Even more fragmented, Lunga plays with mirrors too, which puts the viewer into the artwork, allowing you to engage with the mirror, the artist and her environment, within your environment. ‘Something Keeps Calling Me’ (2019) is the work I’m most familiar with. One edition hangs on the same sister’s bedroom wall.
Viewing Lunga’s Instagram feed it strikes me that the breakdown of ‘parts’ of herself has, since lockdown, become even more frenetic – it was her face at first, and now full bodies and limbs are spliced with blurred eyes. The reassembly is an act of healing that also, according the artist, “protects the sitter from the unwanted gaze – a tactic that speaks to the nervous conditions that South African women are subject to navigating in the country”.
For South African women, lockdown has made us face ourselves in ways we never could have imagined, while simultaneously – and perhaps predictably – creating the perfect storm to fuel the rise in gender-based violence.
As artists like Yolanda Mazwana, who paints distorted bodies with eyes that are closed, contorted or displaced, reflect themselves back to us, we turn our gaze from their work back onto ourselves: A piece of public art received in a wholly subjective way.