The art of war: Nandipha Mntambo salutes female warriors in her work

In many ways, Nandipha Mntambo’s new exhibition, Agoodjie, at the Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg is a return to origins. It not only adds to and extends some familiar themes, but also reaches back and revises her understanding of aspects of her earlier work.

Speaking to journalists at a preview of the exhibition just before it opened, Mntambo explained that, throughout her career, she has found herself drawing and sculpting a kind of “rounded” or “hunched” shape.

Despite exploring a wide range of media, from bronze sculpture to printmaking, Mntambo is still perhaps best known for her cowhide works, distinctive sculptural works fusing taxidermy and art, in which she created figurative forms moulded from her own body.

Throughout her career, however, this humped form reappears as a leitmotif. Perhaps one of the most significant is uMcedo, a hut-sized or cave-like installation made from cow’s tails.

“At the time, I thought the cave was about protection and about this space of incubation,” she explains. She saw it as a refuge or “hiding place” you could go into and “then, when you’re ready, when you’re secure, being able to come out”.

In many ways, this non-space she created and wished to retreat into was a response to her emergence into the public eye as an artist.

Those cowhide works not only brought Mntambo success, but were widely misunderstood. Many commentators made mistaken assumptions about the symbolic associations of cattle in her work, assuming that they referred to the practice of lobola. Because the “hairy ladies”, as she refers to them now, were moulded from her own body, her own image became an oversimplified symbol of  “Africanacity” as one commentator later called the phenomenon, which was something she never intended.

In fact, the cowhide sculptures were already a key part of her uneasy engagement with self-representation. Rather than cultural symbols, they were part of a complex exploration of identity and representation. The sculptures were more like vacated second skins, discarded images of herself, than any positive identification. They were traces of tried-on identities, going as far as blending human and animalistic characteristics, exploring hybridity as much in raw physicality as in myth. The moulded forms were also an invitation to others to inhabit the space of her own body and imagine themselves in her position.

The humped, cave-like space she began exploring was fundamental to her approach of unsettling the way she was seen. It was part of a process by which she made art about taking back the power to represent herself, to shake off the representations that had been pinned on her. As a transitional, pre-emergent space, the cave also became part of her refusal to actually represent anything definitive.

Zangbeto, it turns out, is also closely associated with the women warriors on which Emabutfo was based.

Mntambo recounts the history of Hangbe, twin sister to the Dahomey king in the early 1700s. When her brother, King Akaba, died unexpectedly of smallpox during a war against a neighbouring kingdom, Hangbe pretended to be him, took his place and won the war. When her true identity was revealed, she became simultaneously king and queen. Because of the precariousness of her position, however — many others had their eye on the throne — she established a regiment of women warriors to guard her, the Agoodjie (or sometimes Agoji) of the exhibition title.

 “[T]he Zangbeto is a spiritual incarnation of the female and male army that was once tasked with protecting Dahomey,” she writes, going on to explain how recognising the form that had haunted her work, and “brought me full circle and opened a new avenue of discovery”. 

Through the South African ambassador to Benin, Mntambo secured permission to visit the Royal Palaces of Abomey in Benin and make the works on the exhibition.

In much the same way as she explored bullfighting in her Praça de Touros I series and associated works, dressing in the costume of a matador, enacting the bullfight in a derelict bullring in Mozambique, she dressed herself in the costumes of the Agoodjie, “occupying their spaces and communing with these women”, as she puts it in her catalogue.

Their “complex history” reprises many of the key concerns of Mntambo’s work. “The space of ... deception and androgyny, and being somebody else was really interesting to me,” says Mntambo.

There is also the crossover of myth and history’s erasures. Hangbe’s younger brother, who unseated her, deliberately obscured her history, although the Agoodjie continued to exist as royal bodyguards and soldiers, and their war songs are apparently still sung in the police and army.

Hangbe physically exists in contemporary royal figures who Mntambo met, through the local belief in reincarnation, where the physical, spiritual and mythological coexist. And, of course, the voodoo figure of Zangbeto is very much part of contemporary culture, too.

The exhibition itself combines her trademark diverse combinations of media, from film and photographic works to painting, animal-hide installations and figurative bronze sculptures.

Once again, she explores cultural crossovers, bouncing between the particular and the seemingly universal. Once again, she finds herself and loses herself in the stories, histories and myths she explores.

On one level, it’s the kind of exhibition that is almost quintessentially Mntambo; yet, on another, it reorients the way we look at her entire career. She did something similar with the mysterious hunched figure once before in uMcedo and related works, using it to reflect on her earlier work, and perhaps try to correct public perceptions of it.

This exhibition once again reframes her previous work, further unsettling what we might have thought we understood.

Whereas once she seemed suspicious of being pigeonholed into representing “Africanacity” and drew on Eastern and Western myths, trying on and discarding multiple identities, this time she reorients things to place an African story at the heart of her oeuvre, although, as ever, animated with the tension between the particular and the universal.

• Nandipha Mntambo’s solo show, 'Agoodjie', is on at the Everard Read gallery in Johannesburg until November 4.