Lawn 1 Lawn 1

The sculptures of Lungiswa Gqunta investigate the ongoing, tense and destructive relationships surrounding race, architecture, dispossession, capitalism and South African history. Her sculptures and installations, which employ commonly found domestic effects and objects such as bottles or mattresses, are examinations of historical continuities and injustices that persist within post-Apartheid South Africa. While focusing on domestic symbols and everyday commodities, the artist examines practices of social engineering, familial bonds and states of helplessness and shame.

Some of Gqunta’s works examine the ways in which the unjust practices of ‘township planning’ and forced removal were used against black South Africans during and after Apartheid, and the damaging psychological and interpersonal impacts. In Lawn (2017), she creates a ‘lawn’ out of broken bottles that have been inverted and placed on the top of a wooden plate. In apartheid South Africa, only affluent whites had lawns, which were tied to their prosperity and notions of domesticity, security and racial privilege.

Upturned, broken bottles are placed on garden fences to deter outsiders. Aside from connoting capitalism and globalisation, the bottles in Gqunta’s works evoke those used to make petrol bombs during riots in recent years in South Africa. Bottles are also suggestive of alcohol, which the artist notes first came to Africa through Europe as a result of the slave trade. Thus the work responds to the corrosive legacy and social divisions produced by commodities, alcoholism, the destructive delineation of property, and the proximity of violence to borders and policing.