FEATURE ︎︎︎

BELOW PERCEPTIONS

A dig into the private prior to Naledi Chai’s public



Text by Nkosazana Hlalethwa

︎ ︎︎︎ ︎


Naledi Chai’s language is a femme vernacular. It collects. It retracts and refracts. A post-biblical spiritual study, told from the perspective of the congregant that the rapture left behind: her findings are endearing, enraged, ephemeral, all-encompassing and consistent in being ever-changing.




Devoted to mirroring, Chai reflects reality by making the immaterial parts of our material world (whether fears, urges, realities or convictions) visible. So far, these manifestations have taken on varying forms primarily. Collaging. Graffiti. Physical and digital digging. Coding. Gaming. Collecting. Zine publishing. Researching. Sketching. Sculpture making. Performance. Convening. Recording, drawing, destroying, enhancing and presenting.

Through visual, textured and sonic access points, Chai maintains a transdisciplinary practice. “I am always looking to be outside, to be up to shit and to be the one that doesn’t know things. I’m really loving the uncertainty of the space that I work in. That shit makes me feel very much like a child,” she says. In this unfamiliar territory, where there are little to no kinships and nothing familiar to grasp to, Chai becomes a medium, carrying and disseminating messages. “This word medium means something else in my context. It can’t just be collage, oil painting and installation. Certain voices are speaking through me. So this transdisciplinary shit is not something that I do. It’s something that I am,” she offers.
Following an initial urge, the conviction to make passes through a series of negotiations. A response to global resource limitations (in material and space) Chai addresses the lack of having, with found objects and alternative approaches to making.

Occupying her studio, time and mind, as this is written, is a sculpture series. A conversation between craft and chicken coup wires, the series is based on, but does not try to replicate, the human form. Gangly, ghostly and gauze-like, the sculptures are accompanied by a sound collage. Blending field recordings, found sound, excerpts from speeches and music, the sonic addition gives movement and bias to the seemingly motionless, neutral beings. Presenting sound as subjective: the work forms part of Chai’s research into what is triggered when we hear. “I’m not telling you anything because I want to know how hearing this feels to you. It’s a question I’m being asked too but I’ve realised that I don’t want to talk about what the work has surfaced in me,” says Chai. “The demarcations of contemporary art can nudge you into a particular dance and it’s a skill to have. But sometimes I’ll sit it out and let the audience go off on their own path.” 




Collaging. Graffiti. Physical and digital digging. Coding. Gaming. Collecting. Zine publishing. Researching. Sketching. Sculpture making. Performance. Convening. Recording, drawing, destroying, enhancing and presenting.





As porous as the chicken wire she is engaging, her approach understands the importance of oscillation because the delicate dance between retaining and relinquishing is necessary for survival, even when it fails to be palatable. “I don’t know that the things I make are nice or beautiful. But I am excited by the shape and space they take. And I think: maybe that’s all I need to know right now.” Open: it knows the consequences of remaining absolute. 

Synonymous with play, the receptive nature of Chai’s practice defies logic’s linearity. Childlike in its contradictions, in process, Chai collects and listens with as much vigor as she discards and neglects because it’s a fearlessness often afforded only to children. “All I do is give in to the urge to make, using the things that surround me. It’s what has kept me making all these years: the capability of the things I make with. I am constantly asking them what they can do. It is in the answers that they give me that I find my reason why,” explains Chai. Established in the early 2010, Fly Machine Projects demonstrates Chai’s many reasons why. “I wasn’t even trying to DJ. I was interested in vinyl and wanted to collect. I would knock on doors, listen to the stories of what these vinyls mean and so I kept digging,” she adds. A movement bringing experimental music to the people, Fly Machine Sessions offers a sensory experience and sonic home for the othered. A mother ship, it presents its audience with the opportunity to voyage through uncharted realms.







“I don’t know that the things I make are nice or beautiful. But I am excited by the shape and space they take. And I think: maybe that’s all I need to know right now.”









Sometimes literal, but mostly figurative and conceptual: Chai’s practice also acts as a coded document of black femme lamentations and celebrations. Themes explored here include “image equity, identity, queer visibility, women’s rights and reproductive health”. Take her untitled 2017 microfilm where threads of synthetic hair fibre are bound to a lamp post. A probable protagonist, the hair fibre hovers slightly above the pavement because the wind will not let it sit still. "My whole thing with filming is to make really uncomfortable, extreme shots," she explains. Short and repetitive, a prolonged screening of her films builds a genre of hope that can only come from enduring discomfort. Seen in a loop, it mimics the never quit, never back down gospel of the day, while acknowledging our indissoluble nature.

Brief but impactful, the conversation with Chai dissolves from professional to platonic, landing on the subject of good trauma after she makes a remark about the delayed onset muscle soreness she is experiencing. “I’ve been working with that wire and my body remembers. I’m sore because I remember, that’s that good trauma,” she says smiling. When asked how she would classify it as good trauma, Chai shrugs. “It’s welcomed pain and the speed at which the impact comes is different and expected.” A new layer to the way she navigates her practice, Chai concludes the reflection with relief. “This is the one place where I get to transcend your perceptions of me, your memories with me. I get to transcend that shit.”

Naledi Chai is one of two artists selected to take part in a dual exhibition following the Art After Baby initiative by the Independent Network for Contemporary Culture & Art at the Keyes Art Mile. The exhibition will take place from 2-30 November 2023.





Independent Network for Contemporary Culture & Art





Open call project ︎

Art
After
Baby Vol.2



Siviwe James
Ubuhle Ngaphaya Kwameva
Opening Sunday 2 February 2025 at 10am
Victoria Yards, Lorentzville, Johannesburg

Phumelele Kunene
In My Element
Opening Sunday 2 March 2025 at 10am
Victoria Yards, Lorentzville, Johannesburg
INCCA is pleased to announce the two incredibly talented artists selected from our Art After Baby (AAB) open call – Siviwe James and Phumelele Kunene. Each artist will hold their own solo exhibitions in February and March 2025 at Victoria Yards, Lorentzville, Johannesburg. We look forward to revealing more and platforming their powerful work to our network in the coming weeks.

The second edition of AAB is again supported by the National Arts Council South Africa (NAC) Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme (PESP 5).

The selected artists both create deeply personal work that reflects not only their positions as caregivers and artists, but also how they have navigated loss, which has impacted their roles as mothers and created new, unexpected paths for them as creatives.

The overall aim of AAB is to confront what remains a taboo subject, and to find pathways for the accepted applicants to participate in an industry often still dominated by men and/or privilege, and also to explore how art-making itself can be a cathartic salve for the many challenges of motherhood, caregiving and/or trauma and loss. AAB aims to provide artists with a short period of breathing room to focus on their work, and motivates those who are battling to juggle a career in the arts to find spaces and avenues to continue producing. In addition, we hope to establish routes and approaches for others in similar positions.

Previous recipients include artists Ditiro Mashigo and Naledi Chai.
 

We hope to establish routes for others in similar positions.






Siviwe James
Ubuhle Ngaphaya Kwameva
Opening Sunday 2 February 2025 at 10am
Victoria Yards, Lorentzville, Johannesburg

Siviwe James is a researcher, arts practitioner, and archivist whose works speaks through visual and sonic archaeology, as reconstructions of place and meaning. James’ practice inserts fragments of time in the voids of history, creating new imaginaries as landscapes of knowledge of the lives and worlds of Xhosa people, working with both personal and public audio-visual archival materials and everyday interviews.









Phumelele Kunene
In My Element
Opening Sunday 2 March 2025 at 10am
Victoria Yards, Lorentzville, Johannesburg

Phumelele Kunene is a South African photographer, curator, and filmmaker with a background in photography from the Market Photo Workshop and digital filmmaking from the Big Fish School of Digital Filmmaking. She honed her skills while working as a Gallery Assistant and Photographer at David Krut Projects from 2015 to 2017. After gaining industry experience, Phumelele founded Still Imagery, where she now serves as Executive Creative Director.



Explore Previous AAB projects and texts below
︎︎︎ Next