Buhlebezwe Siwani

The new performance, film and installation by Buhlebezwe Siwani, ulwela amaza (2024), traces a deeply embodied choreography that ebbs and flows in a number of significant sites in Amsterdam, Middelburg and their surrounding waters. The work asks how these cities are connected to Blackness and life, as well as what is known and unknown about histories of presence in and removal from this place, the Netherlands.

Countering the landscape urge of the horizon line, the film insists on portraiture, framing the six performers whom the artist works with as time travelling inhabitants of multiple eras and dimensions. Their transient collective and solo scores can be read as invocations of the people who were brought to the Netherlands involuntarily and who now, in the present, choose to remain.

Moving within concurrent legacies of slavery, economics, cultural inheritance, the performance interrupts the trappings of VOC and WICwealth, and unsettles the grounds of Museumplein – the site of one of the earliest colonial “world” exhibitions which put people from occupied territories on display.

Rituals of resistance and belonging are refigured in the studio of the “Dutch Master” Rembrandt whose paintings featured Black folks and who made his work in a neighbourhood formerly inhabited by many communities of Colour. The performers’ gestures claim space in the Bijlmer’s modernist architectural projections, under the watchful eyes of anticolonial activist and WWII resistance fighter Anton de Kom. 

From Amsterdam Central Station to Middelburg, Siwani’s film navigates the routes and roots of resources and bodies on whom the so-called Golden Age was built. Middelburg: once a hub of colonial trade, is also where vessels destined to transport thousands of abducted people were built and repaired.

It is here by the sea, and in the church – which has been both an instrument and opposer of such atrocities – where ancestral realms are brought forth through sacrament and song. Reclaiming these infrastructures, the performance calls the souls of those cast adrift to rest, and the living to bear witness.

In these many ways, Siwani’s immersive installation and program draw to the surface the lives and memories that constitute an essential and erased part of this place’s selective story. The waters have been stirred, and they speak to different sensibilities, implicating all who watch and listen.

Buhlebezwe Siwani works with performance, photography, sculpture and installation. Siwani’s work interrogates the patriarchal framing of the black female body and black female experience within the South African context. As an initiated Sangoma, a spiritual healer that works within the space of the death and the living, Siwani focused her artistic practice into rituality and the relationship between Christianity and African spirituality.

Central to her work is her own body, which operates in multiple registers as subject, object, form, medium, material, language and site. Her work can be described, although not literally, as the documentation of a diverse set of performances, which are rendered through video, photography, sculpture, installation and works on paper.

Each of her projects deals with the relationship between ancestral rituals and modern life, touching social and political topics, such as the female body, black communities, histories of colonization and the paradoxes of our contemporary society, all seen through the filter of the artist’s own biography and experience.

ulwela amaza was commissioned by ROZENSRAAT-a rose is a rose is a rose-and is Siwani’s first solo exhibition at a Dutch art space. It is also the first time that her work is so directly linked to a Dutch subject. The specially written lyrics for the project are by Logan Hon Mua.

Credits:

Artist: Buhlebezwe Siwani 

Performers: Harvey Burke-Hamilton, Imanirayy, Lana Lauryn Renfrum, Logan Hon Mua, Marilou Fortuné en Oumar Jalloh.
Curators: Clare Butcher and Sjoerd Kloosterhuis
Camera: Giovanni Salice
Editing: Buhlebezwe Siwani
Assistant camera and light: Nicola Baratto
Singers: Logan Hon Mua, Imanirayy
Songtext: Logan Hon Mua
Sound: Thomas van den Berg, Manuel van den Berg
Set design: Denis Ninine

Special thanks to: Museum van Loon, Rembrandthuis and Oostkerk (Middelburg)

Supported by: Mondriaan Fonds, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Cultuurfonds, Theodora Niemeijer Fonds