Shirley Bassey’s 1971 soul ballad “(Where Do I Begin) Love Story” echoes throughout “Omweg” (a shared Dutch and Afrikaans word meaning something akin to “detour”), Moshekwa Langa’s first major solo exhibition in the Netherlands. The artist has spliced together the song’s surging string-and-brass overture with a loop of the title refrain as part of his 2001 video work Where Do I Begin, which was shot in his birthplace of Bakenberg in South Africa’s Limpopo province. Here, passengers in floral skirts and polished shoes are filmed from the knee down as they gingerly board a regional bus. This anonymous processional transforms a repeated motion—bearing down, stepping up—into a metaphysical state that, together with Bassey’s languid inquiry, acts as an invocation or open-ended prophecy for a show exploring the contours of belonging.
Langa, who is based in Amsterdam, explores materiality and ephemerality in both his abstract and his documentary work. “Omweg” presents several new painting series that represent the challenges of translating home into or onto a set of straightforward coordinates. In his series “Moonscape,” 2020–22, Langa has lacquered over shards of burnt firewood and charcoal atop unframed canvases. The gesture renders familiar materials into uncanny textures while suggesting a monochromatic landscape distinct to South Africa, where the charcoal was collected. The artist’s series of “Blotted Paintings,” 2022, continues this exploration of movement and stillness. At the far end of the gallery, an ensemble of thirty colorful canvases is strung from the ceiling like parts of an elongated mobile. Though stationary, the paintings seem to sway to Bassey’s soundtrack as a kind of breathing, a moment of exhalation before the start of something big.
— Annie Goodner