PASSAGE “Passage is a three-channel projection that meditates on slavery’s dismemberment of African identity and its enduring erasure of personal histories. In each of the artwork’s three projections, we are confronted with a character – a woman with a hawk perched on her arm, a young man in a Trilby hat and a woman wrapped in a Basotho blanket. As the passengers lie motionless on their backs looking up at the sky they begin to perform a series of actions that move between gestures of struggle and resignation. A pool of water slowly forms beneath their bodies. The rising water gradually floods the well of the boat eventually leaving the passengers submerged while the boat is slowly sinking and eventually disappearing. In Passage, the ebb and flow of water, as both life-giving and deadly, symbolizes the many who have arrived or departed from South Africa in trade, as cargo or as transient bodies belonging to no particular state. In Setswana the experience of life is referred to as a ‘passage.’ The Setswana word for life, botshelo, means ‘to cross over.’ As such, all human beings are referred to as bafeti (‘voyagers’), a word that points to the fact that the experience of life is transient; it has a beginning and an end, as with any voyage.” - Mohau Modisakeng Studio LAND OF ZANJ “The hope with a work like Land of Zanj is to continue to restore the lost place of black histories as a means to reclaim the power of each and every individual who were forced to flee their homes, or taken to be sold into slavery, or confined and controlled, as in South African history. A work engaging such themes attempts to draw on the many similarities in the experience of black bodies under the oppressive regimes everywhere throughout history. In all these historic migrations there are traces of our humanity with stories that have the potential to restore that which for centuries has been misplaced.” - Mohau Modisakeng
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