Speaking Back to the Landscape Canon: Cultural Translation in Phumulani Ntuli’s Cloud Migration and the Liewe Land! Exhibition

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article I argue that contemporary artists in post-and decolonial contexts are adopting deliberate approaches to respond to and revise canonical art, in what I interpret as acts of cultural translation. Seeing representational practices through this linguistic lens, with concomitant grammars and vocabularies, sheds light on how established conventions may now be challenged through translation—filtering and transforming them. I am particularly interested in the historical South African landscape canon and in how Phumulani Ntuli and several other artists employ different strategies to contest and reimagine the erasures and biases enacted in the canon in their work for the exhibition Liewe Land!. The exhibition was held at the Voortrekker Monument in 2021, and included various artists who all responded to printed reproductions of landscape paintings by historical South African artists. The strategies used by artists that I investigate here include: the reinscribing of people into portrayals of empty colonial landscape scenes, the subversion of pictorial unity and the naturalistic style solidified in the canon through western conventions, and lastly, the use of pre-colonial iconography, grammar, vocabulary and registers of representation that evoke historical relationships between land and people.