00:00
/
00:00
Installation view, Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys, Museum London, 21 November 2024–22 May 2025. Image © Alex Walker
Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys: Curatorial Essay

by Dr Qanita Lilla

Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys: Curatorial Essay

The world is dancing a masquerade. If you want to understand it, you can’t remain standing in one place.
— Igbo Proverb

African dance and music inspired Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys. Ukutula is a new word created from two Nguni words: in both isiXhosa and isiZulu, “ukucula” means “to sing”; “ukuthula” can mean either “to be quiet” or “to be calm.” By combining these meanings to form a new word, we can highlight a tension inherent in any exhibition featuring African art — historically silenced voices defiantly speaking themselves into existence. The show allows us to dance (often the antithesis of being calm) through the extraordinary diversity of West African masks, hoods and crests of the Justin and Elisabeth Lang collection of African art, singing together with contemporary art made in Canada today.

Ukutula originated as With Opened Mouths, an exhibition held at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University in 2021–2022. The central circle of sixteen masks in that exhibition were originally danced in West African masquerade, but in With Opened Mouths, they were surrounded by projections of the Atlantic Ocean, echoing the shores of home they left behind more than a hundred years ago. The masks in that exhibition were combined with art from Eminado (2018) by artist Oluseye. In With Opened Mouths the masks helped us consider the legacies of people and things crossing the Atlantic Ocean from colonial times onwards. As they gazed across the ocean, they also made me think of the longing I feel for the sound and rhythm of the ocean and the way music helps to soothe my longing. Today, the masks and a new troupe of contemporary art are in London, Ontario, resting together on river pebbles from the banks of Deshkan Ziibi (the Antler River in Ojibwe and Anishinaabemowin). Their proximity to the river here reflects not only where they have come from but also how their continuing journeys signify who they are, how they are collectively experienced, and what they might become.

Commenting on the Nigerian Igbo proverb above, Chinua Achebe explains that masquerade is theatre, music, dance and motion and links the ancestors to the living world. But Achebe emphasizes that living spectators need to move with the performance or they will miss its power and magnificence. For Achebe, the world is in a continuous state of flux and its inhabitants need to learn how to adapt, change and move. Mobility and the fact that no condition is permanent are enshrined in Achebe’s Igbo thinking.

In South Africa, the place I am from, we do not have a masquerade tradition, but we have the “Klops,” which are clubs or troupes that date back to the time of slavery in the Cape and also combine music and dance.1In the Cape slavery lasted from 1658 to 1838.  But I am drawn to the jazz tradition for Ukutula. South Africa endured the longest sustained presence of settler occupation in Africa and the brutality of apartheid. Jazz musicians used music to subvert the oppressive laws of the white supremacist state in unexpected but emotionally moving ways. The brilliant enduring vision of African jazz gives me glimpses of how colonial collections could move alongside contemporary art. It also makes me think about the historical basis of musical mixing, and the spiritual qualities of Nigerian Igbo masquerade.

Robbie Jansen was a key figure in establishing the South African Cape Jazz movement. He mixed American jazz with pre-colonial Cape Town sounds and local Ghoema styles—Ghoema being the music of the Cape Town “Klops,” with roots in the music of enslaved Malay people who were brought to the region by the Dutch East India Company from 1658 onward. Blending inspirations, languages, races and formal musical elements stood in profound opposition to state policies and cultivated the iconic musical genre of the Cape. For Cape Town jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, who lived in exile until Nelson Mandela was freed from prison in 1990, music and sound not only recall the violence of the country he left behind, they are also potent entities that cross borders and survive despite physical separation. Music links those who left their countries and those who remain.

Cape jazz and Igbo masquerade both share a quality of adapting, mixing, perfect timing, technical mastery, physicality, improvising and innovating. These qualities form part of Ukutula and demonstrate lessons we in Canada can learn from African ontologies. As part of a collective, the African masks of Ukutula do not stand alone as they journey across Canada from Kingston to London, Ontario. They make their journey enveloped by African ways of being, alongside art that welcomes them, art that seeks counsel from them, art that seeks belonging, resonance and visions of the future.

 

Seed

Jill Glatt’s textile pieces Seed (2024) and Who is Belle Island? (2023) provide a warm welcome in London, Ontario, offering care and support from Katarokwi/Kingston . Both pieces echo intergenerational migratory journeys. Who is Belle Island? was produced in a collaboration between Glatt and poet Billie Kearns (a.k.a. Billie the Kid). Weaving together storytelling and poetry and working with botanical dyes and paints, they ask “How can we honour the land with the stories we tell?” This work proposes that Belle Island is a living being who holds both those who are from this land and those who reside there now. 2Belle Island is north of downtown Kingston. It is a small piece of forested land surrounded by the Cataraqui River. It serves as a rich source of history regarding Kingston’s Indigenous past. Glatt’s piece Seed rises to greet the masks. Made with botanicals and seeds harvested from Kingston, the piece imagines unseen botanical entities dancing in greeting on light airwaves. Seed activates the museum space with the element of air so that sound can find a medium through which to move.

Katherine McKittrick associates Black geographies with sound when she suggests that space and place are always connected to audible demands.3McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.   McKittrick asks us to hear places differently and to think about how the production of space is not a silent process. Artist Jessica Karuhanga’s suite of art in Ukutula is a sound piece called All of Me (2017); a video projection, Body and Soul (2019); and an installation, Through a Brass Channel (2017)—together disrupt traditional ideas of geographies and sound in multiple ways. All of Me is the intimate narration of Black women, non-binary and gender-non-conforming folk who talk about hidden histories, layered with gospel choir samples, electronic rhythms and trap beats. When Karuhanga conceived of this piece, she wanted it to be experienced in a space of safety, showing how Black voices are often sites of risk and danger, but also how music is ever-present in their journeys. Having to listen to these voices on a headset in the museum feels like being privy to worlds that are hidden in plain sight.

Embodied knowledges

Karunhanga’s single-channel video projection Body and Soul (2019) shows the artist’s breathing torso. It is at once a landscape pebbled by illness, a vector of vulnerability, and a site of reckoning against the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean, all circled by the African masks. Body and Soul’s “body” is more powerful than the physical limitations imposed on it, and while a body facilitates us in our life’s journeying, like the African masks it also carries memory, trauma and pain.

But Karuhanga’s sculptural installation, Through a Brass Channel (2017), is the connective tissue of Ukutula. Thin brass pipes and the accompanying bracelets balanced precariously on blocks of masonry are archival traces of Karuhanga’s relationship to her Canadian diasporic experience. The brass bangles are from her father’s jewellery collection, which he tried to sell at trade shows to earn a living. For Karuhanga, the bangles invoke many things: a means of adornment, a link to her history, but also the darker aspects of Black history, such as the trade in enslaved people of the past and police brutality in the present.

For the artist, the copper pipes are conduits or channels, but instead of water they carry a life force that has nourished Karuhanga’s family both physically and spiritually. The pipes also gesture to sound, as copper pipes have a sonic sensibility, are highly conductive and are used in musical instruments and telephone lines. Sound as life force traversing copper pipes bridges the commonplace and the realm of memory. It speaks to the manual labour required of immigrants in Canada, but also of intergenerational bonds and of the possibility of hearing familial worlds.

The spiritual artist Winsom Winsom’s The Masks We Wear (2018) speaks to the bonds that connect us to each other. Commenting on our need to fit into our surroundings, The Masks We Wear literality shows us the masks we wear every day as we navigate life in Canada. Unlike the rich stylistic diversity of African masks, Winsom’s masks are all generic, bland and white. Wearing these masks allow us to “pretend” to be people we are not. Winsom’s self-portrait creates a strong contrast to these masks. The mask the artist wears is superimposed above her own clothing and serves to reveal rather than conceal her identity. For Winsom, the only way we can break the cycle of artifice in Canada is to connect to our ancestors and to heal from our own life journeys. The colour red indicates spiritual insight and the wooden snakes in front of her portrait point to spiritual awakening and guidance.

Love from the future

In order to receive guidance, we require a guide. Guiding us through the sonic waves of Ukutula is Camille Turner’s time traveller in the two-channel video installation Nave (2022). This gentle visionary returns from the future to share stories of early Black lives in Canada. During the eighteenth century, shipbuilders deforested large areas of Newfoundland to build ships that would depart to Africa and carry enslaved people back across the Atlantic. The time traveller  guidestraveller guides us along this painful journey, and as she breathes life into archival debris, she navigates time and place to awaken buried histories.

As the time traveller  carries the burden of the past, she might look to Mahaba (2024), Anthony Gebrehiwot’s ongoing photographic research creation project. Mahaba means love in Swahili. The collection of photographic portraits considers Black futures by drawing on African street photography, where the ready-made and everyday are re-imagined and elevated. Gebrehiwot’s world-making celebrates a community of people and the gifts they contribute, not only the props that make them beautiful. Gebrehiwot sees people and communities as fundamental to new, uplifted modes of Black living and to envisioning possible futures. The beautiful peacock chair invites visitors to sit surrounded by the people of Mahaba.

Love from the past

My grandmother, Aysie Jeppie, grew up in District Six, an urban township in Cape Town close to Table Mountain and to the bustling port, surrounded by sounds of the Atlantic and the harsh Southeaster. She was a devout Malay woman who travelled to perform Hajj and who spent her time caring for her seven children and her neighbours during the darkest days of apartheid. But when she was young, she was a wedding singer, singing Ella Fitzgerald covers at weddings at the town hall. After District Six was declared a White Area in 1966 and the buildings razed and destroyed, the community who heard Aysie sing was spread far and wide on the desolate Cape Flats. After she was forced to leave her home, I never heard Aysie even hum a tune, but I often wondered what those racially mixed spaces felt like, where a Muslim woman could sing and lift the hearts of people in love. For me, music and sound not only point to the confluences of jazz luminaries, they also speak of intergenerational ties of love, struggle and longing.

Ukutula: Our Timeless Journeys is about what lives in music and what guidance it provides. Although the exhibition considers collections of African masks in contemporary ways through the inspiration of African music and ways of being, it comes from what I know to be true. As a link from the past to the present, Ukutula demonstrates the richness in mixing creative forms, the sonic formation of Black geographies, the importance of navigating the world collectively and the loving presence of those who came before as they guide us to new futures.

References and additional reading

Beier, Ulli. (30 May 2017). The world is dancing a masquerade — Chinua Achebe interviewed by Ulli BeierArt Africa 7 (30 May). Originally published in Ulli Beier & Remi Omodele, Weighing the cost of pin-making: Ulli Beier in conversations. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2012.

Erasmus, A. & Layne, V. (2023). Oral/Aural: Pastness and Sound as Medium and MethodKronos 49 (1), 1–14.

McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ramphalile, D. M. et al. (2023). ‘Echoes From Africa’: Abdullah Ibrahim’s Black Sonic GeographyKronos 49(1), 1–19.

Footnotes
Image Credits