A river that never dries up, is never celebrated is cow dung and oil stick on unprimed Belgian linen, and the material is the thesis rather than the texture. Ka Zenzile has painted with dung for over a decade; what has changed at Stevenson Cape Town, where the show runs July 4 to August 15, is that he no longer uses it to argue against Western painting. He uses it as a knowledge system that was always sufficient on its own. He is also a practicing traditional healer, and he describes the studio in those terms: incense, pipe smoke, music, the rational mind quieted until a color flashes. His earlier paintings were representational and politically legible. These are intuitive, and harder to file. The detail that decides it: the show includes installations and interventions that cannot be bought, which he counts as artworks made for the audience's experience rather than for a wall. Inside a commercial gallery, inside a market that rewards African material as spectacle, that is a deliberate cost. Asked what he wants a visitor to leave with, he says art cannot be limited by what is fashionable. Fifteen August is the deadline and Cape Town is the only address.
THE MUSA FAMILY · HEIRWAVE
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