Finding Kaggen, an exhibition planned for the National Arts Festival Fringe event art artEC in Port Elizabeth this year, seeks to excavate meaning and widen the national aesthetic discourse by making the invisible visible.
Opinion is radically divided on the subject of the Thikoloshe (tokolos or thokolose) throughout Southern Africa. Popularly dismissed during apartheid as “Bantu superstition” the Thikoloshe has in recent years reappeared as a firm favourite in the tabloid press.
But according to curator Nicholas Hauser, writing the Thikoloshe off as a hackneyed folk fantasy is to ignore the possibility of mining fertile creative soil. He argues that Thikoloshe goes beyond being a manifestation of suppressed power, impotence, ambition, fear and insecurity.
“Far from being a cliché, I think Thikoloshe is an archetypal liminal being occupying borders between the corporeal world and incorporeal states. But also a crucial device – even today – for linking rural and urban behaviours and more recently of becoming an unquantifiable alibi for acts like abductions, tik-fuelled rages and rape.”
“Certainly, many artists will produce representational images of a hairy hobgoblin with a penis like a garden hose, and we need to embrace those efforts too. I’m interested in encouraging an exhibition that brings the so-called lowbrow and highbrow art enclaves together – just as /Kaggen or Thikoloshe makes cowards out of warriors and makes fools out of the wise. Many of South Africa’s more serious A-list artists allude eloquently to the spirit of the times in their work, either through satire like Kannemeyer and Murray, or along more sinister lines like Siopis’s Pienkie pienkie series a while back and Dianne Victor’s neo-gothic visions. I have ambitions of this being a genuine No-brow show.”
The ambiguity and limbo-like status of the Thikoloshe, straddling the half-dissolve of visible and invisible, he says, makes a fine focus for investigations in film, paint, performance, print making, drawing and sculpture.
“Currently, although Thikoloshe is currently most frequently represented as a surrogate for human misdemeanours, there is a pool of imagery that stretches from Rico and Stephen Francis’s Madam & Eve cartoons to bite marks on goat hide that demands our critical attention. I’d like the public to be able to view everything from Granny Gloria’s watercolour tokolos to Waddy Jones’s Evil Boy music video.”
Finding Kaggen opens at the artEC Gallery in Bird Street on Tuesday 28 June and runs until Friday 15 July as a part of the National Arts Festival Fringe Event in Port Elizabeth.
Alan Straton
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