A man crouches in a bucket as he’s lowered into a hole. It’s scarcely wider than his shoulders, and pitch black. He’s a tin miner in Nigeria, part of the fag-end of a colonial legacy that has seen industry revert to the Stone Age. Karimah Ashadu’s video ‘Plateau’ is typical of this dark and troubling group show, curated by Gabi Ngcobo. Many of the works see man pitted against his landscape, or what’s left of it. Others bring the landscape into the room, like Moshekwa Langa’s ‘Drag Paintings’, huge suspended ochre canvases that are scarred and riven by the physicality of his home town, a centre for platinum mining.
The overarching themes of ‘The Show Is Over’ are ‘loss, threats to the environment, spirituality, labour and silenced histories’, so it’s not exactly a massive cheerer-upper. What it does brilliantly, though, is remind you that global environmental concerns, as articulated by activists and politicians, have a real human face and cost, and that even that articulation remains defined by colonialism. Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Tessa Mars’s ‘How Many ____Does It Take?’ is a dialogue about the founding of a South African newspaper at the end of the nineteenth century and reforms in Haiti, and is appropriately ramshackle in its investigation of how storytelling is always fraught with untrustworthiness and partial truths.
There are a few pieces here that feel superfluous, and there is an uneasy relationship between the purely visual and more conceptual in places (plus, I defy you not to find yourself swallowing endless saliva as you enjoy Anawana Haloba’s ‘Lamentations’, in which she draws a map in a mound of salt with her tongue for ten minutes). But the best works here are riveting. Along with ‘Plateau’, I really liked Luana Vitra’s ‘Zanzado em trama é armação de arapuca’, a room full of dismantled homemade animal traps, hooks and bent wires threatening to snag you, while Misheck Masamvu’s small oil and pencil drawings of animal-human transformations have a subtle, disturbing presence.
Some of these landscapes may be barren, but far from the show being over, their power and creative impetus seem endlessly fertile.
