00:02What happens when an artist's love of monster fantasy crashes the gates of tradition?
00:10In Cape Town, artist Hanali Tout does exactly that.
00:15Either a mother can have influence so that children turn into monsters or that children can turn their mother into
00:24a monster.
00:28Old family portraits watching from the walls, Victorian virtue meets rubber and chains.
00:34It's uncomfortable to look at and that's exactly the point.
00:37This is how she begins a conversation about control, tradition and what women are taught to hold inside.
00:47I created a dress out of hair. This is my first monographic exhibition.
00:53I'm going to be brave and shake my head and appear in public without hair.
00:59But the hair is going to be on my dress and my body.
01:03And I gave myself a muzzle from rubber.
01:06So it's a restraint. It's taming the monster.
01:14This is not about dressing up. It's about holding something back.
01:18Let it not nibble the audience and shed hair like animals do.
01:24For Hanali, the monster is not there to attack. It's there to show what happens when control slips.
01:31The work unsettles people and it also feels familiar.
01:38This is one of the most exciting exhibitions I've seen in a while.
01:42The titles as well, I think they're so, so clever and so fitting and a very engaging way to approach
01:49it.
01:51The kind of savageness, the kind of feralness.
01:54I really deeply appreciate women's work in general, but also growing that into motherhood.
02:02Hanali is Afrikaans, a South African ethnic group descended from Dutch settlers.
02:07She grew up in a culture shaped by discipline, restraint and clear ideas of how a woman should behave.
02:13Everything neat and respectable.
02:23I question the patriarchy in the Afrikaans community.
02:28I'm interested with the domestic mythology.
02:31So the mother is a very central part.
02:33When you're young, you're sort of trained, stitched into your role.
02:37You become a mother, become a wife.
02:44The taboos, the tensions and the tangled legacy somehow makes it both radical and wickedly funny.
02:52I think the monster is always there because a big part of Hanali's work up to this point is also
02:57very much her character,
02:58which is to ask hard questions, but always with a twinkle in her eye.
03:03And the monster is the moment when you try to unpack these heavy things.
03:08The creatures and the horrors start to escape.
03:13Her work asks a simple question.
03:16What happens to the parts of yourself that don't fit that picture?
03:22But the strongest force in this exhibition is not the monster.
03:26It's the mother.
03:28I lost my mother when I was quite young.
03:32What teaches you to become a mother if you don't have a mother?
03:38That question sits at the heart of her work.
03:41Motherhood, care, fear and responsibility all stitched together.
03:47When you're young, you're sort of trained, stitched into your role.
03:51The monstrous part was interesting to bring that together with her mother.
04:00For Hanali, monsters are not fantasy.
04:02They are what happens when expectations become too heavy.
04:06Rubber appears again and again in her work.
04:08Not as a sexual symbol, but as a skin, protection and armor.
04:14Rubber is a domestic material.
04:17It's industrial material.
04:18Rubber is also, for me, very close to skin.
04:21It holds memory.
04:23And a lot of people associate rubber with fetishism.
04:27But it's more the culture that fetishizes the rubber than the rubber itself.
04:39This is not about destroying tradition.
04:42It's about repairing it.
04:44Honestly.
04:44Leaving the stitches visible.
04:46So maybe the monster isn't hanging on the wall.
04:49Maybe it's the pressure to always look fine.
04:520
04:52druk
05:02controll
Comments