Building on Mokoenaβs inclusion in ππ°π΅π¦π΄ π°π― ππ’π±π¦π³ (2025), and his continued practice of mobilizing the painterly and the notational, ππ΄π΄π’πΊπ΄ is the current culmination of our collaboration in the form of a post-residency presentation. As a set of propositions for articulating the relationship between being and environment, Essays is formed around the concept of Beachnessβ a deep pyscho-social marker of access, socio-economic status, pleasure and safety. For Mokoena, who grew up without passage to the ocean, repeatedly encountering Cape Townβs beaches produced a profound sublime effect, a reckoning, which leads to a set of inquiries about how ways of engaging the environment attest the primary pleasure(s) and structural antagonisms that constitute the Capeβs ontological ground.
Mokoenaβs practice is primarily concerned with the revisioning quality of Drawing as a tool for radical thought, metacommentary, and social critique; these postures are manifest in the use of line, language, colour and composition. Apparent in Mokoenaβs habit of notetaking is the continued application of Drawing to form new vocabularies and methods of apprehension. One such precedent can be found in The Kathorus Documents: a critical meta-nexus and proto-archive that holds archival, sonic, literary, and pop-cultural references. The Kathorus Documents indexes the ethno-tribal, socio-political, and geo-transportational violence that gripped the township of Thokoza (East Rand, Gauteng) in 1994, the enveloping context in which Mokoena was born. Equipped with notebook in hand and a robust referential repository, our objective for the residency was to consider the encounter between Mokoena, a black abstractionist from Johannesburg (fundamentally rooted in its cultural paradigm), and the spatial politics of Cape Town.
The beach is a site where Cape Townβs particular racial dilemmas, class divides, and colonial past coalesce. For Mokoena at the beach, these historical traumas are tangible at a sensory level. Sublimity engenders a similar process of existential computation. What is my place? What are the limits of my understanding? What is the line between awe and horror? Terror and pleasure? Beachness operates as a citational device through which feelings of the sublime are elicited. These citations become the building blocks for a series of essays that try to make sense of the landscape as subliminal and semiotic fields. The different rooms in the gallery are dedicated to the constituent emotions of sublime encounters, such as joy; fear; awe; reverence and reckoning. They represent alternative means of essayistic articulation.Β
Toward Fear
Structured by submersion, this section plunges the viewer into the sinister aspects of sublime affects, connecting the onset of fear to meditations on the violent histories of Cape slavery, deepwater tragedies, naval warfare, apartheid maritime legislature, and indigenous genocide. The invocation of lyrics (90s RnB, Hip-Hop, Reggae, Soul), cuts and complicates the discursive field through the introduction of different historical experiences and lingering traumas. In Mechanisms of Investigation (2026) Mokoena posits, βWhat if the Lijadu Sisters, or Sister Nancy has a theory? /Practical gesture?β The surface (paper) becomes fluid territory where visual codes, poetic devices, lyrical citations converse with one another a form their own metadiscourse. Formal characteristics of the work function in similar ways as textual devices in lyrics (metaphor, metonymy), easing the concentration of time and space in tempestuous compositions.
The Joy of Punctuations
The second section, centred on the use of painterly marks as form of punctuation, considers Mokoenaβs experience of joy during our site visits to beaches around Cape Town. During these visits he would frequently revel in the intricacy of seashells, the texture and form of kelp, and the elusive white mist hanging above shoreline. The surrounding dunes dampen sound, creating a sonic deprivation that in turn brought shape and form into clearer focus. The works in this section consider the politics inherent in a slow, observant, ground-level manners of engagement with the landscape. A form of surrender to natural beauty, Mokoena points at the politics of black joy in its conflict with the tradition of landscape study. The use of pigment is pared-back, consisting of minimal, monochromatic, sparsely aggregated silhouettes in ink create an alphabet of marks that echo natural forms as unbounded poetic ensembles that resist containment.
Pleasure (Indirect delight)
As the main body of Essays, we consider the shift from the sinister, and improvisational lettering of poetic joy into the phenomenological dimension of sublime affect. Here, shifts in monochromatic tonality, scale, humour is interweaved through the registers of painting, and installation. Colour maintains an important role in both practices as Mokoena notes that through his site visits colour calls to mind elements on the beach that mark places of psychological safety - lifeguard towers; beach umbrellas, changing rooms that are charactarised through rows of colour. For Mokoena, colour functions as a charming mechanism that lulls one into periods of sheer pleasure shortly before signalling the danger the ocean and the beach can inflict on bodies in its domain.
