Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: modernist identities in the Global South

The Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) has established itself over the past few years as one of the definitive academic and research-orientated private art institutions in the country. Its three-year initial exhibition cycle has focused on the ambitious goal of repositioning women artists and art history under the rubric of the “Global South”.

This perhaps overused and somewhat obscure academic term refers not strictly to a geographic area, but also to a geopolitical and cultural concept aligned with the idea of the “subaltern” in postcolonial studies, popularised by theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Subaltern populations are essentially those who were denied the right to speak and even think independently of imperialist control in the colonial period — including apartheid.

Staging exhibitions of work by artists — especially female artists — from this historical period is a means of rethinking the way we construct art making and art history.

In this “final and definitive” exhibition of the cycle, a group of female artists — one of whom is world famous, one locally revered and one who’s important, but somewhat overlooked — are deployed to advance what the period of high modernism (roughly from the 1910s through to the early 1940s) in the visual arts actually meant. 

As one might expect, acquiring work for an exhibition of this nature, for a lengthy period of time, is an arduous and difficult undertaking, not least logistically. Loaning the Frida Kahlo and, to a lesser extent, the Amrita Sher-Gil works took years of planning and collaboration with various agencies and governments.

In the end, the JCAF decided to showcase one work per artist in the exhibition.

The overall exhibition design puts together a rich smorgasbord of contextual and background content on each artist that is fascinating in its own right. These include references to the cultural and architectural heritage of each artist, which is simplified as a colour-coded design motif for the rooms housing the individual portraits: pre-Columbian architecture of Mexico for Kahlo, Sikh and Mughal architecture in India for Sher-Gil, and Watusi Congo vernacular architecture for Irma Stern.

The carefully laid out, three-part structure to the exhibition focuses first on the sociopolitical events that occurred during the artists’ lives in the period their careers overlapped between 1930 to 1941. Second, a section comprising photographs, films, diaries and objects situates each artist’s practice within specific personal and sociocultural contexts. This section excitingly includes a dress designed by Kahlo herself from indigenous Mexican fabrics and which she wore herself. The final section is  the three paintings themselves, which are exhibited in their separate rooms.

Stern’s contribution to the exhibition emerges from one of her well-documented trips to the Congo in Central Africa. The Watussi Woman in Red (1946) is a portrait of a young woman dressed in red, set against a lush yellow background. The young woman depicted in the painting is Princess Emma Bakayishonga, sister of King Mutara III Rudahigwa (1912—1959). This is denoted by the glass-beaded hoop necklace around the figure’s neck.

The choice of the three painters as a conversation in the exhibition seems, on the face of it, an imaginative leap. Curatorially, much is made of each one having a mixed heritage that is represented in their work: Kahlo was born in Mexico City to an immigrant German father and a Spanish-Mexican indigenous mother, Sher-Gil was born in Budapest to an aristocratic Sikh Indian father and a Hungarian-Jewish mother, while Stern was born in Schweizer-Reneke (in the then Transvaal) to immigrant German-Jewish parents.

“Kahlo, Sher-Gil and Stern all construct a self through an imagined identification with indigenous women. Drawing from aspects of traditional cultures, they created modern hybrid identities against the backdrop of evolving nationalisms across three continents in the Global South,” says Clive Kellner, executive director of JCAF.