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Meleko Mokgosi Quotes
born 1981 Botswana
Meleko Mokgosi (born 1981) is an artist and a professor of painting and drawing at the Yale University School of Art. His work includes large-scale paintings that explore themes of colonialism, democracy, nationalism, and life in Southern Africa.
Random Meleko Mokgosi quote
13 quotes
I cannot say that there is anything such as social responsibility because that would be too prescriptive
This is what I am interested in painting: black skin
And what I appreciate about my students is how they continue to help me to think about critical dialogue in different ways
A lot of times in a southern African context, the agents of social mobility are the middle-class people
Capital itself is not bad, but what is bad is the instrumentalization of capitalism by the human
Nostalgia is not just temporal, it is also spatial; if one is of the diaspora, then there develops a distance between being in the diaspora and one’s experience “back home.
The idea of democracy is not a bad one but it’s just not practiced the way it ought to be
What I find interesting about memory is that not all memories have to have happened, or have to be quote unquote “true
No doubt, I am heavily committed to history, and am trying to figure out how it is constructed and its effects on particular publics
We all know that no one is really black or white, yet we buy into these categories and attach our identities to them
I was thinking about how I could use something like love to navigate the question of history as an unfinished project
A lot of times, memorialization tends to create a hierarchy where some things become more important than others, whether it’s the history of our independence or how we imagine our future or something else.
I think the most important thing for me is if one or two people can see what I’m trying to do and find the ideas interesting, then I’ll be happy
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