Paul Maheke Dossier 2024

PAUL MAHEKE
To be blindly hopeful
23 March 2024 - 29 June 2024
MOSTYN Contemporary gallery and visuals art Center - Llandudno, Wales, UK.

In the space where the intimate and the global converge, where a personal narrative intersects with a broader socio-political landscape, the work of Paul Maheke comes to life. 

Here at Mostyn, Maheke presents his largest solo exhibition in the UK to date, inviting us into a world where drawings, prints, videos and paintings composed into thoughtful installations, weave a narrative that transcends the confines of the written word, where it all started.

To Be Blindly Hopeful emerged from the very last sentence of a journal that Maheke wrote between August 2020 and June 2021, encapsulating those turbulent months. The exhibition serves as a proposal to revisit fragments of this journal, a personal odyssey that became the genesis of a body of work, as intricate as it is expansive. The exhibition title references the artist’s mindset during a period marked by uncertainty and upheaval. It beckons us to consider the potency of hope, not as a calculated response to circumstance, but as a courageous act of faith in the face of adversity.

Paul Maheke, "Levant", 2018.
Tate Modern, London, UK.
Permanent Collection

In his video installation Levant, Maheke stages a poetic meditation on visibility and erasure

A video performance made in collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis (born 1983) and the musician Nkisi (Melika Ngombe Kolongo) (born 1985) is projected onto a gauze fabric screen. Lewis repeats a sequence of movements to a pulsating electronic soundtrack, her form blurred. As the field of view shifts and phases, the figures of Maheke and Nkisi also briefly join Lewis in movement. Dressed in black, the three performers appear and disappear, hazy and ghostlike, against the background of a dark and indistinct space.

The Purple Chamber
ICA Milano
26/10 — 10/12/2023
Curated by Chiara Nuzzi

Paul Maheke, The Purple Chamber, 2023 curated by Chiara Nuzzi, Installation view. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milano.  Ph. credits Andrea Rossetti and Tiziano Ercoli

"L’Origine de la mort", Lafayette Anticipations, Paris.
September 16 - 17, 2023.
© Martin Argyroglo

PAUL MAHEKE
Ancestral Musing
Goodman Gallery London
1 June - 18 August 2023

Goodman Gallery presents Ancestral Musing, Paul Maheke’s first solo exhibition with the London gallery spread across the lower ground and featuring two new bodies of work in which the artist continues to expand on his performance practice to include drawing and installation. 

For the exhibition, the artist continues to explore his interests in the experiential aspect of the body within space as well as the ways in which the body can act as an archive of history and personal experience. As such, Maheke’s exploration of the ancestral muse, seeks to highlight questions about history, visibility and representation. 

Shifted Realities
GroupShow exhibition at the Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic
16/03/2023 - 11/06/2023

We took a sip from the devil's cup
Project Art Centre Dublin
2022

YOU & I
Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia
Photo Martin Polák

Two figures are moving through a landscape. Only that it might not be a landscape. Their bodies are touching. How many of them are there, though?
It’s hard to say what constitutes a body. They are Mauve, Jim and John. They are conversing and wind floats between their branches and ruffles their hair.
Where do we draw the line between human and non-human? Or even something other? Something which is not other whatsoever, because it is on its own, without perceiving the notion of otherness at all?

Paul Maheke’s first exhibition in Slovakia gravitates around topics of interdependency. Maheke stages circumstances formulated by the physical presence of objects, shapes, lines, forms, sounds, images and imaginations, or silly little animal figures. All of them build a resonating tension, interacting with each other, shifting attention from one to the other; drawing you in and out. Offering solace while immediately cutting your hopes short. There is a complex network of relationships in this exhibition and none of them are simply this or that, none of them exist within normalized binaries. They are all queer, which could mean anything, and that is just beautiful.

Temporary Atlas: Mapping the Self in the Art of Today
MOSTYN,
June 25 - September 25, 2022

Temporary Atlas: Mapping the Self in the Art of Today presents a selection of works that explore an alternative, complementary idea to cartography, the traditional science or practice of drawing maps.

The 17 cartographer-artists of Temporary Atlas investigate their perceptions using a traditional approach to mapping but expand it along unconventional paths. They reflect upon identity, spirituality, the subconscious, emotions, physical and mental sensation, and challenge the methods and rules we use to interpret such maps.

Paul Maheke,
Vanille Bleue
Goodman Gallery Johannesburg
April - May 2021

Vanille Bleue is a new body of work by Maheke, drawing on journal entries made since July 2020 during lockdown in Paris. Part diary, part non fiction, Maheke’s journal is brought into the exhibition to drive the artist’s reflections on vulnerability through drawing, text and sound. In particular, Maheke’s use of drawing in the exhibition represents a continued shift in the artist’s practice beyond primarily performance-based work.

The title of the exhibition refers to a type of vanilla indigenous to L’Île de la Reunion, once home to Maheke’s parents. Similar to the works on display, the exhibition’s title offers viewers a context both poetic and political in nature. Maheke cites writers such as Audre Lorde and Édouard Glissant for their use of poetry to “play on one of the most oppressive structures we have - language.” Similarly, by incorporating text into the exhibition Maheke offers an additional voice for his works to communicate various meanings.

Paul Maheke’s Taboo Durag (2021) is a performance work that explores the porous interface between vulnerability and resilience. A dance solo unfolds different narratives and choreographic registers with a score that swells up through bass-heavy ambience and vocals. 

Created during the 2020 lockdown, the intensely personal work is rooted in the ways in which invisible, and yet sometimes very concrete forces, affect our bodies as well as our identities and how we experience ourselves. These forces comprise everything from the political and social understanding of our history, to more mystical and spiritual understandings. It also includes the sonic, inter-human and physical forces such as gravity that surround us. 

Conveying a narrative around violence and acts of violence over bodies, Taboo Durag utilises sound, text and movement to speak to themes of trauma and, in turn, healing both as personal catharsis and as a way of reaching out to establish a form of touch, without physical contact.