The Ideal Between Intuition and Institution
Meleko Mokgosi
Bread, Butter, and Power, 2018
Fowler Museum at UCLA
Courtesy the artist and Honor Fraser, Los Angeles
Photo © Monica Nouwens
Newcity - November 2019
As a way to look beyond the metanarratives of colonialism and nationalism, the twenty-one large panels are grouped and positioned side-to-side, formally organized like a film strip. The subjects become actors and, through Mokgosi, they speak their realities. In one set, the scene begins with school children performing manual labor in their uniforms, presumably in the school courtyard. As a show centered on gender, it complicates that theme through its intersectional engagement with questions concerning class and education.
Foundational to feminism is education, both in terms of who has access and what is taught. Mokgosi highlights state educational priorities for children and young women in Botswana where manual labor is privileged over academic pursuits. A country could have an image that upholds democratic values and organization of law. But if the law governs a society never equally trained in what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a great influence to Mokgosi, calls the “intuition of democracy” – that is, to have the tools to question their world and its lines of power – then could that country claim to be democratic?