“Philisa: Zinza Mphefumlo Wami,” 2022, is an installation of seven sculptural tapestries, each roughly 6-feet long, including red and blue beadwork, textiles featuring the words of Black American poet Lucille Clifton and cowhide patterns.
Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Photo by Jorge Bachman.
“IRMANDADE: The Shape of Water in Pindorama,” 2018–2020, is a 16-minute video documenting Lhola Amira’s travels to Pindorama, Brazil.
Courtesy of SMAC Gallery and Lhola Amira
“Philisa: Zinza Mphefumlo Wami,” 2022, is an installation of seven sculptural tapestries, each roughly 6-feet long, including red and blue beadwork, textiles featuring the words of Black American poet Lucille Clifton and cowhide patterns.
Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Photo by Jorge Bachman.
“Facing the Future” centers on Lhola Amira’s work, as well as on the de Young museum’s extensive collection of African art.
Samantha Tyler Cooper/Courtesy Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
What if, instead of glossing over the specifics of major historical traumas with broad words like “colonialism” or “slavery,” we asked questions that explored how those traumas manifest today? Questions like “How does it hurt?” and “Where does it hurt?” This is the approach taken by South African artist Lhola Amira, who aims to address those wounds through “a practice that gestures toward sacred healing.”
“Facing the Future,” Amira’s first solo exhibition in the United States, also launches the Contemporary African Art Program at the de Young Museum, helmed by the museum’s first designated curator of African art, Natasha Becker. Together, Amira and Becker have produced a show that is at once centered on Amira’s work, as well as on the museum’s extensive collection of African art, placing historical African artworks and objects in conversation with Amira’s, emphasizing concurrent strands of place and diaspora in the artist’s work.
The selection of works from the museum’s collection, spanning the 19th century through the 1970s, is far from supplementary. Becker “selected artworks from the collection that speak to (Amira’s) themes, namely, the sanctity of all life, the importance of ancestors in our journey toward wholeness, and the religious and ceremonial significance of beadwork.”
Amira has placed glass gallon jugs of water beside these artworks, invoking a cleansing for the works themselves, and the gallery’s walls have been painted a deep shade of blue, a curatorial choice made by Amira to suggest water as well. Entering or leaving the exhibition, visitors are invited to participate in a purifying and protecting ritual, by submerging their hands in a bowl of salt; as one moves through the gallery, the tapestries brush against one’s shoulders.
These curatorial decisions set the tone for the show, foregrounding Amira’s project as a dynamic conversation with global history, a pluralism at the crux of their practice. The artist uses a pseudonym and they/them pronouns in an effort to define themselves as “an ancestral presence co-existing in the body of curator Khanyisile Mbongw.” This rhetorical and metaphysical framework extends to include participants in Amira’s performances and directly implicate viewers.
“Philisa: Zinza Mphefumlo Wami,” 2022, is an installation of seven sculptural tapestries, each roughly 6-feet long, including red and blue beadwork, textiles featuring the words of Black American poet Lucille Clifton and cowhide patterns. A soundtrack, featuring a mellifluous female wail that Amira describes as the “Black scream” plays throughout the installation. A South African tradition that predates colonialism, wailers would often assist families in mourning the death of a loved one by holding space for grief. Making space to mourn is what Amira does, too.
One primary manifestation of Amira’s art practice comes from interactions with communities across the world, often centered around feet-washing ceremonies, and with the land itself. “IRMANDADE: The Shape of Water in Pindorama,” 2018–2020, is a 16-minute video documenting their travels to Pindorama, Brazil. After walking along the rocky beach in high heels, Amira washes their own feet in the ocean; later they wash the feet of a group of women, an act which brings the women to tears. At one point, Amira takes a boat into the ocean and stands, submerged up to the waist, holding a candle-lit vigil over the water, calling to mind the Atlantic Ocean as the connecting artery between Africa and the Americas via the slave trade. As night falls, Amira, too, begins to weep.
It’s a deeply moving scene, but perhaps the most effective elements of Amira’s artworks and actions are those that remain invisible. The experience of the participants, for instance, at the moment when they are moved to tears by Amira’s gestures of generosity and healing, isn’t something that can be conveyed through viewership alone. Rather than what is on display, it is the experience one has while visiting “Facing the Future” that constitutes the work of the art itself, offering visitors an opportunity to contemplate their own wounds and ways of healing.
