Black Subjects

Serge Alain Nitegeka, Black Subjects (film stills), 2012
Single-channel digital video
6 min 56 sec
Edition of 6
Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

In his exploration of formal and philosophical
‘blackness’, Nitegeka follows a lineage of art
movements that have placed black at the centre of
their rationales (Russian Constructivism, Minimalism
and Abstract Expressionism), and of artists who
worked from within a basic ground of blackness:
Malevich whose blacks are ‘generative’, Rothko whose
blacks ‘pulsate’, Reinhardt who shows ‘degrees’ of
black. The colour black, says Nitegeka, is notoriously
unrevealing and uncompromising. It is the colour
of the origin of painting—and our own origin. He
describes the French expression, that the newborn
baby ‘sees the day’, which means that before the day,
we were in the dark. This is to suggest that we come
from the dark, that, really, we don’t know where we
come from and we don’t know where we are headed.
All we know of blackness is its presence. As we return
to ashes, as we return to dust, so we return to black.

Serge Alain Nitegeka was born in Burundi in 1983. He lives and
works in Johannesburg. His work, mainly in sculpture and painting,
frequently explores black subjectivity and experience not only
in relation to history and politics, but also within the framework
of art-historical notions of form and colour. In particular, his
asymmetrical wooden sculptures engage the body in space and
time, considering the relationships between movement and stasis.
Nitegeka won the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts in
2010 and in the same year was selected for the Dakar Biennale,
where he won a Fondation Jean Paul Blachère Prize. He has held
solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2014);
Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg (2009, 2012, 2013, 2014);
Le Manège Gallery, French Institute, Dakar (2012); and the National
Arts Festival Grahamstown (2011). His first US museum exhibition,
Configurations in Black, is currently at the SCAD Museum of Art,
Savannah, GA. Recent group exhibitions include Venturing Out of
the Heart of Darkness at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-
American Arts and Culture, Charlotte, NC (2015); This House, part
of Nouvelles vagues at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); My Joburg at
La Maison Rouge, Paris and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,
Dresden (2013); and The Space Between Us at ifa Galleries,
Berlin (2013).