Madi Madi
 

Money! Do we have a more complicated relationship with anything else?

This is the subject that pulses through Lady Skollie’s upcoming solo exhibition, Madi, Madi.

Madi is the Setswana word for ‘money’, but it also means ‘blood’— and in this new exhibition, these essential forces collide.

“The whole show is about money because that’s literally what everything is about,” the award-winning artist says. Money is a lifeblood, but one that comes with complexities. “As South Africans, I feel like we are reaching a point where, irrespective of race, we are all one cent away from things falling apart. There’s a sense of impending doom, but also the freedom you feel when you do have cash,” she adds.

The hustle and stress are undoubtedly intense, but as Skollie observes, they aren’t new. One of her works for the show is based on a 1955 linocut by South African great Peter Clarke, titled, Vandag is daar niks wat goedkoop is nie (Today, nothing is cheap).

Money’s dichotomous sense of pressure and pleasure washes through this tightly curated collection—much like the blood that has also inspired Skollie’s visual cues. The mixed-media works on Fabriano are washed in ferrous shades of red, juxtaposed with black, and are vital, unsettling, and deeply appealing all at once.

LADY SKOLLIE

Lady Skollie – aka Laura Windvogel – lives, works, performs and hustles for centre stage in Johannesburg, South Africa, with storytelling, ink, watercolour, crayon and woodcut printing as her weapons of choice. She describes her own work as ‘fire, ritual, Khoisan’, referring to the Khoisan indigenous people of southern Africa, who have lived in the region for thousands of years and to whom she connects the self-identifying ‘coloured’ community of South Africa – a multiracial group native to the area and distinct from the ‘Black’ and ‘white’ population.

Alive with emotional, political, sexual turmoil and loud questioning voices, Lady Skollie’s works depict relationships between godlike figures and flawed mortals singing, grunting, reflecting, gushing. Her characters writhe, twist and dance, queue and hold each other up whether on paper, architecture, or on the new coin that the artist designed to commemorate 25 years of constitutional democracy in South Africa.

The moniker ‘Skollie’ is a widely-used derogatory term to describe a shady character, historically used in South Africa when a person of colour was in a place deemed unsuitable by the white populace. Lady Skollie embraces this shadiness, combining it with an interplay of masculine and feminine energies, creating a space where the disparate parts of her personality are reconciled. The artist explains: ‘I just like having an alias. You feel like you can take more risks under a pseudonym… there is a psychology behind aliases, a kind of strength that they give you.’

The artist’s work has been exhibited widely at galleries, community spaces and art fairs across South Africa as well as in the UK, Europe and the USA. In 2017, along with Tschabalala Self and Abe Odedina, the artist contributed artwork for the stage design of a gala performance of The Children’s Monologues, a charitable event directed by Danny Boyle and held at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

Lady Skollie’s persona also exists outside of the art world circuit appearing on the covers of lifestyle and fashion magazines, and her position as an influencer in South Africa is bolstered by her enthusiastic use of Instagram and connections to brand culture.  She has been featured on BBC Africa and CNN International on African Voices, as well as on the BBC World Service’s online and radio series In the Studio. She was included in the 2018 edition of OkayAfrica’s 100 Women, an annual list which honours women in different fields for their achievements and influence.

After winning the 2020 FNB Art Prize, Lady Skollie won the 2022 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Arts. One of the most prestigious prizes offered to South African artists under the age of 35, winners are celebrated as national treasures, and many have gone on to achieve international acclaim. Previous winners include William Kentridge, Brett Murray, Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi, and Blessing Ngobeni among others.