WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery presents Dressed Overall, a solo exhibition by Inga Somdyala. Somdyala’s primary excitement lies in form, colour, shape and materiality. With that said, this exhibition features flags, which are a convenient visual language through which the artist breaks the rules of vexillology. Given the six colours of South Africa’s present-day flag—or any of its colonial predecessors—the artist aims to play, disassemble and scatter.
Somdyala is drawn to flags for their nautical flag works, which is a simple visual system for conveying textual information. More than this, he’s drawn to flags for their formal qualities. Their graphic lines, squares, circles, and colour inversions provide a rich and literal visual lexicon to work from.
Inga Somdyala transcribes old Latin phrases for these nautical flag works—phrases found on coats of arms, in legal terminology, or associated with institutions of education, governance and religion. When installed, these Latin phrases, transcribed as nautical flags, are systematically scrambled. Flags are a present visual lexicon, and although the artist mines them primarily for their formal possibilities, it also happens that this lexicon is deeply entangled with national, historical, and cultural meanings, meanings he critically engages with.
Last year, South Africa observed 30 years of democracy. Upon learning that the current national flag—designed just a month before the country’s first democratic elections on the 27th of April 1994—was initially adopted as an interim flag, Somdyala began thinking about South Africa as still occupying a liminal space between the old order and the new political dispensation. Looking at the present-day six-colour national flag, this transitional state is evident: the red, white, and blue from the Dutch and British colonial flags are combined with the black, yellow, and green of the African National Congress, the political party which took over the reigns into democratic South Africa.
Here, the artist continues to deconstruct these symbolic origins, focusing on the red, white and blue that characterise the earliest versions of South Africa’s flag genealogy. Even within this, his works break these elements down further—to their most basic forms, such as the St. Andrew’s and St. George’s crosses. He is driven to uncover the roots of these symbolic ideals, questioning their conceptions of democracy and nationhood, particularly considering how their foundations are embedded in a history of conquest and colonial violence.
A ship displaying all of its flags at once is said to be “dressed overall”, hence the name of the exhibition. This is traditionally considered a celebratory gesture and Somdyala wanted to enact something similar in WHATIFTHEWORLD’s Cape Town gallery space—to dress the space overall as both a celebration of 30 years of democracy and a kind of distress signal. This is partly why the artist created a series of nautical flag code messages—based on Latin mottos seen on coats of arms—but installed them in a scrambled, incoherent manner.
This scrambling is in line with the tradition of dressing a ship, whose flags are arranged specifically against any hidden messages or meanings, and is only about the gesture of adorning the vessel with all its flags at once. Further, it is also part of the playfulness Somdyala wants to maintain in the work: a celebration of South Africa’s metaphoric “Ship of State” by dressing overall, yet one that simultaneously gestures toward an underlying sense of unresolved histories. Dressed Overall opened on the 5th of April and will run until the 31st of May 2025.
