Can Traditional African Art Still Be Radical? Inside Esther Mahlangu’s Museum Takeover
Reading Time: 4 minutesEsther Mahlangu’s entrance into elite museums presents a profound paradox: her traditional Ndebele art, once created for village walls as living cultural expression, now hangs in white-cube galleries that historically catalogued African creativity as primitive “other.” Her radical power lies not in overt political statements but in quiet sovereignty—refusing to modernize her techniques for Western consumption, maintaining ancestral methods with chicken-feather brushes, and asserting Ndebele visual language as a complete, self-sufficient system that needs no translation. The revolutionary question isn’t whether museums have finally validated Mahlangu’s art, but whether her unwavering traditional practice has infiltrated these colonial institutions like a Trojan horse, challenging their fundamental hierarchies not through confrontation but through the radical act of remaining unchanged.
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