Can Traditional African Art Still Be Radical? Inside Esther Mahlangu’s Museum Takeover

Can Traditional African Art Still Be Radical? Inside Esther Mahlangu’s Museum Takeover

The Paradox of Institutional Embrace

Esther Mahlangu’s rise to global prominence is often narrated as a triumph—a traditional South African artist whose geometric Ndebele murals transcended village walls and entered the halls of elite museums. But beneath this celebratory framing lies a deeper, more uncomfortable question: can traditional African art, once absorbed into the white-cube logic of global museums, still be radical? Or does its institutional embrace risk neutralizing the very cultural disruption it once embodied?

In a global art system increasingly eager to diversify its collections, the inclusion of artists like Mahlangu is heralded as progress. Yet this moment invites critical scrutiny. Is Mahlangu’s museum presence an act of subversion—or of strategic assimilation? Does her work still challenge the colonial frameworks that historically marginalized African art, or has it been recontextualized into safe, palatable aestheticism?

This journal examines Mahlangu’s position through a critical lens, situating her within a broader genealogy of African and African diasporic artists—like Wangechi Mutu and Kara Walker—whose practices actively interrogate institutions, identity, and power. It argues that Mahlangu’s work retains its radical potential only when viewed not as static cultural preservation, but as an act of visual resistance that challenges the architecture, taxonomy, and ideology of the spaces that now display her.

Decoding Tradition, Disruption, and Institutional Power

Museums as Colonial Archives

Western museums have long functioned as repositories of imperial memory—displaying African art as ethnographic artifact, often removed from context and authorship. These institutions did not merely ignore traditional African art; they objectified it, freezing dynamic practices into static symbols of a “primitive” past. The modern museum was built not to celebrate African creativity but to catalogue it as Other.

Esther Mahlangu’s work enters this space with tension. Her painted panels—based on living Ndebele traditions—are no longer ephemeral expressions on domestic walls but permanent, framed objects. Their presence in institutions like the British Museum and Centre Pompidou marks a significant shift. Yet it is precisely this shift that demands interrogation: has the radical spirit of Ndebele art been flattened into decor? Or does Mahlangu’s insistence on traditional technique within modernist structures offer a quiet, coded form of institutional sabotage?

Subversion by Repetition: Aesthetic Resistance

Mahlangu does not modernize her technique to suit institutional tastes. She uses the same hand-drawn patterns, materials, and color systems taught to her in childhood. This deliberate refusal to “innovate” according to Western standards can be read as a subversive gesture—challenging the fetishization of novelty in contemporary art.

By presenting ancestral knowledge as a complete, sovereign system—one that needs no Western validation—Mahlangu unsettles the hierarchy of artistic value. Her aesthetic repetition is not redundancy; it’s a declaration: Ndebele visual logic is not frozen in time but alive, rigorous, and sufficient unto itself.

Case Study: Mahlangu vs. Kara Walker

Consider Kara Walker, whose silhouette installations confront slavery, violence, and racial mythologies head-on. Walker’s work is overtly political, explicitly confronting Western viewers with the grotesque legacy of colonialism and white supremacy.

Mahlangu’s disruption is quieter—but no less potent. Where Walker indicts through confrontation, Mahlangu disrupts through sovereignty. Her refusal to translate her work into Western idioms denies the museum its typical mode of framing. The radicalism lies in asserting traditional form as contemporary relevance, without mediation or apology.

Case Study: Mahlangu vs. Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu blends African iconography with futuristic, often grotesque hybrids. Her work resists categorization and actively critiques the museum’s role in constructing female and African bodies as exotic.

Mutu’s museum takeovers are spatially aggressive—covering walls, floors, and ceilings to overwhelm the white cube. Mahlangu’s interventions are less about scale and more about purity of intent. Her insistence on form, symmetry, and ancestral integrity refuses to play the game of cultural fusion. She brings a full, closed system into a space that thrives on fragmentation.

Inclusion or Co-option?

This is the uncomfortable question at the core of Mahlangu’s institutional ascent. Has her work been embraced as a genuine expansion of the canon—or as a digestible token of diversity? Institutions love to celebrate the presence of African artists without interrogating the structural exclusions that delayed their arrival.

Mahlangu’s case forces us to ask: is the museum using her to signal progress, or is she using the museum as a Trojan horse for African visual philosophy? Perhaps both. But if the former outweighs the latter, the radical edge dulls.

The Politics of Display

Even the way Mahlangu’s work is displayed matters. When contextualized with heavy explanatory texts, it risks becoming anthropology. When isolated as abstraction, it risks erasure of meaning. The curatorial choice between “tradition” and “contemporary” becomes a political act.

Some exhibitions, like those at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, have begun treating her work as modernist abstraction in its own right—placing it in dialogue with canonical Western artists. This framing challenges the hierarchy of modernism itself, proposing that African traditions are not ancestors to contemporary art—they are its peers.

Esther Mahlangu vs. Wangechi Mutu

Tradition as Tactic, Not Relic

So—can traditional African art still be radical? If radical means disruptive, subversive, and destabilizing to dominant power structures, the answer is yes—but only under specific conditions.

Esther Mahlangu’s work can be radical when it resists reinterpretation, when it asserts the completeness of Ndebele visual logic, and when it enters the museum not as an exotic specimen but as an uncompromising aesthetic presence. Her refusal to modernize is itself a political act—resisting the colonial imperative to evolve in accordance with Western values.

The danger lies not in Mahlangu’s practice, but in the institutions that house it. If her work is framed as nostalgia, it is neutralized. If it is framed as innovation within its own cultural terms, it regains its teeth.

In this sense, Mahlangu’s museum takeover is a test—for the institutions, for curators, and for audiences. Will they allow traditional African art to exist as sovereign knowledge? Or will they insist on translating it into palatable forms?

Mahlangu does not seek translation. She speaks in pattern, in repetition, in color systems that predate the modern gallery. Her art does not ask permission. It arrives whole.

And that, in a world built on fragmenting Africa’s past, is still radical