The current moment in social and political life is closely bounded up with community. Whether it is the oft-divided global community trying to achieve unity in the face of Covid-19, or black communities across the globe trying to articulate this ‘new wave’ of anti-racist activism. Queer communities are interrogating questions of intersectionality and power, and across all these spaces, we are thinking together, for one another. In a twist on this ‘duty to the collective’ narrative, self-described image maker Jamal Nxedlana presents Dangerous Bodies, a set of images which is at once deeply embedded in community concerns, but remains fiercely individual, introspective and self-soothing.

Nxedlana operates in many roles that infuse into his practice. He is best known as founder and creative director of online platform Bubblegum Club. He is also a co-founder of artistic collective CUSS Group, based in Johannesburg. The intention of the CUSS Group has been to explore the hybrid culture of post-post-colonial South Africa. His images have also formed part of the publication The New Black Vanguard, Antwuan Sargent’s exhibition-publication project focused on transformation in the fields of black art, fashion and culture. But it is his artistic practice which mostly strongly drives this series.

Dangerous Bodies, which was just presented as a solo digital exhibition at Sulger-Buel Gallery in London, is as much about process as it is about the final product, and as informed by Nxedlana’s interior processes as it is by the theme of racism and anti-racism on a larger scale. In the work, he engages large questions of coloniality (and the daunting, vague project of decoloniality), operating from the position of Nxedlana himself as a black man living in post-apartheid South Africa. In a sense, the images of black people captured by his lens are the beginning of a conversation between how the black body and camera have historically interacted, and how they can begin to interact in ways that uplift, rather than shame.

“Photography, like other art forms, reflects the politics of the time and I think this is where the adaptation within the form needs to and will happen. In my own work I haven’t been thinking about the form as much and this because I consider myself less as a photographer and more as an image maker,” he explains. “Of course my work is political but what I am finding is that it is more so as a result of the fact that I operate within a social and cultural context - as opposed to my reason for making, which is more about how far I can stretch the materials I work with and about manufacturing a visual language.”

The series is marked by black bodies covered in colour-blocked paint, in some cases at ease, in others contorted and raised up against a wall, or spread across a hard floor. Nxedlana’s deft hand with colour means that the images are not necessarily threatening but there is a gritty, uncompromising quality to them.

When I first came across the work, I was reminded of the parallels between South Africa’s equally progressive and backward post-apartheid existence and what cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy once referred to as “Britain’s post-colonial melancholia”. Like Dangerous Bodies, there is a particular project of anti-racism that is required to stand against the triviliasation, dismissal and sometimes outright rejection of racism as an everyday condition of being a black South African, or indeed black in Britain, America, and other parts of the world. To capture my sense of what Nxedlana’s work might be saying, I lean on Gilroy’s words, where he writes:

“This is not anti-racism of the type that says we must learn to love and value human differences rather than fear and misrecognise them. It is a new project because it is prepared to break with the notion that racial differences are a self-evident, immutable fact of political life. It refuses the idea that that this order of difference is somehow necessary to the very stability of our conflicted world. Instead, it suggests that the reification of race must be challenged if effective work against racism is to be accomplished. It seeks to turn the tables on purity-seekers, whoever they may be, to force them to account for their phobia about otherness and their violent hostility in the face of the clanging, self-evident sameness of suffering humankind.”

Indeed, theory, artworks, still life and structural design objects were all brought to bear on this series. While Nxedlana does not over-emphasise the philosophies which drive his practice, he is constantly engaging with inspiration and materials, theory and experiences, thoughts and feelings, in order to make nuanced projects in multiple arenas. “I have learnt that, for me, what the work is about isn’t as important as making the work,” he muses.

Ultimately, what Dangerous Bodies offers the viewer is two things. On one hand, a series that challenges the way in which we engage black bodies and people, and the legacy of prejudice which is so often brought to bear on them. On the other, this is the product of a long, simmering process. Nxedlana has managed to draw together concerns of visual language, symbolism and power and use his meticulous process to present a visually arresting body of work that is hard to ignore.

Words Binwe Adebayo

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Published on 07/10/2020