PSM presents The Mountains of My Youth, a solo exhibition by South African artist Inga Somdyala. Bringing together installation, painting, photography and sound, the exhibition unfolds as a continuous environment in which materials, images and objects carry traces of movement, memory and experience. At its centre is the experience of a young man moving through ulwaluko, the Xhosa rite of passage into manhood, and the period of initiation that separates one social position from another. Somdyala’s gestures are often spare, but their associations are expansive: a thing encountered in one register returns elsewhere altered, carrying something of its previous life with it.
Upon entering the gallery, one encounters an intense field of red. Within it, recognisable objects are brought into unfamiliar relations, their established meanings made unstable through proximity. A school desk has been dismantled and marked with the stripes of an Aranda blanket. Its tabletop rests on the floor, detached from the structure that once gave it purpose. Nearby, fourteen okapi knives remain closed. Their potential is held in suspension, present without being activated. At the far left of the room, a fragment of clear blue sky introduces another register altogether. It opens onto a space beyond the immediate confines of the installation, suggesting a view, a memory, or somewhere already left behind.
This sense of elsewhere continues in a new series of paintings. Here, Somdyala turns towards the solitude of the mountain and the experience of occupying a vast terrain, where the body becomes acutely aware of its own scale and of the space surrounding it. Removed from the ordinary pace of daily life, attention shifts. Changes in light and atmosphere become events in themselves; time stretches and the landscape becomes increasingly atmospheric, shaped by shifts in light, temperature and time. Working with oxide, charcoal and ash, mixed with linseed oil, Somdyala’s paintings draw the material conditions of the mountain into the surface of the work. Their reds, blacks and greys move between the density of earth and the changing light of day, recalling the pigments and substances encountered in the context of initiation. The paintings hold a particular temporality: the suspension of ordinary life that accompanies the rite of passage, when an initiate is removed from familiar surroundings and enters a period of transition. This sense of suspension is also present in the paintings’ dense, worked surfaces, where colour appears to settle, accumulate and weather rather than simply describe.
This attention to place extends into the title, The Mountains of My Youth, which takes its point of departure from Moshekwa Langa’s 1997 installation of the same name. Somdyala’s exhibition enters into correspondence with this work through its own red ground and its attention to landscape, movement, memory and the ways in which a place is carried with us. Throughout the exhibition, different forms of learning sit alongside one another: what is taught, what is inherited, and what is picked up through experience. A desk, a blanket, a knife, a photograph, a voice - each brings with it a way of knowing, while also holding something that cannot quite be explained. In bringing these things together, Somdyala allows the familiar to shift. A place can be remembered differently once it has been left; something encountered far away can stay close to the body. What remains is not a fixed image of a mountain, but the feeling of having been somewhere, and of carrying some part of it home.