We Are Running Out Of Hashtags!
The exhibition, titled We Are Running Out Of Hashtags! is an intimate photographic consideration of the limits of hashtags as symbolic grammar for organizing our experience of being in the contemporary. Nxumalo calls us to an aesthetic meditation on the #Hashtag, beyond its function as a kind of digital flag; but as an organizing force that gathers bodies around particular politics of protests or other less urgent agendas. #Hashtags, like nationalist flags, are acquisitive in the way they are able to turn followers into advocates or lobbyists.
In this way, we may say that it is #Hashtags that have people and not people who have #Hashtags; like flags are for nation-states and citizens. The Soweto-born and raised photographer has turned his camera lens onto his peers as subjects. Hence the 16 Shots on show represent a reflection on the changing contexts and concerns that confront this contemporary generation of South African ‘youths’ – a generation whose meaning Nxumalo is also the co-architect of.
Indian writer, Arundhati Roys holds an instructive cynical view of flags as bits of coloured cloth first used to shrink-wrap people’s minds; then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. Our age has no shortage of deaths, or #Hashtags to memorialize them: #JusticeForTshego; #BlackLivesMatter; #JusticeForShoni... But, beyond the tweeted outrage with its accompanying images, can they hold without running out? Nxumalo’s new work tries to trace out possibilities of the photographic image deployed as a kind of flag.
In his series, Story of O.J., after 4:44, Nxumalo presents a selection of portraits of young black men standing semi-nude with only their pants on, an occasional hat, but no shirts. They pose for Nxumalo’s camera in the tradition of tattooed gang members being studied by law enforcement lenses trained on their torsos for toll-tales of lived criminality. Only there are no inked marks on Nxumalo’s displayed bodies. Only refracted light, the apparent softness of maturing flesh, and the embodied black boyhood as it fades into manhood.
The pictures are printed and hung like flags as opposed to being framed. The back of these flags are completely black. Nxumalos’ semi-naked subject is coded; not unlike a media hashtag. In popular discourse, the black male body exists and appears always tagged with myriad culpabilities for immeasurable deviences; both real and imagined, earned and projected.
However, Nxumalo zooms in on this discursive limitation by zooming his lens in on their vulnerability, eschewing urban machismo mythologies with an intimate photographic gaze.
These mythologies govern how we identify, classify and often fail to see the vulnerability of urban black males. In the poem, Twenty-six Ways of Looking at a Blackman, Raymond Patterson hints at this idea of the invisibility of blackman’svulnerability. The ninth stanza, or way of looking, declares the following:
Children who loved him // Hid him from the world // By pretending he was a blackman.
Patterson points us to a pretended black manhood, as a hiding place, a performance of public invisibility. Nxumalo’s lens is asking us to look and find it beyond the shallow reach of #hashtags.
Beyond these probing portraits, the show includes a wall, designed street-poster style, with pasted images to announce the title of the exhibition. The visual grammar of the street poster, coalesces with the picture flag and syntax of #hashtags to underscore Nxumalo’s focus. There’s a public life of ideas and a spectacle within which the meaning of our shared lives is occasioned. The limits and excesses of that spectacle underscores Nxumalos work.
The exhibition also includes projected selections from Nxumalo’s previous bodies of work: Anthology of Youth (2016), 16 Shots (2017). Alternative-Kidz and others, registering continuity in Nxumalo’s practice. These echoes of earlier work give context to his new interest in pushing the limits and possibilities for presenting the photographic image. The projection, the hoisted flag, and the wall of pasted posters are part of this growing creative concern.
Nxumalo, noted for his vivifying, intimate photography of black youth in Johannesburg, has taken his eye for the nuanced and subversive to the city’s blossoming ballroom culture.
Ballroom emerged among queer black and brown communities in New York as early as the 1920s, though the subculture did not receive mainstream visibility until 1990 with the release of the documentary Paris is Burning and Madonna’s “Vogue”. With the current success of series like Pose and Viceland’s My House—not to mention ball-originated slang (werk, slay, fierce, etc.) that have become usurped by pop culture— imitations and offshoots of ballroom are popping up in countries all over the world, South Africa among them.
The characters in Nxumalo’s photographs seem to be doing more than merely imitating American actors imitating the queer and trans legends from forty years ago. Performers have decided which cues to reappropriate—vogueing and six-inch latex boots—and what to make wholly their own—a pair of takkies, a skin-tight geometric bodysuit. Because the ballroom functions, perhaps paradoxically, as both stage and shelter, documentation becomes tricky. On the one hand, it feels important to make gender subversion visible in a world that would prefer
otherwise. On the other, the photographer runs the risk of commodifying or fetishising what was meant to be a safe space. Nxumalo manages this tension well by not being afraid to capture subjects uncaptured: the performer’s back is turned, their features are blurry, or their face is just cut out of the shot. There is a subtle yet profound beauty there which speaks, I think, to a queerness which is uncatchable, uncategorisable, unpronounceable—thankfully so.
Nxumalo also turns his lens on the audience, blurring the lines between gaze and display. A couple makes out on the sidelines while their friend cheers them on. Who is performer, and who is participant? An audience member thrusts an iPhone onto the runway, the phone screen reflects in the latex shorts that the performer is wearing. Who is subject, and who is documentarian?
Nxumalo seems more committed to recording the energy of the ball than its actors. This comes out best in Nxumalo’s eye for nuance: the word ‘woman’ stitched proudly on an elastic band; a loose string of pearls undulating as the dancer moves; skin shining with sweat, or is it glitter? Nxumalo captures moments just before the spectacle: a performer sheds their silk robe; another is in the midst of falling back into a death drop.
This is sensitive, exquisite documentation of the ballroom’s theatrics of becoming, of being-on-the-verge.
Others are more posed. But, there is something heartfelt and genuine about the girls, arm in arm and smiling, that resists the exotification often present in photography of the queer and underground. Less voyeuristic, photographs like these capture the sense of the ballroom as a support network, a gathering where queer people can find affirmation as well as community.
Violence against trans people continues to run rampant in South Africa; the recent murders of Kirvan Fortuin, Robyn Elma Montsumi, Nare Mphela, Phoebe Titus, Leigh Davids, and Ayanda Denge, to name a few, leave a particular sting. Thus, spaces where young, black, queer and trans people can carve out, experiment, and celebrate their identities are increasingly important. “The Ball feels special and significant right now,” Nxumalo says,
“The queer community is beginning to enjoy acceptance. Things are not perfect and easy, but there’s an energy out there that seem to be accepting and welcoming which, as an artist, I feel it is important for me to document.”
Ultimately, Nxumalo aims to compile “an archive of moments where ‘youth,’ as vague as that term sounds, is taking ownership and control of a situation, showing solidarity and perhaps victory.” In this body of work, Nxumalo has achieved an archive of fabulousness, where fabulousness, in the words of cultural critic, DJ, and scholar madison moore, is both “aesthetic labour” and “praxis.”1 In other words, the creative and radical ways in which young, black, queer people articulate gender have stake in the world beyond the ephemerality of the ball. More than working looks, the ball is about working for the more open, expansive world to come.
- Percy Mabandu, 2020