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What's bangin'

I'm sure you must be thinking: What the fuck is a boombox? Well a boombox is an electronic audio device used to blast loud music from. What this has to do with me is that this page is what I consider to be my boombox. This is the heart of my website, the place where you will find information about my work in both text and other media. I first started working with the internet around 1995. At that point I made use of the net at the only two free access points in cape town at the time, a technology center run by the telephone company and a computer store. I started building my first sites using free site builders like geocities and freeyellow. I have subsequently met many people across the world who have at some point in their lives owned a piece of real estate on bourbon sreet, the street on which what I recall to be the music and arts neighbourhood was established in geocities. This sense of community is what I loved about the net. I developed relationships that translated into real-world relationships with people across the world. People actually do care for each other on here - at least most of the time.

Introduction

I feel it is important for people to see where I come from and how I have developed as a person over time. When I organised my first solo exhibition I was only 19. I had never been to any art school to learn about setting up shows, I just knew that my work needed to get out. after being rejected by various galleries who will remain unnamed, I stumbled upon a nice independent space run by a crazy but committed cat named David Lewis (he has a list of other pseudomyms but I will just leave it at this). I paid the rent for the week I wanted my work shown, designed the flyers and posters in word on the computer of the Joseph stone theater in Athlone where I was renting a studio (paid for by doing occasional sign painting and theater backdrops) and photocopied the design to A5 size for flyers and A3 for posters. I then went about plastering the city with my posters reading "Melanin Millennium at Mau Mau Gallery". For the opening I had asked DJ Ready D if he would DJ and he did it at no cost. DJ E20 (who is also a taxi driver) provided the transportation for the turntables. This was my introduction to the artworld: as a do it yourself hip-hop kid from the Cape Flats. I had no friends with artworld connections, no mentors who hooked me up, no ass kissing, straight up do for self! The artworld came to my show and I got a lot of love from many people. All be it because they bought my work at laughably low prices. At the end of the night after all the artworld people had left it was just me and my hip-hop people left in the gallery. I bought a few gatsbys (Capetonian delicacy) and we ended the night with a b-boy battle. Everybody got down to show their skills on the floor. That's what my art is about and what it is for: my people

    me with gsann and ziggy from xplastaz

Statements

Dislocacion:
I am interested in the ways that people produce meaning. Individuals do not create their views of reality on their own, they are guided by and utilise a system of meaning created through interaction with others. It means that people make sense of a remark or a sign by reference to the context in which it occurs. 

   I’m constantly playing games with people’s assumptions. People connect particular bits of information I give them to other information that’s already in their heads. That’s where we start getting into problems, because depending where we grew up, how we grew up and what we’ve been programmed to think by our societies we live in will ultimately decide how we interact with the “other”. It will ultimately decide how we react to things that are not “normal’. That’s where prejudice comes in.

   I am interested in the way we react to a situation, we tend to create a safe space inside our heads for new facts to become normal. The social structure of reality is created by people, it’s not reality. It is there to organise the potential chaotic. Social actions are everyday events in a specific order. People are making and giving sense to their world. My approach is descriptive, I am just telling what is going on, in my research I am both participant and observer, I am documenting without generalising. - 2002

mustafa maluka - bad for your health - wrong colour:
I fart in the face of commodification with my unique bouquet of sweet revolutionary perfume. A punch in the face of illusion. I FART IN THE FACE OF COMMODIFIED REPRESENTATION. Ignorant masses listen up: I am a figment of your imagination. I DO NOT REPRESENT TRUTH. Illusions of oasis. I am not a circus monkey. I am not entertainment.   -2001

The weight of being a minority rolemodel:
My mind dwells to wells of consciousness/The knowledge I express gets less cause I'm under stress/At night it's dark./I'll sleep in parks if I got no place/I'm trying to show my face yet negativity pervades/I wear suedes/drenched in the blood of my dead slave
ancestors/their wounds still fester in my mind as I find/Same shit as before/Except now it's me on the frontline -1997

my family and myself at the age of 4 in mpumalanga province before moving back to cape town

Projects
1997 - 2004 

Rap lyrics

Been through it:
My only route to get to school was through clarkie
YDB was stalking me from the parkie
I'm the kid they used to call the blue darkie
My mind was so black that I could hardly
Be missed or mistaken for any of you ugly
Two faced fakes who grew up kinda softly
Never had to face police but you're talking
Like you were there in the struggle when we were marching
10 000 strong plus police dogs were barking
Very often, we'd be faced with sjambokking
5 minutes to disperse the pigs shouted
Kaspers moved in slow - it got dark then
All I could do was just start running
Eventhough next to me old women were falling
Hit in the back - fell to the street
Yo the rubber bullet just did it
No games but real life things
I went through it - 1999

installation view - CBK, Emmen - 2003