STEVENSON presents Appellations and Speculations on Drawing by Meleko Mokgosi, taking place across the gallery’s Cape Town and Johannesburg spaces, jointly marking the artist’s third exhibition with the gallery.
Where Mokgosi’s previous exhibitions in these cities formed part of Democratic Intuition (2013-19), an eight-chapter project examining the ways in which democracy is conceptualised, constituted and experienced within southern Africa, the works in Appellations and Speculations on Drawing chiefly derive from Spaces of Subjection, his current multi-chapter illustration. The spaces explored in this body of work span the physical, discursive and otherworldly; his concept of subjection encompasses facets of self-making including subjectivity, subjecthood and subjugation. Referencing Michel Foucault’s theories, this series advances Mokgosi’s argument that ‘subjection is a structural necessity for becoming’.
The works in this exhibition span screenprints, etchings, chine collé, dry point, charcoal and digital drawing on three dimensional objects – all balancing line and space to examine drawing as process, concept and a theoretical framework. The selected drawings act in conjuction with the concerns of Mokgosi’s painting practice, interspersing art historical references with iconographic southern African motifs including domestic interiors, guard dog posters and modernist-inspired figurines. The artist’s configuration of images weaves an elliptical picture on subjection, subjecthood and representation.
Meleko Mokgosi had this to say, “As a practice that conventionally concerns itself with the notion of the index, drawing seems to always centre the body. Regardless of the presence of the body in a drawing, the body is foundational to drawing because it is the body that the drawing process depends on, and the body is an object the proposed spaces are projected to contain.” Drawing is continually perceived as supplemental to other art forms such as painting, sculpture and design among others. With that said, drawing as a conceptual tool is used by theorists and philosophers to examine the parergonal; that is, the view of drawing as always not-finished, or as something that is at the service of another iteration of art.
It can be argued that because of its material processes and indexicality, drawing constantly allows us access to the contingent. To speak of contingency is to refer to things that are not yet known, that which is yet-to-come – most of which make themselves known on their terms. The contingent as incalculable or unexpected or the unverifiable – is framed by and through the experiencing body and its psyche (the psycho-somatic field of relations).
Drawing is a spatial articulation of things. First and foremost, we can say that drawing always already involves the idea of a line. Line however is an arbitrary but necessary delineation of space. As a concept, process, commodity, and object, drawing can used to speculate on thingification and or reification. In a way, drawing situates itself alongside knowledge and language.
There are fundamental questions that emerge at the intersection of drawing and language; drawing and knowledge; drawing and experience; and last but not least, drawing and space. Therefore, space is constitutive of drawing. This exhibition opened on the 28th of June and will run until the 16th of August at STEVENSON Cape Town while it opened on the 5th of July and will run until the 22nd of August 2025 at STEVENSON Johannesburg.
About the Artist
Meleko Mokgosi (born in Francistown, Botswana) is an artist, Associate Professor and co-director of graduate studies at the Yale School of Art, and the co-director of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program. Mokgosi’s large-scale, figurative and often text-based works engage history painting and cinematic tropes to uncover notions of colonialism, democracy and liberation across African history.
Mokgosi received his BA from Williams College in 2007 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study program that same year. He then received his MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio Program at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011, and was an Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem from 2011-2012. His work has been exhibited at Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden; at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Botswana National Gallery, Gaborone, Botswana; The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art Museum, Peekskill, NY, among others. He lives and works in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
