The Mountains of My Youth

PSM presents The Mountains of My Youth, a solo exhibition by South African artist Inga Somdyala. Bringing together installation, painting, photography and sound, the presentation takes ulwaluko, the Xhosa rite of passage into ‘manhood’, as a point of departure. Across the gallery, Somdyala creates a continuous environment in which material gestures condense to form a landscape shaped by experience, perception and transformation, bringing school, the mountain, the body, the object and ideas of home into close proximity.

Ulwaluko is a significant rite of passage within Xhosa culture through which boys enter into ‘manhood’. The initiation takes place away from everyday life, with initiates separated from their families and brought into seclusion in the bush, often in the mountains. During this period, knowledge is acquired not through the formal structures of school, but through the body, through instruction, ritual and the experience of being removed from the familiar. The passage marks a transformation in both the individual and his relationship to the community. It is this movement between different forms of knowledge, and between states of belonging, that Somdyala brings into this body of work.

Upon entering the gallery, one is met by an intense field of red. Surface and structure lose their distinction as redness blushes across the white of the walls, establishing a perceptual condition before any single object comes into view. We are drawn into the installation through recognisable objects whose meanings begin to shift in relation to one another. A school desk has been taken apart and bears the stripes of an Aranda blanket. Its tabletop lies on the floor, separated from the structure that once supported it. Fourteen okapi knives occupy the same space. They are closed. Their potential remains contained, but not neutral. At the far left, a crop of clear blue sky offers another kind of distance.

The school desk is an object of preparation. It belongs to a system in which knowledge is taught, tested and measured: one learns, passes, and progresses. Its presence in the installation brings this familiar structure of education into proximity with forms of learning that are rooted in Xhosa knowledge systems. The two are not offered as equivalents. They prepare the young person for different forms of life, and ask different things of the person being prepared. The desk therefore sits at an interesting threshold: between childhood and ‘manhood’, between institutional education and the knowledge that lies beyond it.