MMAKGABO HELEN SEBIDI

Who Are We and Where Are We Going? is undoubtably Mmakgabo Sebidi’s magnum opus, created over four years, at the height of her creative powers. An epic and endlessly enigmatic work, Sebidi invokes and reinvigorates Renaissance mainsprings like the Adoration of the Magi, and other canonical works. Here though, Mother Africa, rather than the Madonna and Christ, holds court in a mythical Valley of a Thousand Hills, an otherworld that recalls another South African masterpiece – the controversial, fantastical, and numinous Indaba My Children by Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, variously considered the bible of African folklore.

Aptly, as the matriarch of contemporary South African art, 10 years after the advent of democracy, Sebidi titled this distillation of her visions and dreams, hopes and fears with a question, a foundational provocation that lies universally at the heart not only of artmaking, but also of philosophy, spirituality and life itself.

Interestingly when read as allegory, one might see a panoply of abundance and one senses that Sebidi is urging us to seek the answer in a return to essence, to traditional values, all the while exhorting us to imagine a fantastically fecund future, steeped in inherited, ancestral wisdom and humanity. When read as a mirror of our current existence Sebidi’s polyptych makes no attempt to answer the question. The painting is the question. Fraught with the confusion, schizophrenia, and cacophony of the ‘post-everything’ world, there is something of the bitter-sweet – a snapshot of the soul of a people both beleaguered and ascendent; of a dawn and a dusk; of a knowing and an unfathomability – an African Renaissance both nascent and tumultuously ancient.

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_{Photo credit: Michael Hall}