Simphiwe Ndzube combines African-derived fairy tales, folklore, and the fantastic to explore what it is to be human in both individual and collective terms. His characters often mirror people from his past, examining them as archetypes that spark contemplation, imagination, magic, adventure, and fear. His paintings, sculptures, installations, and prints also coalesce familiar imagery and materials in new and strange ways as expressions of community, gathering, protest, and parade that double as forms of healing. The three images on view in the Platform Gallery bridge Black diasporic traditions of landscape and storytelling with local histories of movement and migration. The river motif that recurs in the images mimics the curves and bends of the Christina River while the artist's bold color palette sustains a visual smorgasbord that is both playful and spellbinding. These compositions spring from a larger body of work that Ndzube has imagined as the Mine Moon, a space in which he uses magical realism and surrealism to create an alternate reality. In so doing, he resists the expectations of art making in South Africa and the U.S. where Black artists are often only noticed or respected when their art is about subjugation and violence.

Through painting, sculpture, and spatial intervention, Simphiwe Ndzube stages an introduction to his imaginative universe: the Mine-moon. He states, "We begin in the real world and through interaction with the work enter a fabulist tale in progress. I’ve attempted to create the genesis of a cosmology that finds itself in the uncharted lands and trackless seas. In it exists characters, gods, and demigods—different people influenced by the post-apartheid black South African experience. It emerges from the tradition of magical realism and is expanding to points currently unknown."

Narrative influences include Ben Okri, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, and Zakes Mda. In particular, Ndzube highlights Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community by Wendy B Faris and Lois Parkinson Zamora which describes magical realism as "a mode suited to exploring—and transgressing—boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical or generic. [It] facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, [and] systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes." Ndzube's recent body of work tells a story of power and conflict—within it is a focus on the people affected by abuses of power; these figures are on their own search for freedom, love, and meaning in a setting that has deemed them, as Frantz Fanon phrased it, the wretched of the earth.

Curated by Tiffany Barber, TDC Curator-in-Residence

Banners produced and installed by Precision Color Graphics.