Dust: Ruth Ige, Nozuko Madokwe, Cinthia Sifa Mulanga, Agnes Waruguru

Understanding our own selves involves intertwined aspects that we are often unaware of. Our geographical locations for instance play a fundamental role when defining ourselves within a global context: Where do we come from? Where are we? Where are we going? And often, individuals are being defined before their voice is heard. Identities are assumed based on skin colour, on physical attributions, on the language one speaks… Especially as women who come from the Global South, there are even more cultural stigmas to break, stigmas imposed by the community, region or countries of origin and which need to be dismantled in order for voices reaching beyond the borders that have been imposed. 

Dust is a contemporary art exhibition that invites four artists who recognize themselves as women, painters and Africans, and who try to break stereotypes with their practices. Painting, and the exploration of the medium’s limits are undoubtedly the common thread weaving together the works in the exhibition. All four artists have their own way of understanding the craft and their own ways of approaching the formal challenges of the demonstration. Drawing on personal and collective narratives, the four artists use a multifaceted array of media —ranging from natural pigments and embroidery to collage and painting— to delve into themes of Blackness, belonging, and spiritual transcendence. The curated works invite viewers to move between the visible and the invisible, past and present, engaging with stories of origin, belonging, diaspora, and resilience. The exhibition emphasizes the material’s ability to hold stories, reflecting the tension between fragility and permanence, tradition and innovation. 

Nozuko Madokwe was born in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa in 1983. Her work is deeply rooted in the concept of umhlaba, which means earth, and from this concept she explores tradition, history and identity. Madokwe’s practice thus celebrates the earth as a medium, creating paintings with natural pigments collected and processed from her surroundings. She understands the earth as a powerful expressive and symbolic force in itself, and is interested in the rituals and traditional practices of those who inhabit the geographical spaces she uses.

Ruth Ige was born in Nigeria in 1992, but settled in New Zealand at a very young age. Painting and poetry are her paths chosen to explore Blackness and its multiplicity. Her paintings are characterized by forms that move between abstraction and figuration, with a palette rooted in the color blue. Ruth’s blue is polysemic and emulates nostalgia and the joy of living at the same time. For her, color is an evocative necessity. Ruth adopts a protective position with the characters that inhabit her paintings, which are barely identifiable within large spaces of color and texture. She claims that, in this way, she protects them and gives them the opportunity to be who they want to be, breaking with the stereotypes that condemn Blackness. 

Agnes Waruguru, born in Kenya in 1994, creates art characterized by a blend of abstraction, minimalism, and influences from arte povera, while deeply engaging with the textile traditions of Kenyan women. Her works are poetic reflections on personal identity, memory and places of belonging. They are subtle, delicate, and inhabit spaces from the simplicity to the strength they represent. Waruguru is interested in exploring the primitive, in the origin of the traditions of her people, their fabrics, their colors, which are anchored there, in that past that still lives in the women of today who sew and dye fabrics, weave and embroider, who care for and protect a legacy that is anchored in their land. 

Cinthia Sifa Mulanga was born in 1997 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but has lived in South Africa since her childhood. Mulanga uses painting and collage to interrogate the representation of Black women, challenging traditional Western art histories. Her works juxtapose multiple female characters within intimate interior spaces, layering references to popular culture and personal aspirations to explore the complexities of identity, beauty and social expectations, and how all of these aspects end up influencing our own way of understanding and defining ourselves within the contemporary society we inhabit. 

By bringing together works by these strong female artists, Dust explores the intricate ways in which memory, tradition and identity intersect with contemporary art on a continent marked by assumptions, that we actually know very little about. Minerals, earth, dust are features that anchor and speak of tradition, of the memory that they were culturally entrusted to protect and bequeath. Within the social sciences, we understand memory in its broadest sense, as an idea of questions and definitions about social, cultural, and political identities. But memory also opens up the possibility of understanding disputes and consensus about the meanings given to the past by the present and its individuals and groups, defined by the Greek as the soul. For its part, tradition is a social construction that changes temporarily from one generation to another, and, spatially, from one place to another. Tradition varies within each culture, over time and according to social groups, and between different cultures. While identity is the set of traits of an individual or a community that characterize them in front of others. A person's awareness of being themselves and different from others. 

Dust also speaks of strength and freedom, of the power to decide one is. Dust is sinuous, omnipresent, ductile and imperishable. Dust is a recurring element in practically all founding myths, it is true that it is anchored to men, but in the daring of appropriation we have decided to rather see it from a feminine perspective, the soft, the subtle, the vulnerable, the unbreakable.