STEVENSON presents an exhibition by Tumelo Mtimkhulu at the gallery’s Amsterdam space. The exhibition, titled I, one drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two, is drawn from Mtimkhulu’s recent residency project at De Ateliers, with programming curated by the artist himself.
With this exhibition, Tumelo Mtimkhulu attends to the reality that even before he knew of and read textual history, he already had an intimate relationship with it, through its omitted constituents through his body and its sensorial apparatus. ‘One drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two’ is a line uttered in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film entitled Nostalghia. For the artist, this speaks of the inability to truly discern that which is innate or personal from that which is shared and historical; how in their meeting in the body, they become a bigger drop.
Throughout the exhibition, the artist uses poetry, thereby abandoning the notion that the book is the established material carrier. In the piece Khafulela, Mtimkhulu explores labour as well as imported ideas of respectability and moral rectitude. The work is made up of four irons on which he etched a poem, and behind the irons there’s a mirror that echoes the objects.
Aperture, a poem in twelve parts, is an etching printed on plaster to convey the weight and materiality of the intangible quality of language. It is a poem alive with entanglements. In it Tumelo Mtimkhulu moves from writing in response to the countenance of his mother as she ages, the intimacy of a home, being away and having to rely on language to bridge the distance, to reckoning with the failures of language.
Excerpts from part 7 and part 8 of Aperture:
I am away… This city…
The street lights line the lip of sidewalks.
A limbless lot, of cyclops that look with jaundice eyes.
In a darkness broken by unblinking windows.
I have known only of an ill-tailored night.
Whose darkness is like a pall.
To which many are made to resign themselves and although our names be beautiful
Katlehong
Thokoza
Thembisa
Khayelitsha
Langa
…
‘To which many are made to resign themselves’, with an emphasis on the word made, speaks to the ideological superstructures that occasioned geographical dispossession. The making of townships as sites of extractable labour and how in the wake and aftermath of Apartheid, the people who emerge from the township still insist on the necessity for ‘Life. Conviviality. Affect. Names. Love. Mourning. Plots against the state. Plans for living after.’ (after Canadian poet and novelist Dionne Brand). This insistence is encapsulated in the entire poem and extends to the other works shown, all of which are typified by my return to language and its relationship to the representational world; because language is where worlds are made.
The selected works shown in this exhibition form part of a larger body of work made and first shown as part of the end of Mtimkhulu’s residency at De Ateliers, with mediums ranging from installation, site-specific interventions, sound, sculpture and poetry. Many of the works are held in a tension of the artist being privy to how even some of the experiences thought to belong to the domain of the personal are impressed upon by the histories of imperial subjugation and colonialism.
I, one drop plus one drop makes a bigger drop, not two opened on the 17th of July and will run until the 6th of September 2025 at STEVENSON, Amsterdam.
