Strauss & co - 16 February 2019, Cape Town

132 107 Simphiwe Ndzube SOUTH AFRICAN 1990– Inevitable Journey to Mars I signed and dated 2016 acrylic and mixed media on perspex print 120 by 240 cm R100 000 – 150 000 EXHIBITED WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, Simphiwe Ndzube: Becoming , 19 October 2016 to 26 November 2016. LITERATURE M. Neelika Jayawardane (2016). Precarious Bricoleurs: Simphiwe Ndzube’s Becoming . Cape Town: WHATIFTHEWORLD. Illustrated in colour on page 5. ITEM NOTES ‘Ndzube’s work is characterised by his use of multiplicitous materials, artistic techniques, and stylistic choices – including painting, collage and assemblage – reflecting the equally multiplicitous and contentious socio-political landscape of South Africa. The performative stages and figures he assembles are created out of roadside construction site material and castoff clothing – thrown-away objects that the “nobility” of South Africa have discarded. His fantastical leaps of imagination and practical- ity mirror the techniques common to the bricoleur; like the figures in his carnivalesque processionals, he welds together both home-grown and borrowed aesthetic principles, philosophies, and cultural theories. Through these bricoleurs’ bodies, Ndzube reflects on the ways in which South Africans struggle to face the impact of colonial and apartheid history on their fragmented families and communities, and how they attempt to heal the woundedness of their present’. 1 1. M. Neelika Jayawardane (2016). Precarious Bricoleurs: Simphiwe Ndzube’s Becoming . Cape Town: WHATIFTHEWORLD. Page 2. Photo: Matthew Partridge