Mmakgabo Sebidi’s ‘Women in Conversation’ is a significant exhibition for SA fine arts

A hugely significant exhibition for SA fine arts is showing in Johannesburg, to scandalously little fanfare. Everard Read’s Circa Gallery showcase is showing a group of three bronze sculptures, called “Women in Conversation” by national arts icon Mmakgabo Mapula Helen Sebidi.

Varying in height between life-size 171cm and 175cm, the three female figures are all depicted in traditional attire and grouped in such a way that they attend to and look at each other rather than the viewer or their surrounds. In this way, despite being three stand-alone sculptural figures, they comprise one intimate and yet deeply profound and spiritual work. The sense of a communion between the figures and a noumenal realm is heightened by the simple, almost theatrical staging in Circa’s large elliptical gallery, ideally designed in space and lighting for the display of significant three-dimensional sculptural work.

The statues are an unusual departure for an artist who has been known for two-dimensional work in paint, pastel and collage since the 1980s. Originally crafted in clay before the Covid-19 pandemic, they have been cast for this show in highly detailed yet calm and graceful bronze, after their first showing at this year’s Art Joburg.

Given the atmosphere, their dress, and the intimate, almost reverent attitudes of the three women towards each other in their conversation, there is a strong sense of them sharing not only knowledge, but, as the exhibition statement puts it, “the sculptures embody the process of unlearning and relearning the ancestral wisdom that flows from one womb to the next. The figures symbolise the pivotal task of raising future generations to lead better lives — emphasising the essential role mothers and grandmothers play in this transformative journey.”

Insightful decision

Sebidi’s foray into sculpture not only continues her extraordinary 50-year journey exploring the shifts and transformations between the human world and the spiritual one, it also draws comparison with one of her contemporaries who works with similar ideas of transformation and the dream world — Noria Mabasa, one of SA’s most important sculptors. Mabasa’s work, like Sebidi’s, straddles two worlds where their practice has immediate aesthetic meanings, but also a more recondite set of meanings accessible only through spiritual belief and folk traditions, including communication with the ancestors.

Sebidi’s Women in Conversation installation takes place alongside a selection of her recovered works on paper, thought long-lost, from an institution in Sweden and recently shown at the University of Johannesburg. This is an insightful curatorial decision, since it becomes evident that Sebidi’s calling on the dream process — listening to the ancestors through the medium of dreams and after their instructions or signs in her work — is, like Mabasa’s use of dreams and ancestral voices, neither to be understood entirely literally, or as exoticized “magical thinking”.

Perhaps in contrast to Mabasa, Sebidi has been exhibiting and contributing to the professional SA art world since the late 1970s, working with the Johannesburg Art Foundation, the Funda Art Centre in Soweto, and many others, contributing to commercial exhibitions and collections freely down the decades. Her body of work, recognised by the government with the Order of Ikhamanga, brings to viewers a sense of the connection between the everyday world we all experience and the spiritual realm in which we all transform, and which we can access through art. 

This magnificent installation brings that connection, and conversation, fully to bear on all who see it — and it should be as widely seen as possible, asking as it does, that we question our own mythmaking beliefs or lack thereof. Perhaps more importantly it provides us with an opportunity to let this iconic artist and her work speak for themselves.

“Women in Conversation” is at Everard Read’s Circa Gallery until December 20.