#3-4: Mohau Modisakeng

This is the work of the South African artist Mohau Modisakeng. It is a three-screen moving image work called “Passages”, originally shown at the Venice Biennale. In a way, we are simultaneously thinking about myth, memory, and movement. When we see black bodies combined with water, it inevitably brings to mind the history of the Middle Passage, the forced migration of millions of African people across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas. Likewise, the image of black bodies in boats also evokes contemporary migration crises.

But here, Mohau Modisakeng imbues water with more meaning—it is not only a symbol of myth, but also of possibility and renewal. Water becomes a site or a territory upon which new myths, new possibilities, and new remembrance can be conjured into being.

Thus, in this three-screen work, water becomes the stage for Mohau Modisakeng’s performances. As an artist, he works not only with moving images but also in performance and photography. He takes the water here as a starting point, an invitation to imagine a state of traveling, to feel the experience of being African, as a set of ongoing impossibilities and challenges.