Hand-me-downs and amputated dreams

Imagine the smell of a primary school classroom. It’s infused with the odour of the present absence of cleaned-up ancient vomit, pee and fear. It’s a place coloured with spontaneous and often irreverent wax crayon drawings and punctuated with carvings into the wooden desks, declaring love, hate and speculation. It’s about the joy and terror of learning new things and being tested in new ways. It shouldn’t be about the discomfort of putting your little six-year-old feet into someone else’s sweaty deformed shoes, because that is what you are given.

In the late 1960s, SA photographer Ernest Cole published some stark black-and-white photographs in his House of Bondage portfolio, exposés of how SA schools where black children were obliged to go, were horribly overcrowded and undersupplied. They’re difficult to look at. Nosiviwe Matikinca, the winner of 2023’s Sasol New Signatures Awards, and a Wanted Young and Vital Artist, presents an installation, Ukungalingani Kwezemfundo (Educational Inequality), which contains the horror and gravitas of Cole’s images.

Here we find Ndiziphiwe (They were given to me), a series of work comprising cast shoes and found objects, in six numbered iterations. They comprise 11 school desks in various stages of brokenness. One’s just the rusted skeleton of a desk. Another two are the wooden tops of desks with no frameworks, placed on the floor. The message resounds with profundity, like the crashing of a dustbin lid. This is all there is.

It’s an installation that recalls the potency of the 1996 sculpture by Karl Biedermann and Eva Butzmann, called Die Verlassene Raum (The Deserted Room) in Berlin’s Koppenplatz. A comment on forced removals in 1930s Europe, the piece is direct, devastating and sadly universal and timeless. It comprises a domestic table with two chairs cast in bronze. One chair is violently thrown on the ground. Two of its legs forever raised. Its back forever on the floor. Its former occupant bundled off forever. No more needs to be said.

Matikinca’s installation is more than just a portrait of the horror of abuse, however. It’s an essay on childhood that reaches deep into the ethos of poverty, but also engages the levity of being a child. The desks are surrounded by shoes. They’re pairs of shoes, but organised with a sense of the cheeky, a playfulness.

The shoes are not perfectly cast. They’re not perfectly filed with flawless finishes. They shouldn’t be. They convey the etymology of “shoe” without these attentions to detail. These represent the notorious “hand-me-downs” that a wealthy society flings in the direction of its indigent little sons and daughters. The items that are meant to be “good enough” because the recipients are still tainted with a “less than” set of values.

Positioned as they are, these cast shoes take on the ghost bodies and personalities of small children. As you stand on the outskirts of this sketched classroom, in your mind’s ear, you can hear the strident voices of very young people, with feet small enough to fit Matikinca’s cast renditions of children’s shoes on the floor. They laugh and play. They gossip and pretend. They do what children are meant to.

They stand on tip toes or balanced on one foot, jauntily positioning their anatomies in the face of discourse and focus. They carve the surface of the wooden desks into reflections on who they are and what they believe. It’s an installation alive with energy.

On the other hand, there is you, the beholder. You enter this space and look at the pieces of what should embrace education. The situation points to you, an adult in this world that has allowed children to be compromised so brutally. Fortuitously or perhaps ironically, Pretoria Art Museum itself plays a role in the installation’s sense of moral despair, which makes Matikinca’s work glow all the brighter with anger. The installation is placed between the museum’s ceramic collection, a room divider and a dusty window. The lighting is weak and one of the LED globes was flickering a flicker of demise, a few days after the exhibition’s opening.

Matikinca’s exhibition also shows bronze cast school objects and bits of stationery — or allusions to stationery — which are blind embossed on Fabriano. These pieces are exhibited on plinths and on the wall, aside the installation. While these parts of the show allude to imbalance in value through the use of bronze, an expensive medium, they’re works that do not fulsomely add to the impact of the main installation.

In essence, had Matikinca immersed her audience in this sense of ghostly promise more forcefully, the exhibition would have been stronger. But, for this 23-year-old’s debut show, the work reaches deeply and with maturity into contemporary SA’s oversights and underprovisions. It’s a show that should be given currency outside the offices of the financial decisionmakers regarding educational grants and the psychology of the hand-me-down.

Ukungalingani Kwezemfundo (Educational Inequality) is on at the Pretoria Art Museum until November 3. An entrance fee is payable in cash — R30 (adults), R15 (pensioners and students), R10 (learners) and R2 for all visitors on Wednesdays.