Visual artist Bulumko Mbete’s exhibition is a multi-layered familial narrative

Like the sky I’ve been too quiet, a solo exhibition by 2023 Absa L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto winner is currently on at Gallery Momo in Parktown North, Johannesburg is currently on.

By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor

I first met Bulumko Mbete in 2018, when she worked at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation in Forest Town, a privately owned progressive Museum that since its founding by two businessmen has steadily solidified its position in the art world. Mbete then worked there as an assistant curator to the museum’s director Clive Kellner.

The second time our paths crossed it was at the Bag Factory Artist Studios in Newtown in 2022, when she exhibited there after winning the Welz Cassier Award, a prestigious award that wards new emerging visual art talent on the African continent, some of whom, for example Blessing Ngobeni I have gone on to make a good name for themselves in the contemporary award world.

That exhibition, which was framed at the intersection of identity, memory and personal history, marked Mbete as someone yearning to retrace her complex family background for personal and spiritual tranquillity and satisfaction. What became outstanding in that exhibition is her use of fabric, pieces of cloth to weave together a personal narrative about her life and her family. At the time, she was also preparing to leave for the USA where she had just gotten a scholarship to study further for a masters degree in fine art.

Last week on Saturday, our paths crossed again, and this time, at Gallery Momo in Parktown North, Johannesburg where she unveiled her latest solo exhibition titled Like the sky I’ve been too quiet, and this time as the 2023 Absa L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto winner. The exhibition supported by ABSA as part of its current mode of partnering with several strategic galleries to take art to visitor-friendly environments, “where the people are” according to Dr Paul Bayliss from ABSA, is currently on at Gallery Momo.

And this exhibition which again looks closely at her family history, and this time even more closely than any of her previous exhibitions, using again fabric as the main material to deliver her narrative, alongside other materials this time. Such as music and pieces of wood, beads and clay. Here one cannot fail but to notice that this exhibition has more depth, and the level of family exploration is dense, more textured, delivering a complex narrative that is positioned at different levels to unpack in a more nuanced way, her family history.

For instance this show is primarily focused and motivated by her grandfather, who in 1997, took a road trip along the eastern and central parts of South Africa. Mbete reflect on this guided tour, and on the experiences, memories and inheritances that remain from a life lived. She ponders nature’s ability to conform to the narratives that we conjure and contemplates an intangible human voice. Through four installations Mbete contemplates the terrain of familial memory and narrative.

In Sojourning, a collaborative sound installation with Kamil Hassim, Mbete uses the act of memory to constructive the sonic landscape of her grandfather’s journey.

This is an impressive body of work that digs deep into her familial experiences, reimagine differently by an insightful artist, who took her time to think through and come up with this multi-layered familial narrative.

Ï think it is fair to say that having resources at one’s disposal plays an important role in an exhibition, allowing one to explore more the subject matter under investigation,” she said. This was in response to my remark that this time there was more depth to her work than before.

This is in reference to the benefit of being a winner of (2023) Absa L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto winner, which saw her spending six months working in France, deepening one’s art practice. The award is named after South Africa’s iconic painter Gerard Sekoto who left South Africa in 1947, tellingly a year before South Africa officially became an apartheid country when the National Party won elections. Sekoto may then be said to have seen the worst that was to this country for decades until apartheid’s fall in 1994, when democracy dawned, as he left for Paris via London. He died there in 1993, but the work he created especially about black lives in iconic areas such as Sophiatown, are today some of the most sought works by collectors from around the world at auctions.

And so winning this award for artists such as Mbete carries both a burden and prestige. Burden because one has to prevail in their art practice and achieve work that is of a certain minimum standard, which Mbete has clearly achieved in this current exhibition, without a doubt.