The MaBareBare Project contextualises nine years of creative engagement with Associate Prof. George Mahashe’s imagining of Khelobedu through exhibitions, installations, academic text and public oriented programs. Khelobedu generally refers to the religion, culture, political and philosophical thought of Balobedu, who are a polity constituted around the figure of Modjadji, the head of a 200 year strong dynasty whose highest position is reserved for women. Balobedu’s stronghold is called Bolobedu and is located in the north eastern part of Limpopo in South Africa. Within the MaBareBare context Khelobedu refers to the myths tailored by Balobedu, designed to counter representation practices of successive waves of Portuguese, British and Afrikaans colonists that encroached their area. It exists alongside different classes of local and colonial texts produced by Balobedu’s neighbors, missionaries, anthropologists, travelers and colonial administrators produced and archived over the last 170 years. I understand these productions by and about Balobedu to be entangled and inseparable. Therefore my imagining of Khelobedu manifests as a conceptual tool that looks at colonial and local texts as functioning as one entangled archive accessible through different subjectivities and practices. MaBareBare explores this entangled archive and utilizes a space within contemporary artistic practices that allows one to deploy multiple and sometimes contradictory subjectivities simultaneously. I use this space to present a fluid glimpse of Khelobedu.

Works within MaBareBare include works such as Camera Obscura # (2015-16) the photographic exhibition ‘Gae Lebowa’ (2010) presented at the Museum of World Cultures in Vienna; photographic installations like ‘Dithugula tša Malefokana’ (2012) and ‘InBetween’(2014) both presented at the 10th Bamako Biennale in 2015; text such as ‘Of Myth and Fantasie’ (2012) as well as video works such as Etcetera! Etcetera! (2013), presented at Goethe on Main in Johannesburg.