3/17/17 - 9/17/17

Meleko Mokgosi

Lisa Dorin, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Contemporary Art

In two new chapters in his Democratic Intuition project Meleko Mokgosi (Botswana, b. 1981) Williams ’07, investigates the irresolvable contradiction that is democracy. Presented together for the first time at WCMA, Lex and Love consider the daily experiences of diverse populations who occupy southern Africa. Lex explores the role that gendering plays in specific cultural and socio-economic relations. Love applies the ideas of allegory, historicity, love, and representation to eight uniquely shaped canvases inspired by the paintings of William-Adolphe Bouguereau from the 1890s made coincidently during the height of the scramble for Africa.

About the artist

Meleko Mokgosi (born in Francistown, Botswana) is an artist who works within an interdisciplinary framework to create large-scale project-based installations. Mokgosi works across history painting, cinematic tropes, psychoanalysis, and post-colonial theory. His studio program interrogates narrative tropes and the fundamental models for the inscription and transmission of history along side established European notions of representation in order to address questions of nationhood, anti-colonial sentiments, and the perception of historicized events. His artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Botswana National Gallery, The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art.