Visions, writings and walls: perceptual learning and the artwork of Kemang Wa Lehulere

Abstract

It is not easy to define where, for Kemang Wa Lehulere, the making of art begins and ends. Wa Lehulere’s artworks suggest an attitude toward looking focused on less developed aspects in contemporary art criticism and art history. The artworks perform this task by insisting on the attention and involvement of the viewer in ways that make artistic production and viewer reception a potently intertwined and productive place of attention. This article argues that Wa Lehulere’s creative practice reflects contested and changing ideas of visual cultural knowledge in South Africa. My personal encounters with Wa Lehulere’s artwork over the years, through direct engagements at exhibitions, in talking about reference images, sketches, and unfinished object assemblages in the artist’s studio, and in moments of reflection on the artist’s own way of describing their practice, have informed my ideas about creative practices loosely described as ‘conceptual art’ in the space of South Africa. The contestations and changes that I see through these visual gestures are seen to organically expand into the vicissitudes of cultural, social, and political dynamics. Wa Lehulere’s artwork as an analytic device changes the viewer’s long-term perception (of learning) and, in this context, delivers a form of perceptual learning oriented toward decolonial education. It permits a choreography of and for future narratives. As such, Wa Lehulere’s performances, drawings, photographs, and texts function as forms of sense-making for other sights. Such visual and theoretical activities of critical conceptual art are produced by and effectively inform changing definitions of art, care ethics, and freedom in periods of transformation wherein such cultural phenomena become crucial to liberatory practices.