Tumelo Mtimkhulu
Engaged ArtTumelo Mtimkhulu is an artist from South Africa, working between Johannesburg and Amsterdam. His practice questions the language and architectures through which established social realities are constructed and maintained. He approaches these realities, and the ways they shape experiences of upbringing, labour, loss, geopolitics, imagination, love and language, with suspicion. Through poetry and material abstraction, Mtimkhulu investigates how particular ways of living and understanding the world come to be presented as natural and inevitable, despite often reflecting the imagination of a few. His practice encompasses an expanding range of materials and forms, including visual and written text, plaster, cement, concrete, everyday objects, sound and video.
Commonplace takes vibracrete walls as a starting point for considering how social realities come to be perceived as fixed and unchangeable. Drawing on the visual language of privacy, domestic interiors and architectural divisions, the installation brings together material abstractions, curtains and structures that are classically used to establish the binary of public and/or private space. Referencing the use of curtains to divide open-plan homes in working-class South African households, the work considers how physical structures shape social relations and everyday life. At the same time, it questions how imagination, desire and ordinary acts of living can offer forms of resistance, and how these possibilities may themselves become absorbed into established social realities.