Mphapho Christian Hlasane

I revel in the sumptuousness of dark themes. The kind of themes multi-layered with heavy, melancholic undertones a la Jo Ratcliffe, Phaswane Mpe, Taiwa Molelekwa or the fleeting transcendence of Santu Mofokeng’s photographs.

Looking for my father is a seminal, life long project exploring my own lack of menories of my late father, who passed when I was three. As to what Looking for my father is as an installation I don’t know, but it serves as marker of where I have been, physically and in many other ways. Through this work I grapple with my own thoughts around memory versus time and/or vice versa. Memory loss is to me another way of dying and death is a fascinating subject for me. Death in this case is not the opposite of life, by the way.

Time is central to my work because the premise of this work, a kind of re-mourning of my fathe, works on the idea of “time heals all”. The process of my art making is therefore therapeutic and often obsessive and time consuming as in Lengwalo as a point of reference. Video as a medium is time orientated, so is the act of looking, writing, reading and watching the sunset.

My approach plays on the binaries of presence/absence such as a shadow as an ethereal manifestation of the physical in Looking for my father. The silhouette as a simultaneous denial and affirmation of the physicalness of a fence further explores the notion of permanence.

I’m fascinated by the overlaps of memories, dreams and fantasies. Over time, the distinction of my own experiences becomes blurry, tricky even. When it comes to presentation, I enjoy installation because in itself is an experience, a creation of a memory. Photography and print is about the freezing of a moment as well as an attempt to capture the essence while video, due to its intangible quality, reveals the temporality and visceral nature of dreams and memories.

Ultimately I constantly search for a nostalgic visual vocabulary in order to dwell on the bittersweet sentimentality of dreams and memories.

Information courtesy of the curator/artist Mphapho Christian Hlasane.