Kemang Wa Lehulere's "The Sky is coming home" features swirling black strokes on a stark white background, creating an abstract form with a sense of motion and chaos. The drawing lacks specific figures, instead offering a dynamic interplay of lines and spaces that evoke a sense of fragmentation. Characterized by its minimalistic yet expressive style, the artwork employs the spontaneity of brushstrokes reminiscent of calligraphy. This piece reflects the artist's focus on South Africa's turbulent history, embodying themes of memory and transition in a post-apartheid context. ...
Kemang Wa Lehulere’s practice engages with the past of South Africa, tracing the ways it still haunts the country’s current condition. Working with personal and collective histories and archives, the artist repeatedly employs found objects representing both individual and collective memory. Wooden, old-looking school desks or mass-produced ceramic sculptures of Alsatian dogs are at once familiar and alienating; a reminder from childhood also acting as a reminder of the complexity of social structures within the Apartheid regime of South Africa. Inspired by set design and theatre, Wa Lehulere’s drawings and ‘living sculptures’, comprising smudged chalk drawings on blackboards, sculptures made of grass and soil and wall etchings, further dwell on the processes of revision, juxtaposition and the malfunction of histories. By making history physical and personal, the artist contrasts liberation with repression and sharply connects the painful past with a painful present. ...
