Mo Laudi celebrates the explosive silence of a famous Gerard Sekoto painting - Mo Laudi and James Webb have turned their passion for music and sonic mischief into art, and are winning audiences in France
Mo Laudi and James Webb, two expatriate South African visual artists interested in sound and its relationship to sight, are holding court in France.
Speakers at four venues across Lyon broadcast a series of questions, voiced by Johannesburg playwright Sylvaine Strike. Spoken at 10-second intervals in English and French, the questions address park users, museum-goers and specific objects, among them an urn that dispensed the ancient cure-all medicine theriac.
No answers are offered to Webb’s scripted questions; the enquiry, and the silence around it, is all. It was in Paris, as part of his first outing as a curator at Bonne Espérance Gallery last year, that Laudi paid homage to Sekoto. Unable to secure Sekoto’s drawings of Parisian nightclubs for his exhibition, Laudi built a sound installation in a nearby church instead. It replayed songs from Sekoto’s 1959“You could hear Sekoto sing every Saturday for the duration of the exhibition,” says Laudi when we speak via Zoom. “To hear him sing, it was so much more powerful than having a drawing.
Nigerian Otobong Nkanga’s ‘Kolanut Tales, Dismembered’ on Mo Laudi’s exhibition ‘Globalisto: A Philosophy in Flux’. Sekoto began to explore the same subject in a 1939 watercolour. But it is his 1947 oil composition that refutes the heroic terms of Kay’s study of bare-chested labour, offering in its place something suggestive of unified purpose in the face of white exploitation.Laudi’s own sense of the power of community was shaped by his love of music. He name-checks Run-DMC, Tupac, A Tribe Called Quest, Mos Def and Saul Williams as early influences.
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