Inzilo

Mohau Modisakeng, Inzilo (film stills), 2013
Single-channel video
4 min 57 sec
Edition of 10
Courtesy Brundyn+

Inzilo is an isiZulu word meaning ‘mourning’ or
‘fasting’. As in many of his films and images,
Modisakeng’s body occupies centre stage in
this work. He enacts a mourning ritual by sitting,
standing, and rotating slightly, all the while throwing
a burnt, ashy substance into the air. Extreme closeups
of his body begin to suggest the shedding of a
skin, as though the ash is falling from his limbs as
the ritual proceeds. He performs an elaborate rite
of passage in which the initiate seems to draw the
material for his transition from within his own body.
In the absolute purity and focus of the moment,
Modisakeng is turned inwards but gesturing outward,
undergoing a mysterious transformation that is at
once a private ceremony and a public declaration.

Mohau Modisakeng was born in Soweto in 1986 and lives and
works between Johannesburg and Cape Town. He completed his
undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape
Town in 2009 and worked towards his Master’s degree at the same
institution. His work engages race, the militarisation of society
and the deep divides of post-apartheid South Africa and the postcolonial
continent. He interrogates the collective narratives that
inform our experience of the world, in particular those that evoke
the black body as a site of fragmentation and distortion.
Modisakeng was awarded the Sasol New Signatures Award
for 2011. He has exhibited at VOLTA NY, New York (2014); the
Saatchi Gallery, London (2012); Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar (2012);
Focus 11, Basel (2011); and Stevenson, Cape Town (2010). In 2013
he produced an ambitious new video work in association with
Samsung as a special project for the 2013 FNB Joburg Art Fair. His
work is included in public collections such as the Johannesburg
Art Gallery, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town and the
Saatchi Gallery, London as well as in significant private collections
such as Zeitz MOCAA.