Conference of the Birds Conference of the Birds

The sculptures, performances and installations of Kemang Wa Lehulere comment on the educational and experiential divides felt by people of different colours and backgrounds, whether from the artist’s native South African context or outside of it. His works incorporate everyday objects within cultural and institutional settings: school desks, books, murals and blackboards document and present what the artist calls ‘deleted scenes’ from South African history. His work responds in an associative and quietly assertive manner to the ways in which historical narratives are selected, obfuscated, redacted or blotted out.

Lehulere’s installation for the Istanbul Biennial, entitled Conference of the Birds (2017), examines contemporary group dynamics in a world riven by oppositions, identities and belief systems. In this work (named after an album by the Dave Holland Quartet), a series of sixteen blackboards, inspired by forgotten countries that no longer exist, investigates historical erasure. Writings on their surfaces, mostly rubbed out, point to the ways in which educational settings such as schools can inculcate, revise as well as distort versions of history, while also emphasising the human ability to resist such revisionist omission and distortion. The black and white iconography of a ‘blackboard’, meanwhile, recalls the issue of race relations.
A separate work places Turkish politics and educational systems alongside Lehulere’s examination of the politics of race and the legacy of ethnographic and ethnic absolutism. The installation incorporates a Turkish classroom desk as well as birdhouses: sites of shelter and passage for migratory beings. The desk recalls the current political environment in Turkey, in which many academics, teachers and researchers are being dismissed from their jobs. One side, in which Lehulere has sprinkled bird seeds, is open; the closed side of the desk, standing for sealed, potentially inaccessible narratives, has been painted black. Lehulere’s work calls attention to legacies of institutional racism and injustice in an age of ‘post-truth’ and institutional antagonism, where both historical accounts and human lives are seen as malleable to political whims.