Omama Bencelisa (Mothers Breastfeeding) from The Self Portrait Project (2007/2013)

Inscriptions

Signed, lower left, in graphite: NOMUSA MAKHUBU; inscribed, lower center, in graphite: OMAMA BENCELISA (2007/2013); inscribed, lower right, in graphite: AP

Label

Nomusa Makhubu developed her Self-Portrait series within a body of work that examines representations of African women in colonial photography from 1870 to 1920. In Self-Portrait, Makhubu projects archival images onto her body, which recedes into the background, becoming integrated with the projected image. Interrogating the "documentary" aspect of photography, the artist provides a haunting glimpse into colonial images that represented African bodies as social documents about the "native" and advanced scientific racism by reducing them to phenotypes. Their original titles, such as Comparison I, allowed the images to "masquerade as truthful scientific categories." By retitling them in Zulu, Makhubu questions their "contextual ‘truthfulness.’ "Makhubu explains: "I wanted to explore ways in which it might be possible to subvert that hierarchy and re-write the political implications in the photograph. . . . The women in the photographs that I selected had come to represent the collectivities of women and men who have been subjected to the dehumanizing scientific gaze."

From the 2020 exhibition Reconstitution, curated by Jessica Hong, Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art

Course History

ANTH 3, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Chelsey Kivland, Winter 2015

ANTH 3, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Chelsey Kivland, Winter 2015

WGSS 10.01, Sex, Gender and Society, Douglas Moody, Winter 2021

Art History 20.04, Faith and Empire, Beth Mattison, Spring 2023

Anthropology 55.01, Anthropology of Global Health, Anne Sosin, Spring 2023

Exhibition History

Inventory: New Works and Conversations around African Art, Friends Gallery/Owen Robertson Cheatham Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 16-March 13, 2016.

Made in the Middle: Constructing Black Identities across the African Diaspora, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology 3, Winter 2015, Chelsey Kivland, Teaching Exhibition, Ivan Albright Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, November 15, 2014-March 15,2015.

Reconstitution, Dorothy and Churchill P. Lathrop Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 2, 2020 - June 20, 2021.

Provenance

Erdmann Contemporary, Cape Town, South Africa; sold to present collection, 2014.

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Subjects