The Art of Unnaming: How Meleko Mokgosi Deconstructs the Colonial Gaze

Meleko Mokgosi’s practice refuses essentialist readings and counters historical erasure. His work resists the fixation of the Black African subject into any stable identity, offering instead a vision of subjectivity as fluid, historically embedded, and perpetually contested. His relentless excavation of the violence embedded within these often-invisible mechanisms, constitutes a vital intervention in the urgent work of reframing the non-Western subject. Specifically, his challenging of the reductive, voyeuristic gaze of the West on the African indigenous subject, and proposing an alternative pathway that moves beyond imposed conceptual frameworks.

His artistic practice eludes easy categorisation as well, unfolding less as isolated, self-contained objects and more as ongoing investigations into the social and political architectures that shape how we perceive, name, and interpret the world. Spanning image, text, and critical discourse, Mokgosi crafts a practice where medium is never simply material but always a mode of thinking. Though rooted in Southern African soil, Mokgosi was born in Francistown, Botswana, his work looks outward, pressing against inherited representational systems that have long framed Africa through reductive, one-size-fits-all lenses. This outlook is inseparable from his transnational background: Born in Botswana, educated in the United States, exhibiting globally and most recently at Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town.

His latest solo exhibition, Appellations, pivots on a deceptively simple yet profound premise: Names carry weight. They are never neutral; rather, they structure power. To rename, unsettle, or reframe these appellations is to contest foundational regimes of authority. During a recent talk at Chimurenga Factory in Woodstock, Cape Town, Mokgosi posed a quietly urgent question: “What is a name?” This inquiry moves beyond linguistic semantics to excavate histories both emotional and structural embedded in naming. “Names”, he explains, “are vessels of memory, anchors of place, and codifiers of political realities.” This exhibition probes the politics of naming to reveal how identities are constructed, classified, and live within charged symbolic systems. By interrogating these foundational ideological structures, Mokgosi compels us to question even those truths we once took for granted, revealing them as contingent products of power’s entangled instruments operating within the continuous formation of identity. The artworks in Appellations balance this lyricism with urgency; their commanding presence insists on visceral engagement.

An interplay of image and text unsettles, peeling back layers of social meaning inscribed by power. This tension plays out through a dual visual grammar; one drawing on the grand compositional tradition of European history painting, the other deploying textual interventions that fracture and expand the narratives within each image. These text fragments resist functioning as mere labels or captions; instead, they act as conceptual catalysts demanding a rigorous labor of interpretation. His works also reclaim drawing as a principal method, Mokgosi resists its marginalisation as mere preparatory work. For him, drawing functions as critical practice, a method to render visible how abstract theoretical frameworks become materialised and legible.

A pivotal reference in this exhibition is the 1980 South African film The Gods Must Be Crazy, notorious for its reductive portrayal of San indigenous peoples. Mokgosi engages this film not merely as critique but through a creative act of rewriting within its own representational space. The Western cinematic tradition routinely fabricates indigenous subjects as exotic others, and this film epitomises such violence by confining indigeneity to a caricatured “otherness.” Appellations disrupts this logic, employing drawing and text to unravel and contest these entrenched narratives.

“As most people [here] know, The Gods Must be Crazy is both an iconic and problematic film in terms of how it depicts the San people. This group has and continues to be called many things, including “Bushmen”, San, Khoisan, or Basarwa to name a few. While trying to come up with a title for the project, I realised that the notion of titling or naming could also be a proposition in itself, and so I settled on the concept of appellation or the practice of naming, which I believe is connected to our understanding of selfhood, the history of identifications, and the fact that naming something functions as a way of partial ownership and formally codifying something within language. For example, Khoisan is derived from Koїsan; a term coined by German anthropologist Leonard Schultze. Hottentotten (Hottentots) and Bosjesmannen (Bushmen) were given to indigenous southern African peoples by the Dutch. So by using the complex and difficult history of naming the work reveals this as symptomatic of how indigenous peoples are treated, dispossessed, and misrepresented by both black African citizens and governments, as well as Eurocentric perspectives,” he says.

Mokgosi’s practice foregrounds the materiality of form and the inherent politics of representation. Rather than offering straightforward affirmations, it opens spaces for critical reflection and revision. In an age saturated with images and competing narratives, Mokgosi insists that form is never neutral, and identity, however named, is an ongoing political project in motion.

Phokeng Setai

Dr. Phokeng Setai is a curator and writer with a PhD in Anthropology from the University of the Western Cape. His work explores contemporary African art, experimental curatorial practice, and the evolving infrastructures of cultural life on the continent. In 2024, he joined Zeitz MOCAA as Assistant Curator, where his cross-disciplinary approach informs one of the continent’s most ambitious cultural platforms. He is also the co-founder of Exhibition Match, an art-meets-football initiative. An alumnus of globally renowned platforms including Raw Material Company (Dakar), Independent Curators International (New York), Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Madrid), and G.A.S. Lagos, he brings a globally informed sensibility to the contemporary African art conversation.