Sinya wa le xikarhi

Curator

Luke Chapman

In "Sinya wa le xikarhi," Maluleke delivers a visual poem about liminality and persistence that hums with quiet urgency. The Xitsonga title, suggesting something like "the middle field" or "central grassland," anchors us in the specific geography of Limpopo while simultaneously transcending it. What grabs me immediately is how Fumani manipulates tension between absence and presence. The charcoal—smudged, erased, reapplied—creates a palimpsest effect that mirrors how memory works on landscapes we've known intimately. Those power lines aren't merely documentary elements; they're the syntax connecting disparate moments of rural South African experience, the infrastructure of both development and disruption. Those strategic color interruptions? Pure genius. The red fragments read simultaneously as dwellings, fire, flowers, blood—signifiers refusing simple interpretation. The solitary orange marker in the foreground becomes a hieroglyph of resistance against encroaching erasure. This is landscape as testimony, not mere scenery. What we're witnessing in Fumani Maluleke's evolving body of work is an artist excavating cultural memory while refusing nostalgic simplification. The tension between traditional rural imagery and contemporary mark-making creates a visual dialect that speaks to displacement, resilience, and the complex relationship between land and identity in post-apartheid South Africa. "Sinya wa le xikarhi" isn't just seen—it's experienced, a visual field where past and present collide with electric consequence.