Sikhona

....An evening spent looking at women’s stories

OOOhwww to be a 20 something year old girl, scantily dressed, sipping wine and walking through exquisite art pieces. And so there is something particularly lovely about arriving at an exhibition opening when everyone seems to have made a little effort. 

 

The room is full, the wine is flowing, people are moving slowly between the work, stopping every now and then to have a conversation or take a second look. For a few hours, the Eswatini Theatre Club felt less like a theatre and more like one of those charming little art spaces you might stumble into on an evening in Paris, except the women and the stories on the walls were unmistakably our own.

That was the atmosphere at the opening of Sikhona, an exhibition centred on womanhood, identity and inherited memory. Curated by Xolelwa Malinga and visual artist Phetsemajali Shongwe, the exhibition brought together the work of photographer Noncedo Msibi, artist and Art Hut founder Sinqobile Nkambule, potter Happiness Simelane, multidisciplinary artist Yenzokuhle Shongwe and Shongwe herself. With a glass of wine in hand, the best way to experience it was to take your time.

 There was plenty to look at. Photography sat alongside painting, pottery, glass and digital work, with each artist bringing a different way of thinking about the exhibition's central themes. Nothing felt like it had been placed there simply to fill a wall. The works seemed to speak to one another, even when they came from completely different practices.

The title, Sikhona, meaning 'We Are Here'  began to make more sense the longer you stayed. The exhibition is interested in the things that shape women long before they have the language to explain them. 

There are family teachings, childhood memories, cultural traditions and expectations around what it means to be a daughter, a sister, a wife or simply a woman. These are not always dramatic things. Sometimes they are found in the details of everyday life, in the stories told by mothers and grandmothers, in rituals repeated without much thought, or in memories that remain long after the people and places attached to them have changed.

That is what made walking through Sikhona feel quite intimate. You were not being presented with one neat version of womanhood. Instead, the artists approached the subject from their own experiences and artistic practices. Msibi's photography offered a way into questions of identity and memory, while Nkambule brought the perspective of a self-taught artist whose work sits alongside her work through Art Hut. 

Simelane's pottery introduced the physical relationship between earth, hands and form, and Yenzokuhle Shongwe's multidisciplinary practice allowed her to move between different forms of expression. Phetsemajali Shongwe occupied both sides of the exhibition, helping to shape the wider curatorial conversation while also contributing her own work.

 

It was easy to move through the room and find yourself thinking about your own family. A photograph might remind you of something you have tucked away at home. A piece of pottery might bring back the feeling of being around older women in your family. 

A particular idea about womanhood might make you remember something you were taught as a child without ever stopping to question where it came from.

That is the interesting thing about inherited memory. It does not always arrive in the form of a grand story. Often, it is much smaller than that. It can be a recipe, a photograph, a phrase someone has repeated for years or a tradition that has simply always been there. Sikhona gives those seemingly ordinary things room to be considered as part of a much bigger story about identity and belonging.

There was also something quite satisfying about seeing the work outside the usual gallery setting.The Eswatini Theatre Club is, after all, a place most people associate with performance. On this occasion, however, the theatre opened itself up to visual art, allowing photography, pottery, painting, glass and digital work to exist together. 

The exhibition therefore became about more than the five artists. It also became an opportunity for different parts of Eswatini's creative community to occupy the same room. And perhaps that was one of the loveliest things about the evening. There was no need to rush through it.

 People stood around discussing the work. Others wandered quietly from one piece to another. There were introductions, conversations and those little moments at exhibitions where someone points something out to you and suddenly you are seeing the work differently.

For an evening, the Theatre Club became a place to linger. Sikhona asks its audience to think about what we inherit and how those things become part of us. But it also gives the artists the freedom to tell those stories differently. One woman's memory does not have to resemble another woman's memory, and one artistic practice does not have to look like another for them to belong in the same conversation.

That is what makes the exhibition feel alive. By the time I was making my way through the room for what was probably my third look at some of the pieces, wine glass still in hand, I found myself less interested in trying to decide what each work was supposed to mean and more interested in what it made me remember.

Perhaps that is the nicest thing art can do. It can give you someone else's story and, somehow, make you think about your own. For Sikhona, the answer was in the title all along. Five women artists had entered the room with different experiences, different practices and different memories, but together they created a space where those experiences could be seen, discussed and remembered.