Solo Exhibition
5 April - 31 May 2025

Exhibition Opening: Saturday 5 April 2025
Exhibition Closure: Saturday 31 May 2025 Share Facebook Twitter

WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present Dressed Overall, a solo exhibition by Inga Somdyala.

‘My primary excitement lies in form, colour, shape, and materiality. Flags are then a convenient visual language; vexillology has its rules, and I have fun breaking them. Given the six colours of South Africa’s present-day flag—or any of its colonial predecessors—my aim is to play, disassemble, and scatter. Even with the nautical flag works, a simple visual system for conveying textual information, I am drawn to them for their formal qualities. Their graphic lines, squares, circles, and colour inversions provide a rich and literal visual lexicon to work from.

I transcribe old Latin phrases for these nautical flag works—phrases found on coats of arms, in legal terminology, or associated with institutions of education, governance, and religion. When installed, these Latin phrases, transcribed as nautical flags, are systematically scrambled. Flags are a ubiquitous visual lexicon, and although I mine them primarily for their formal possibilities, it also happens that this lexicon is deeply entangled with national, historical, and cultural meanings—meanings I want to critically engage with.

Last year, South Africa observed 30 years of democracy. On learning that the current national flag—designed just a month before the country’s first democratic elections on 27 April 1994—was initially adopted as an interim flag, I began thinking about South Africa as still occupying a liminal space between the old order and the new political dispensation. Looking at the present-day six-colour national flag, this transitional state is evident: the red, white, and blue from the Dutch and British colonial flags are combined with the black, yellow, and green of the ANC.

Here, I continue to deconstruct these symbolic origins, focusing on the red, white, and blue that characterise the earliest versions of South Africa’s flag genealogy. Even within this, my works break these elements down further—to their most basic forms, such as the St. Andrew’s and St. George’s crosses. I am driven to uncover the roots of these symbolic ideals, questioning our conceptions of democracy and nationhood, particularly considering how their foundations are embedded in a history of conquest and colonial violence.

A ship displaying all of its flags at once is said to be “dressed overall.” This is traditionally considered a celebratory gesture. I wanted to enact something similar in the gallery space—to dress the space overall as both a celebration of 30 years of democracy and a kind of distress signal. This is partly why I created a series of nautical flag code messages—based on Latin mottos seen on coats of arms—but installed them in a scrambled, incoherent manner. This scrambling is in line with the tradition of dressing a ship, whose flags are arranged specifically against any hidden messages or meanings, it is only about the gesture of adorning the vessel with all its flags at once.

Further, for me, it is also part of the playfulness I want to maintain in the work: a celebration of South Africa’s metaphoric “Ship of State” by dressing overall, yet one that simultaneously gestures toward an underlying sense of unresolved histories.’

Text by Inga Somdyala