Rebaone Finger

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

Cheese Girl: Conspicuous Consumption Edition

A ‘Cheese girl’ can be understood as a social indicator of class privilege, seemingly different from the greater community or social circle one occupies. The term historically stems from histories of being able to have a cheese sandwich in your school lunchbox within a black South African township community, which was primarily made up of households that could not afford the luxury of having a cheese sandwich for lunch (Ledwaba, 2020).

The term has grown to include and communicate far more expansive layers and levels of social class disparities between those who are more privileged vs those who are not. Cheese Girl: Conspicuous Consumption Edition embraces the term’s slippery and fluid nature by tapping into both silent and loud indicators of social class. From nails to food, bouquets, and the use of insight to the personal gallery, the fluidity of the term is potentiated as an alternative way for blackness to exist beyond suffrage. Cheese Girl: Conspicuous Consumption Edition imagines blackness as opulence, wealth, and luxury in this exhibition. Instagram-inspired tropes and symbols of what is imagined to be opulence are merged with images and objects that resemble contrasting realities. This accounts for the fluid and slippery nature of cheesiness. The work is cheesy in a nonconformist sense, with deliberate and radical ideologies that reimagine the possibilities of blackness in sometimes silent, other times obnoxious, unsettling ways. It calls for luxuriating as a form of self-care and self-love (Ricks, 2018; 3) and imagines Cheese Girl as a vision of actualised black utopianism and racial justice.