Mparara

Curator

Luke Chapman

"Mparara" doesn't just depict decay—it inhabits it. The work vibrates with a frequency that echoes both personal and collective trauma, situating itself at that delicate intersection where memory confronts reality. Drawing from his roots in Limpopo, South Africa, Maluleke here transcends mere representation to deliver something more visceral, more immediate. The sparse landscape becomes a meditation on absence, on what remains after catastrophe—whether environmental, societal, or spiritual. Those wooden crosses and broken posts read simultaneously as grave markers and as the remnants of human infrastructure reclaimed by time. What strikes me is how Fumani employs the traditional medium of charcoal—carbon itself, the residue of transformation through fire—to speak about cycles of destruction and potential rebirth. In the contemporary context of climate crisis and sociopolitical upheaval, "Mparara" feels prophetic yet deeply rooted in South Africa's complex history of land, dispossession, and resilience. Maluleke doesn't offer easy answers but rather creates a space where viewers must confront their own relationship to loss, memory, and what it means to witness.