In Conversation with Khwezi Gule: the South African museum as a social being
by Thato Mogotsi
In terms of museum practice there certainly seems to be little or no acknowledgement that a seismic shift is taking place in the arena of collective memory. If they are to remain relevant, universities and other cultural institutions will have to find ways of dealing with changing times, and it remains to be seen if museum professionals have the will to “commit class suicide” and decolonise in line with the urgency of social transformation that is upon us.
Khwezi Gule (Glossary of Common Knowledge. Johannesburg, 2016) [1]
As soon as we’ve settled down at a round table too spacious for only two patrons to occupy in this suburban coffee shop, I’m eager to unpack with Khwezi Gule some of the audacious institutional problems I’ve witnessed in my recent role as a curatorial consultant at the Apartheid Museum. The meeting feels much like a continuing reflection on our respective experiences negotiating the South African museum and cultural landscape – a conversation that initially began in late 2018. I had sought Gule’s counsel on potential strategies I ought to consider if I were to contend with the inevitable structural and epistemic pathologies of this (privately-owned) historical museum; one that capitalises on the presentation of a dominant narrative of the rise and ‘fall’ of Apartheid and white supremacist rule.
On relational politics and the South African museum as a site of coloniality and predatory practices…
Taking this as a productive cue, Gule suggests I read a review he recently penned on a curatorial and artistic intervention by Johannesburg-based artist Farieda Nazier, entitled Post Present Future (2019), staged within the Apartheid Museum’s permanent exhibition over a period of seven months. He waits patiently as I read the short text from the email he’s just shared with me. In his review, Gule aptly points to a much needed interrogation of the uses and affectations of such gestures within museums and posits that one consequence of such interventions is that they tend to ‘offer a kind of temporary interruption to the dominant narrative and do even less for the underlying logic and operation of the prevailing power structure.’[2]
I’m quite pained by this attestation that often goes without saying. But this is precisely the kind of intellectual (and emotional) labour that is demanded of black practitioners who conscientiously elect to offer a disruption of the structural myopia of South African institutions and museology by reimagining new, or at the very least generative, practices. How then can we, in working through the uses of the curatorial, hope to do so from within such potent sites of explicit coloniality?
As the incumbent chief curator of the Johannesburg Art Gallery – having observed his practice over many years – I particularly resonate with Gule’s capacity to simultaneously trace, articulate and bear witness to the evidence of the violence of coloniality that is innate to the specificity of museology and cultural institutional practices in post-1994 South Africa, as is most evident in his discursive voice.
On the final day of the Imagined New colloquium Gule moderated a panel discussion titled Museums for Whom, Museums for What? [3] In his introductory presentation, he proposed a kind of existential re-conceptualisation of the museum, using an analogy that implores us to imagine the Museum “…as a person”[4]; in other words, as a social being. If the physical body is the “the brick and mortar… or the infrastructure,” then it follows that “…the mind is the discursive elements of the museum, and the heart speaks to the personality, character, or perhaps the institutional culture of that museum.”
On Black Pain and curatorial reflexivity…
In the same rhetoric, Gule also spoke to a concern for the structural triangulation that exists between state-owned galleries and museums; historical museums and the South African national project and how this inter-related formation systematically overlooks “…issues of economic, racial and social justice” – so far as it is evidenced by a contemporary urgency to rethink the role of museums in black communities, and the experiences and subjectivities of black constituencies and cultural producers operating within this context.
Looking back on our coffee-shop conversation on that Tuesday afternoon three months later, I’m excited by the many moments of honest reflexivity we shared, that tended towards a questioning of the role of transformative curatorial praxis in the South African museum; a closer consideration of ‘Black Pain’ and its proximity to Black Memory. This participatory project of curatorial and critical responsibility and self-reflection is an ongoing and axiomatic one that I could not fully contain in the form of a didactic interview in this article.
It is this constant rethinking of the social construct of the South African museum and the proposition to look toward new methodologies and practices that seem central to Gule’s ongoing curatorial and intellectual concerns – what he himself might term his political project. I realise too that we are both so very tethered to this place and that the value of theorising, or at the very least communing with, the why of what we do is the very site of our agency as black practitioners working in contestation of, rather than in proximity to, the hierarchical power that often defines these condemnable institutions.
[1] A lecture by Gule on bureaucracy as part of a research project, Glossary of Common Knowledge, 2016, Johannesburg. URL http://glossary.mg-lj.si/related/constituencies-gule/410
[2] Farieda Nazier’s Post, Present, Future art-based intervention hosted at the Apartheid Museum, 20 April to 30 October, 2019. It formed part of her practical submission for her post-doctorate degree (University of Johannesburg, Faculty of Art Design and Architecture. Gule’s review titled Crown of Thorns, pp. 40-44, is published in the project catalogue.
[3] Hosted at the Centre for the Less Good Idea on 12 May 2019 on the last day of the Imagined New colloquium in Johannesburg. Part of the JAG Consultations series of discursive public programming initiated by Gule and his colleagues in partnership with VIAD, FADA. URL: https://www.viad.co.za/jag-consultations
[4] Panel discussion video URL: https://www.viad.co.za/museums-for-whom-museums-for-what-video