Booth K24

WHATIFTHEWORLD is proud to present a new body of work by Lungiswa Gqunta at Art Basel Paris 2024.

In Assemble the Disappearing, Site 1, Lungiswa Gqunta brings together a series of forms in wood, glass, fabric, and her signature razor wire. These materials serve as proxies for neglected, dispossessed, or disappearing human, land, and plant bodies, offering a grounded testimony of what they have endured and what they have lost.

“…The mountain is witness to the land changing around it, within it… It has witnessed history, cities being made, wars; it’s held secrets. People have taken refuge in mountains, had political meetings in mountains — they have so much information…”

– Lungiswa Gqunta

Drawing on Amilcar Cabral’s radical notions on soil and revolutionary struggle, Gqunta insists that the land’s capacity to witness goes far beyond disconnected observation. Gqunta’s witnesses, The Onlookers (2024) — wavy wooden outlines and in-lines, accented by curved glass forms — expose their structural anatomy, revealing the bones and inner pathways of their bodies. These are the guts of mountains, with their glass overlapping and reflecting millions of years of interconnected geological life. They have accommodated diverse species across eras, endured generations of violence, and witnessed the trauma of their own commoditisation in modern times.

Filipa César describes Cabral’s conception: “the soil is not an inert and static ‘ground’ subjected to human agency, but rather has a dynamic relation to human social structures, evident in its different responses to forms of colonial extractivism”.  In other words, the land does not merely sit and watch history unfold, but instead interacts with its socio-political world. Much like Gqunta’s Onlookers, the land has an internal life. It is subject to processes like ‘meteorisation’ and erosion, shaped or exacerbated by extraction, exploitation, and forms of toxicity.

In The Onlookers, the blue, orange, and red glass pieces evoke the shapes of land masses, gently curved and specifically outlined. Gqunta is interested in the distorted potential of witnessing, for instance, in how growing older coincides with losing one’s eyesight. Ironically, aging seems also to coincide with the gain of new forms of clarity, often elusive in younger, better-sighted years. The glass used in Assemble… is rarely smooth and fully transparent; it distorts the view of the other side through its colours, layers, and occasionally, fabrics trapped within.

Clusters of winged forms gather in patches across a torn fabric sheet. From a distance, they could be swarms of insects, birds along migratory routes, or shards of shattered glass. These forms obscure the image beneath them, buzzing with a deceptive stillness. On closer inspection, the minute shapes are the sharp teeth of razor wire fencing, painstakingly removed one by one, and concealing the image beneath. It is a close-up photograph of harvested imphepho, our very own species of sage. Imphepho is an essential plant, frequently used in Black spiritual traditions, as well as for its medicinal properties. Yet in cities and online, imphepho is marketed as a special spiritual ‘product’ for the urban consumer, sold in tiny bunches at exorbitant prices. In contrast, when Lungiswa is home in the Eastern Cape, walking down the Humansdorp hills through bushes and greenery with her spiritual guide, she tells me that

“it just grows.”

In this era of capitalist realism, such a simple truth feels like a revelation — a reminder of how far the pursuit of wealth accumulation has distanced us from the most natural process of all: growth. The razor teeth cut into imphepho’s existence, obscuring it from view. It is held captive by the same deceptive forces that encircle mountains with fences, administering entry to ‘their’ outside for a fee.

But the land knows. Soil’s ever-changing state cannot be reduced to pure geological reading; it is both witness and respondent to its treatment, to the treatment of those who work it. In Assemble the Disappearing, Site 1, Gqunta presents a series of ancient land bodies, whose acts of witnessing have taken their toll. Churning up and eroding a multitude of difficult historical insides, it becomes clear that a liberated future demands a deep, mutual reclamation and healing between the land and its people.

Text by Thuli Gamedze