The Memorial Art Gallery and Rochester Contemporary Art Center (RoCo) are collaborating to bring Rochester a unique multi-venue exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist Meleko Mokgosi.
Meleko Mokgosi, a contemporary painter from Botswana now living in NYC, has received international attention for beautifully rendered, mural-sized canvases that explore southern African politics, history, culture, and the complexity of the postcolonial experience.
Pax Kaffraria represents the artist’s most ambitious project to date. Composed of eight “chapters,” it features chieftains, dictators, clergymen, soldiers, civilians, school children, activists, herdsmen, cattle, dogs, and big-game creatures presented in a panoramic, cinematic format.
Seven of the eight chapters will be exhibited in Rochester; six will be on view at MAG and one at RoCo.
RoCo’s Executive Director/Curator Bleu Cease says, “This is an exciting collaborative effort between RoCo and MAG. Brought together from both public and private collections, this exhibition will mark the most complete showing of Pax Kaffraria to date. I know that Rochester will appreciate these large-scale, arresting works.”
MAG director Jonathan Binstock, who has published on Mokgosi’s work, says “Pax Kaffraria depicts the history of a fictional African nation and involves themes of globalism and xenophobia. It is an allegory about allegories; it is a story of history’s afterlife, and it has much resonance today.”
Binstock wrote the essay “Meleko Mokgosi’s Pax Kaffraria: Phantom History, Phantom Nation” for the book Meleko Mokgosi: Pax Kaffraria (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, UCLA 2012).
The exhibition is sponsored by the Mohn Family Foundation, with additional support from the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Fund.
About the artist
Meleko Mokgosi has received international attention for his finely rendered, mural-sized figurative paintings that explore the complexity of politics, history, and culture in postcolonial southern Africa. Mokgosi has participated in group shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he was an artist-in- residence, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, and the Lyon Biennale, among others. In 2015 he had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and at Jack Shainman Gallery, The School, Kinderhook, New York. In the fall of 2016 he had his first solo exhibition in New York City at Jack Shainman Gallery. Mokgosi is the recipient of the 2012 Mohn Award from the Hammer Museum. He lives and works in New York City, where he continues to investigate how national identity influences the way people understand their place in the world.