Solo Exhibition
10 August - 14 September 2024

Exhibition Opening: Saturday 10 August 2024
Exhibition Closure: Saturday 14 September 2024 Share Facebook Twitter

WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present Amatie, a solo exhibition by Sahlah Davids.

Amatie’s scarf is neatly tied at her neck. She holds a cigarette in one hand, her words booming with a demanding yet kind presence. I try to picture her by stitching together my Ouma’s memories. “Amatie” is a unique ‘Cape Malay’ term referring to a paternal aunt. Amatie was a neighbour and not blood-related, but despite this, she was family, a second mother, and a mentor to my Ouma. Their connection was forged through place, heritage, and the social structure imposed by the apartheid regime.

Amatie worked as a supervising seamstress in the Demar factory in Lower Woodstock, a hub of the once-prosperous textile and garment industry. Ouma, her aunts and sisters, and her best friend were seamstresses, too. Education was an unaffordable luxury, and Ouma, who dreamed of becoming a nurse, had to stop schooling to pursue dressmaking to help her family financially. Her father, whom the family called “Boeya” – a term meaning “father” in the ‘Cape Malay’ vernacular was a tailor who had a shop in District Six in an area known as Castle Bridge. He insisted that learning a trade would ensure that she was self-sufficient and had a skill to fall back on in times of financial struggle. With a trade, she could mock up an apron, a tablecloth, or a dress to sell. Boeya’s stance on learning a trade was echoed throughout the community.

My late Oupa would say, “They can take away everything, but they can never take knowledge away from you.” The apartheid regime took away their homes, their rights, and their ability to afford an education. However, by leaning on the practice of our ancestors, who as artisans had used their skills to eke out a slightly better living as enslaved people – that in itself, however small, was a privilege that others did not have.

Learning this trade was not in pursuit of creative endeavors; it was an act of survival to keep afloat in a society engineered to her disadvantage. A vocation was an opportunity to learn from your elders and inherit methods of making, to watch, see, and practice the profession of another to build your own. Influenced by decades of making, a visual vernacular specific to the ‘Cape Malay’ community began to shape how garments were stitched together, perhaps unknowingly an ode to our ancestors through lush fabrics, intricate embellishments, and silhouettes.

My Ouma’s home is filled with offcuts from previous garments and jewels that adorned the wedding dresses she made. The wedding crowns of my mother and aunt, stored in a box at the back of her wardrobe and unwrapped years later, remind me of this history and unique vernacular, pieced together like a dress in a fitting. This history is shared by my mother, my ouma, my aunt, and myself. It is fragmented and haphazardly pieced together from our wedding crowns, now gathered in conversation. This work signifies moments on a wedding day with unseen figures seated on wooden chairs—aged and uncomfortable. I imagine these figures having conversations around what it means to exist generationally, attached to our history, inspired by our resilience, and yet questioning the complexity of what it means to be both ‘Cape Malay’ and a woman positioned within the grey area of tradition and culture.

As a young woman resisting the narrative of assumed subservience and proud of my attachment to Muslim identity, I am negotiating the complexity between the veil and that which is unveiled, simultaneously markers of independence, subversion, and resistance. The ‘Cape Malay’ identity is intertwined with religion and politics. Islam was the dominant religion among enslaved people in the Cape, and during slavery, practicing Islamic rituals was punishable by death. The religion survived, hidden in cultural practices and ceremonies that allowed enslaved people to congregate and continue to protest the erasure of their spirituality.

Weddings, births, and burials were all used as moments of congregation, more significant than the individual and inclusive to all despite religious affiliations. Following colonial-era slavery, the apartheid regime attempted to control every facet of life, but through our tradition and within the walls of our homes, feminine practices of resistance emerged through attire, food, headdress, and domesticity, not as complacency, nor an acceptance of one’s position, but a sign of resistance within its confines.”

My Ouma’s stories – stories of place, religion, tradition, politics, segregation, demolition, rebellion, adversity, heartache, triumph, and love – are all stitched together from fragments of lived experiences echoing her profession and many others like her. My work is a subjective testimony to these stories and a desire to recognise their importance in recording a material history in a culture where much has been unrecorded or erased.

By collecting scarves and using offset fabrics and upholstery foam from family members who are still seamstresses, my works carry the embedded patina of treasured and discarded objects. The works become placeholders for a liminal space between pain and pride, history and the present. My works function as pathways through memories, physical topographies, and distorted symbolic bodies. As a sculptor, I am drawn to creating grotesque yet beautiful silhouettes that grasp for something both uncomfortable and alluring. The works are seemingly decayed and display festering growths, yet are beautiful in capturing the double entendre of these unraveling narratives.

Ouma and Boeya (my grandfather), who made bespoke suits in his basement, Amatie, and many others whose craft was born out of necessity and refined through generations, stand as a testament to their resilience. As memories fade from those who once remembered, I am gathering fragments, not as nostalgia for what once was, but in an attempt to reconcile the intangible complexity of the past and the evolving present.

I have often wondered why my Ouma never taught me how to sew. I assumed I would burden her with my lack of knowledge and that teaching me the basics would be too tedious. But secretly, I wondered if the untold reason was the generational effort to afford me an education and career of my choice. I am deeply indebted to their efforts and in awe of their craft, which, in my family and perhaps others, is now lost, living in fond stories, old donkies, and rotting ironing boards.

Text by Sahlah Davids

Selected Press: 

Jessica Hemmings reviews an exhibition about the material culture of the Cape Malay, Garland Magazine (2024)