Some of the most striking standouts at the recent Biennale in Sydney, Australia (which I was attending, in part, in my sometime role as the Festival’s traveling scout), were the powerfully enigmatic resin cast figures by the young Swaziland-born (1982), Capetown-based Nandipha Mntambo: headless figures cast, that is, out of vast swaths of richly colored untreated cowhide, pelts which in turn had originally been draped over casts of the artist’s own body, whose various poses—defiant, submissive, defeated, resurgent—they continued to limn. Some read as figureheads to phantom ships, breasting the sea; others, crouched on all fours, as if broken, servile, scouring the floor. Some, veritably fluttering, seemed to be taking flight: ecstatic flags. All of them, like Rilke’s torso of Apollo, seemed to be bursting out of all of their contours, like a star. An effect rendered all the more uncanny, in that these figures had been wrested not from royal marble but rather from the most humble of hides, such that they suggested not so much the divine as the feral. Or rather the divinely feral, which is to say, Man, or rather Woman, as animal god. A shapeshifter. A trickster. A sibyl. Present and pulsing with life.
In her more recent work, or so I was able to infer from catalogs of some of her other shows, Mntambo has been pursuing these themes yet further. Casting herself as a sleek matador, in full gleaming regalia, swathed in cowhide vests, fording into a bullring. Fashioning a headpiece with bullhorns rampant and casting herself in photoshopped color prints as both trembling Europa and the rampaging god, or else as a horned female Narcissus abashed at the reflection of her own visage in a dark jungly pond. There are now roomfuls of the cowhide women, striding forward suspended in midair: an assembled throng, an amazon army. Giving rise to a veritable motherlode of compounding associations.
And the artist herself, who I had occasion to meet on one of my last days in Sydney, proved to be no less febrile, lively, charismatic and assertive. We spoke of the situation of women and artists in the new South Africa, the weight of the past, prospects for the future. A conversation I’m very much looking forward to pursuing, this time in public in Chicago, now that she has graciously accepted our invitation to come visit the Festival. Come join us, and expect to be, by turns, challenged and charmed.
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