Discover a new body of work by photographer, Musa N. Nxumalo; a collection of portraits fashioned in the form of flags and pennants. These new photographic works are an expansion and refinement of ideas Nxumalo began exploring around 2020; the work stretches Nxumalo’s interest in alternative ways of presenting his photographs, along with  his long conceptual explosions around the complexities of the contemporary condition on black boyhood as it struggles to matures into manhood.

Nxumalo continues to hold up images of young black men marred by, and wrestling with how they are seen and shaped by the biases of the popular gaze. Just as he did with earlier work, Nxumalo presents us with select portraits of young black men standing semi–nude with only their sagging  pants on, an occasional hat, but no shirts.

 He insists on composition and exposure of meaningful skin and flesh. It’s at once code of performed bravado as it is a mark of unguarded vulnerability. The picture’s symbolic energy carries resonance with jailhouse mugshots in one part, while also flagging the visual grammar of pop cultural iconography with its propensity to fatishize black male figures like these. 

Nxumalo, is a photographer who deals in ideas well articulated by African-American academic of black male studies, Tommy Curry who has written about the need for a genre study of “black male death and dying”; To the extent that Nxumalo’s flags sign post an invitation for viewers to become “interested in the process of what it means to lose one's life in the course of living”. This is to say, what it means to lose one's humanity by being reduced, reified into a shorthand symbol for the specific missteps or failures in one's life - to be made a meme and reduced to a flag. 

If we begin with Indian writer, Arundhati Roy’s instructive cynical view of flags as bits of colored cloth that power uses first to shrink-wrap people's minds; then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead, we find fitting convergence for Nxumalo’s metaphor with Curry’s call to a humanising ethical and critical engagement.

One way to understand Nxumalo’s governing trope, is by observing the way it implicates the reductive speak of the social media age to emphasise his conceptual concerns. But first, we need to attend to some of the building blocks of his discourse. The flag, as a symbol along with its myriad uses, the functions of photography in regimes of surveillance, and ideas black manhood  wrestling to articulate itself in an increasingly misandrist world burdened with a heritage of anti-blackness.

The flag, and its function in the heraldic codes across the world, is created and deployed to mean and to signal. The flag is shorthand for power’s acquisitive capacity. The flag, like border lines, is an instrument by which power delineates included persons and excluded subjects. To be under a flag also means to be subject to its authority, and therefore covered by the meanings it signals. 

In social media speak, the flag functions with a comparable reductive shorthand; often deployed accompanied by phrases describing tropes or behavior by which individuals should be flagged as suspicious, avoided, or excluded; and even marked for potential cancellation. 

“If he listens to podcasts about high value and alpha this and that… #RedFlag” or “if he grew up in Voslo and drives a GTI… #RedFlag”

In this latest iteration of his work on flags, Nxumalo is also exploring the ways in which shared effort is a kind of performative identity. For instance, he has brought in Anthony Kobane of Sir Anthony Jeans co to share in the efforts to realize the work.. This convergence is not without meaning. For instance, it also codes the symbolic and cultural history of denim as a fabric associated with labour and work. 

The laborious process of stitching and patching in the production process is invoked as code for the street vernacular of township brotherhood and the constant need work or produce; Hence to the standard heraldic greeting phrase: ng’sa pesha-pesha, or I am still patching things together. 

This collaboration has evolved Nxumalos form from the flag as banner to something closer to pennants. The work carries his portraits on one side and quotes and pieces of lyrics by hyper masculine black musicians. Fela Kuti, Jay-Z, Nas and others whose creative practices have emerged over the years as examples of black men publicly wrestling with the how to form themselves into healthy functioning beings; this while also demanding exceptional sexiness, authentic street hard-to-unfuck-with-money-getters, vulnerability romantics at the same time. Hence, to be a young black male in Nxumalo’s lens is also about wrestling with a being in a world that keeps sending you mixed messages and crossed flags.

— Percy Mabandu

ARTWORKS DETAILS

Sublimation print on a white gabardine fabric. Assembled by Sir Anthony Jeans on a black bull denim, DTF, and overlocker stitching.

Size: 160 x 140 Cm

Editions: 1 of 5 + 1 Ap