Column | The audacious and vulnerable act of unveiling our "twisties"

"She has historically struggled with consistency.” “She just wants to be done, get off the balance beam, and somehow see if she can pull it together.”“She does better when she’s smiling; now, I noticed in that shot right there she wasn’t smiling, so we need to get that smile back on her face.”

A chorus of voices spills from four speakers. My body is contained within their slight semi-circle, in a self-created surround sound made necessary by a loud art gallery. It’s the opening day of Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi’s “Landings” exhibition at Stevenson in Cape Town.

With my back turned to the crowd, I strain to translate sounds into sentences, but as I begin to make them out, the words land on my skin and seep into it. It’s an undoing.Within seconds I’m alone, in a small room containing a single painting. I’ve rushed to this refuge as the dam wall within breaks and I’m left astonished at what an artwork can do: confront you with the world, with yourself. Chorus, an immersive sound installation Nkosi created with collaborator Dion Monti, is crafted from “television commentary, behind-the-scenes conversations, and the ambient sounds of the gymnasium” – in response to Black US gymnast Gabby Douglas’s routine in particular.

The installation charges the gallery and the paintings on the wall. As it loops, intermittently, its function is similar to that of turning on the lights — as though it makes the paintings of Black gymnasts in scenes of tender touch, community, and togetherness vibrate at an amplified frequency.Its resonant power transforms an arts writer into a girl forced to face the glare of a gaze that demands excellence and trained behaviour — the insistent repetition of what it means to be feminine; made Other in so many ways.

I’ve heard the narrative in Chorus expressed many times, by different bodies and mouths, on the journey from child to adult. It’s become familiar, internalised, rote. And the effect of hearing the sound work in the context of the exhibition — in the same room as the piece Adjustments, where a Black woman lovingly ties a girl’s hair ribbon — is to realise what underscores the need for touch, intimacy, and the communal: the gendered and raced threats, demands, expectations, and requirements created by white supremacist, heterosexual, cisgender patriarchy that reach into our lives and spill out onto the gymnasium floor.

As these athletes show us, it’s a system that rewards those playing by its rules, but that also ensures there is neither guarantee nor safety, not even in executing the highest level of performance. In its glare, we always fall short and fail, as we strive towards a perpetually shifting horizon of being accepted, loved, seen, deemed enough, acknowledged. The room I retreat to on opening day holds the red-hued Twisties, a painting clearly referencing the terrifying condition Biles struggled with at the 2021 Olympics, in which gymnasts feel “a disconnect between… mind and body” and don’t know where their body is mid-air, or how to land safely.

I wonder how the demands placed on our raced, gendered performances create our own sense of “twisties” every day, and how we remind ourselves which way is up, and where we find a landing.

Sitting across the table from a close friend in a loud bar, we discuss our lives in detailed anecdotes. Hard things spill from our mouths, chased with food and drink, as we talk about what consumes us. Our friendship nears a decade, and we find, in this moment of our relationship, a new softness in each other, an honesty and a truth. We can, in other words, be ourselves — we are each other’s landings. And it’s taken time, breaking through walls and the limited performance of ourselves for others.

And I wonder, how did we get this way? Where did we learn that softness was a thing to be concealed, layered like a perpetual winter, when we could just stand in the sun and see each other in the light, instead? My friend gently urges me to be softer, in many ways, and as a writer too. The running narrative of the instructions of gendered performance, learned over years, is what undid me, as I listened to Nkosi’s sound work. Even approaching this page, I’ve learned to fear what it means to be soft and tender — something denied to so many of us at the intersection of race, gender, religion, and culture — and wonder what image to place before you instead.

Rewriting the narratives inscribed on our bodies is a palimpsestic task — you’re writing on top of writing on top of writing that might have been erased but is always present. The scripts of society, as Gqola phrases them, are never silent. But in seeing them clearly, space opens up for play, imagination, and a refusal of their terms. I’m enamoured with the term “‘practicing’ refusal”. Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art Tina Campt describes it as “everyday practices of struggle often obscured by an emphasis on collective acts of resistance”.

It’s a journey, a practice, and a constant learning of new ways to be, think, feel, exist, resist. Nkosi’s work in “Landings” is such a practice, as is Biles’s decision to withdraw from the Olympics, as is even the seemingly simple act of sitting across from a dear friend, in a loud bar, daring to be soft with each other. And I feel it here, too, in making a landing now, on this page.