Athi-Patra Ruga’s exhibition at Somerset House certainly justifies the reference in its title to rainbows. Each of the gallery’s Terrace Rooms is a kaleidoscopic mass of saturated colour. Ruby, fuchsia, turquoise, periwinkle, sunshine-happy yellow, this show of tapestries is the perfect inoculation against the growing greyness of London’s November sky.
So much so that it would be easy to get swept up in the hardcore prettiness of it all and miss the intricately-layered cleverness running throughout. But the South African artist’s works are patchworks of references, allusions and fables. The titular rainbows, for example, nod to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s ‘Rainbow Nation’, the name he used to describe a democratic, modern South Africa.
Ideas of life in Ruga’s native country, post-apartheid, are central to this three-part exhibition, which features works from 2012 onwards. The first room shows parts of the series ‘The Future White Women of Azania’, a collection of images presenting an allegorical, utopian idea of Ruga’s homeland (‘Azania’ being an alternative historic name for Southern Africa).
The second room focuses on ‘Queens in Exile’, a celebration of a collection of South African women, including pop stars, activists, prophetesses and the artist’s grandmother, that renegotiates marginalised histories. And the third room pays tribute to Senegalese dancer and queer icon Feral Benga, offering her up for sainthood.
All three sections centre on the image of black, female and queer bodies, claiming and reclaiming untold stories and discriminated-against identities. And it does so mainly through creating a mythological reality of extreme, OTT beauty.
The majority of the works on display are large, lavishly-detailed, petit-point tapestries. Along with being gloriously technicolour, they’re also tantalisingly tactile. In ‘The Body as a Sight for Contemplation’, fluffy threads of pink and white puff out the tapestry in an open invitation to be… PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE ARTWORKS!!! Stroked with your eyes. They beg to be stroked with your eyes.