Exhibited

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Vabvakure (People from Far Away), 5 June to 5 July 2014.

20th Biennale of Sydney, 18 March to 5 June 2016.

Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, Still Here Tomorrow To High Five You Yesterday, 30 January to 30 June 2019.

Notes

Image courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery.

Gerald Machona first achieved notice with a short performance held on a rooftop overlooking Harare’s long-distance bus terminal in 2010. For his performance, Machona wore a black suit associated with cross-border traders and mask linked to a ceremonial dance performed by a secretive sect of Chewa men from Malawi. Machona’s mask was made from Zimbabwe’s paper money, a cheap material widely available at the time. The political and economic turmoil that beset Zimbabwe in the 2000s created a cycle of hyperinflation that saw the value of the local dollar recalibrated three times: in 2006, 2008 and 2009, after which the state stopped printing more notes. In 2015 Zimbabwe adopted the US dollar.

Throughout the 2010s, Machona continued to use defunct currencies as material in his sculptures and performances. “I have taken something that is useless in my space and state, and I have tried to give value to it through artistic practice,” Machona said of his interest in using obsolete Zimbabwean dollars.¹ This installation composed of a currency-stitched flag precariously planted in a mound of sand was first shown in Johannesburg in 2014. The exhibition critically explored the idea of nationhood as an imagined community held together by ideological symbols such as flags. Machona’s flag is fictional and slots into a rich tradition of non-representative flags by artists, including Moshekwa Langa and Michael MacGarry. The horizontal bands incorporate defunct Zimbabwean dollars, while the three stars are made from decommissioned South African currency and legal tender from Angola and Mozambique.

“If currency in this instance is understood as another symbol that represents the nation, then the act of transplanting and cross-pollinating various currencies onto a single flag is an act of rupturing and of diversifying,” explained Machona in a thesis for his MFA degree at Rhodes University.² Machona’s interest in themes of nationhood, exile and foreignness were triggered by his experience of the harrowing xenophobic violence that gripped South Africa in 2008. The link between obsolete paper money and political identity is key. “For the artist, national identities converge with monetary value, imposing a price and an arbitrary economic hierarchy upon human lives and their movement across borders.”³ Machona’s compelling use of currency as both material and signifier link him to a constellation of artists interested in money as art, from Frenchman Yves Klein to Beninese artist Meschac Gaba.

^1. Sean O’Toole (2011) interview with the artist, Grahamstown, 4 July.

^2. Gerald Machona (2013) Imagine/Nation: Mediating ‘xenophobia’ through visual and performance art, unpublished Master of Fine Arts thesis, Rhodes University, page 42.

^3. — (2016) Artist biography, 20th Biennale of Sydney, online, https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/participants/gerald-machona/, accessed 20 August 2024.

Provenance

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2014.

Private Collection.