Stories of mobility are strongly linked to the individual and collective search for greener pastures. This yearning for a better life, place or situation is the conceptual thread that runs through Gerald Machona’s second solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery.

In this show, Machona explores past and present manifestations of this pursuit and utilises an intersectional approach to navigate the various ways in which interlocking systems of power impact and overlap with individual and collective aspiration towards greener pastures.

‘Induku enhle igawulwa ezizweni is a Zulu proverb that expresses the desire and appreciation of searching for love in faraway places or nations,’ writes Machona in an artist statement about this body of work. ‘Journeying for survival in a search to better understand oneself or even for love is not a foreign concept in tracing nomadic or migration patterns in Africa.’ But due to a past marked by segregation, South Africa has been ‘shaped [by] a culture of mistrust and suspicion amongst its citizens’. The unfortunate effect of this has been the outbreak of ‘xenophobic’ attacks against fellow Africans in the country in recent years; a reaction Machona suggest might be described better as ‘Afrophobia’.

Through his work Machona goes about dispelling these cultural stigmas by revealing stories of cross-cultural, transnational unions, space sharing and family raising. Drawing on his own experience as a Zimbabwean of Shona heritage marrying into a Zulu family, Machona reveals how a tradition such as the gift-giving ceremonies of lobola undermine essentialist concepts of gendered, national and ethnic identity. However, these traditions have remained deeply entrenched in patriarchal norms, often at the exclusion of contemporary struggles for gender equality. Machona expresses these ideas through his signature use of decommissioned currency fashioned as transnational oral arrangements as well as photographic works which depict the process of negotiating marital traditions across borders.

According to Machona, ‘the very notion that people can be ‘naturalised’ into a family, ethnicity or as citizens of a country through marriage contradicts any purist notions of national or ethnic identity rooted in [indigenousness]. What it does point out, however, is that identities are in ux and are constantly navigating across national and ethnic boundaries’.

In Machona’s case this liminality exists in his navigation of marital traditions across Zulu and Shona customs through the boundaries that separate Zimbabwe and South Africa. Such transnational cultural experiences reveal how the receding economic and social signi cance of boundaries, among African nation states, has in actual fact heightened interconnectivity between people.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Gerald Machona is a Zimbabwean born Visual artist pursuing a (MFA) Masters Degree in Fine Art in Sculpture from Rhodes University and holds a Bachelors degree in Fine art from the University of Cape Town, which he completed at the Michaelis School of ne arts in 2009-2010.

In 2013 Machona featured in Mail and Guardian’s 200 Young South African’s supplemental and was selected by Business Day and the Johannesburg Art Fair in 2011 as one of the top ten young African artists practicing in South Africa. Machona works with sculpture, performance, new media, photography and Film, and the most notable aspect of his work is his innovative use of currency—particularly decommissioned Zimbabwean dollars—as an aesthetic material.

Machona’s current work engages with issues of migration, social interaction and xenophobia in South Africa, and explores the creative limits of visual art production through the use of decommissioned currency as a key medium. He has participated in group exhibitions such as Making way at the Standard Bank Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2013), The Night Show, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2011); The Geography of Somewhere, Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg (2011); and US II, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2010). Machona is also a recipient of a Mellon scholarship and is a member of the Visual and Performing Arts of Africa research group at Rhodes University.

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