Nicholas Hlobo Dossier 2024

Nicholas Hlobo, Zawelela ngale
Uppsla Art Museum, Uppsla, Sweden | February 25-May 14, 2017

Site specific amorphous sculptures and textile drawings are the artist signatures. Hlobo has a particular flair for materials that appeal to bodily senses. As performance artist the animated sculptures give a strong sensation of bodily presence. Expressions in fashion and folklore handicraft merge with the politics of black skin. Rubber inner tubes meet light fabrics and satin in a nonverbal queering of traditional spheres. Of particular interest to the artist is the symbolic impact of the stitch as binding together and penetrating a surface. Hlobo has consciously chosen embroidery as a way to draw on paper or canvas. The thread and stitch map and measure, while at the same time expressing a visceral world joined with earthly textures and digital nerve fibres. Zawelela ngale includes earlier artworks of importance combined with newly produced sculptures for the gallery space at Uppsala Art Museum, in the old Gustav Vasa castle. Nicholas Hlobo would translate the isiXhosa phrase Zawelela ngale as ‘They have crossed to the other side’ and by this he describes the performative act of transgressing, crossing a border, or things that have transcended onto another state. Zawelela ngale could be understood as the need to acknowledge changes and shifts in identities and the multifaceted nature of humans.

EXPLORE EXHIBITION

Nicholas Hlobo, Yongamela Ubumnyama
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg | 27 August - 10 November 2022

Yongamela Ubumnyama marks Nicholas Hlobo’s first exhibition with Goodman Gallery, featuring new work that explores a shift from minimal use of acrylic paint to a less inhibited approach, incorporating the unwieldy medium with signature materials ribbon and canvas.

Hlobo is known for creating hybrid objects, intricately weaving ribbon and leather into crisply primed canvas alongside wood and rubber detritus. Each material holds charged associations with cultural, gendered, sexual and national identity, creating a complex visual narrative that references ideas around postapartheid nationhood and bodily healing.

Using the metaphor of himself as a surgeon, Hlobo treats the canvas like a physical being, ready to be cut open and sewn up at his discretion. For this latest series, Hlobo embraces acrylic paint as a primary material in his toolbox, continuing to sculpt the canvas with multicoloured stitching but alongside bold streaks of paint.

EXPLORE EXHIBITIONS

Nicholas Hlobo: Imilonji Yembali
Museum Beelden aan Zee, Hague, Netherlands | February 12 – May 16, 2016

Nicholas Hlobo’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, following exhibitions in Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo.

EXPLORE EXHIBITION

Nicholas Hlobo
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa Cape Town, South Africa | September 16 – October 16, 2017

The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa inaugural exhibition included Nicholas Hlobo’s iimpundulu zonke ziyandilandela, 2011, first exhibited in the 54th Venice Biennale, as well as three paintings produced for the 2012 Paris Triennale. The BMW Atrium stands at the heart of the museum. It provides Zeitz MOCAA the ability to commission and exhibit monumental interventions on a scale never before seen in a public museum in Africa. Hlobo’s, iimpundulu zonke ziyandilandela combines rubber inner tubing, multi-coloured ribbons, an animal skull, and pink theater lights. As light streams in from the glass topped atrium, this massive bird hovers over us. Hlobo seduces us with the haunting lullaby he has created for this piece. As oral histories inevitably disappear, Hlobo represents the Xhosa myth of the Lightning Bird or the witch’s servant, manifesting itself as a bird or an attractive man. Hlobo however morphs the myth to particular personal concerns taking into account taboos associated with masculinity and violence. The generosity of Hlobo’s practice allows us to enter a fantastical world not normally accessible to us.

EXPLORE EXHIBITION

Nicholas Hlobo: Inyoka Yobhedu
Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel November 6 | 2021 – January 1, 2022

On the occasion of his solo exhibition at CCA Tel Aviv, his first solo presentation in Israel, Hlobo presents Inyoka Yobhedu, a site-specific installation consisting of intertwined copper pipes with bronze serpent heads and inspired by Nehushtan [נְחֻשְׁתָּן‎]. First described in the Book of Numbers, Nehushtan was a bronze serpent on a pole, which Moses created following God’s command so that the Israelites could gaze at it and heal from the bites of the serpents, previously sent to punish them for speaking against God and Moses.

Hlobo titles his works in his native language, isiXhosa and not English, which is more dominant in the field of art. Such a decision generates an intermediate space, where things get lost in translation – a fertile ground for innumerable occurrences and possibilities which allow for the imaginative, the intangible, the dreamful, the emotional, and the intuitive to reveal themselves outside of the orderly structure of language.

Since being introduced to Christianity, the Xhosa people experienced being between two spiritual practices – Xhosa’s ancestral tradition and Christianity. In this context, Inyoka Yobhedu might suggest a link between the liminal condition of the Xhosa people and that of the Israelites at the time of the Exodus. Furthermore, the story of the Israelites, their deliverance from slavery and the journey back home to a promised land evokes the transition of South Africa from apartheid to democracy, the collective historical trauma of both nations and the complex relationship between Israel and South Africa

EXPLORE EXHIBITION

Nicholas Hlobo: Unyukelo
SCAD Museum of Art Savannah, GA | January 24 – July 7, 2019

In Unyukelo Nicholas Hlobo responds to historic narratives of the American South to create a poetic and moving installation of large two-dimensional and sculptural works for the SCAD Museum of Art. Inspired by the evocative name of the city of Savannah – with echoes of the rolling fields of grass of the African savanna - Hlobo conceived a project rooted in the search for liberation and escape. Taking the reference of tumbleweed as a metaphor, Hlobo’s new artwork explores the materiality of copper piping, as both sculptural and linear drawing in space. Small, recognizable objects are attached to larger entangled shapes, which shift the original function and meaning to a place outside of immediate comprehension.

EXPLORE EXHIBITION

Nicholas Hlobo, Umbhovuzo: The Parable of the Sower
Performa 17 New York, NY | November 18 – 19, 2017

Nicholas Hlobo’s presentation at Performa 17 expands on an earlier four-part performative installation, first seen in his 2016 exhibition Sewing Saw. Umbhovuzo: The Parable of the Sower; Lo’de litshone; Umbhaduli; Uthekwane performances feature dress-clad men. Hlobo’s interest in engaging with historical objects from domestic interiors contribute to each work’s conceptual and material multiplicity. He adopts the Singer sewing machines, workstation and other apparatus that symbolize industrial self-sufficiency whilst critically observing prescribed gender roles that shape domesticity, labor, and globalization.

EXPLORE EXHIBITION

Nicholas Hlobo: The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists
SCAD Museum of Art Savannah, GA | October 16, 2014 – January 25, 2015

Nicholas Hlobo’s floor-spanning, intestine-shaped “Tyaphaka” belongs in Hell, but then a giant black snake is almost too literal for the room. Whereas the Inferno selections include abstraction and installation, the Paradise rooms trend toward the figurative—surely a conscious decision, but not one in keeping with Dante’s depiction of an upward trajectory into perfect light at the end of “Paradiso.” At a certain point, some of the joy of seeing the artworks gets lost in worrying too much about the logic connecting them. Yet the interplay is there: The exhibition depends on it.

EXPLORE EXHIBITION

54th International Venice Biennale ILLUMInations
June 4 – November 27, 2011

The piece is titled Iimpundulu Zonke Ziyandilandela, which in the artist’s native Xhosa means ‘all the lightning birds are after me’. The work is made of tyre inner tubes. The dragon bird is shown in flight with its wings extended and the long tail rolled into coils behind it, while red ribbons have been stitched throughout the creature’s body, stretching down to the ground beneath it. The work has been described as a Biennale “highlight”. Hlobo is said to have drawn inspiration for the piece from many sources, saying “I looked at a lot of paintings by Tintoretto and found that many of them had birds in them”. The title of the artwork, Iimpundulu Zonke Ziyandilandela, references a song about a mythological creature that “at times presents itself as a bird and at times as a handsome young man, but only to women”, Hlobo said.

EXPLORE EXHIBITION 

Momentum 11: Nicholas Hlobo
Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Massachusetts | July 30 – October 26, 2008

For Momentum 11, The artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., Hlobo creates a new sculptural installation, large-scale drawings, and a gallery performance that explore how “notions of nature / difference / foreignness / dominance / submission are forced to live side-by-side.”

Suspended in the gallery, a large rubber and ribbon sculpture resembling a bodily organ or growth connects by a canal to an opening in the gallery wall. This opening suggests an orifice or wound with ribbon-stitched veins inlaid directly in the plaster. The entire room will be lit from above with a soft pink glow, expanding the allusions to the gallery as a bodily interior of generative activity and growth, whether malignant or benign. As part of his work for Momentum 11, Hlobo will also present a live performance, Thoba, utsale umnxeba. Translated to mean ‘to lower oneself and make a call,’ the title describes how Hlobo will sit in a meditative posture with a headdress of multiple ribbons and hair extensions fastened like suction cups to the gallery walls. The performance introduces fresh perspectives to the space were the private body, public ritual, and cultural engagement align. 

EXPLORE EXHIBITION