Lerato Ntladi

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ARTIST CATALOGUE

This Body, My Witness Sub title: "erotic knowledge."

This body of work is an auto-ethnographic exploration. I explore my past and current context relating to the body. I explore the vulnerability of being a body, particularly a black queer body in a world shaped by colonial and structures. This work maps a journey of shame, damage and judgement to liberation, repair and curiosity.My artistic practice while rooted in the quest for true knowledge of the self and liberation, is also built on the complex layered reality of identity as a black Afrikaner woman. This work acknowledges the inherent value in my upbringing and cultural context, language and the familial bonds that shaped me. 

However more focus is placed on the deep-seated existential necessity for a departure from certain restrictive ideologies and perspectives embedded within the Afrikaner cultural landscape. It has been a vital journey to move past racially coded doctrines that have imposed restrictive conditionality on my self acceptance and authentic embodiment. My work serves as a personal commitment to the erotic as Audre Lorde conceptualises it in Uses of The Erotic. The erotic serves as epistemological knowledge and a powerful form of resistance. Emerging form my conservative Afrikaans upbring as a black body in a space filled with racial tensions, my works also maps a somatic and critical journey of unlearning, reclamation and affirming selfhood that has been fundamentally contested. Lorde defines the erotic as not a mere sexual or pornographic but as a source of power and spiritual energy, and a profound self-knowledge. She further describes the erotic as a measure of one's deepest desires and intuitive truth as a woman. My artistic process evolved from a broad concern with the racial tensions into a more personal exploration where mending is prevalent. 

This erotic knowledge for me in this context is be sourced through questioning the tensions of my lived experience. This is understood through archives of pain and joy in the body, like remembering the profound emptiness felt during religious sermons that condemned self-inquiry, and the discomfort felt from casually racist remarks that reinforced being othered, and conversely, the visceral sense of meeting myself, feeling las though i am right where I need to be, the joy and safety in embracing my desires. Ward notes, the erotic in daily practice is a self referential determination to what is truly aligned with individual integrity. Mapping key moments of honouring this inner authority is a deeply political act and self- emancipating act for me. While I acknowledge these themes are nothing new, I am honouring that arriving here is new to me. Key moments of repair displayed are moments where I feel in my body and in the erotic. Learning how to style my own braids, embracing music and fashion that is not embraces in Afrikaans spaces all became acts of self sovereignty to me. 

The creative process and methodology of my work is anchored by translating lives experience into tangible forms as a intimate and personal commitment and somatic practice. I employ mixed media, intergrating hard and softer materials. I use imagery of my own body as I deal with these themes. Forms resembling Western Dutch architecture are contrasted circular African architectural forms like the rondavel. The rondavel is used recurrently in my work acting as a metaphorical sanctuary and a no containment zone and an imagined space where my ancestral roots do not remain unknown and I am unshackled from the kind of racialised sexuality I am still repairing from. This use of form speaks to the vulnerability of being a body that feels estranged and feelings of displacement whilst also speaking to the reality of all these making me who I am. For me this functions as a critical archive of injury and finding deep satisfaction through curiosity and self discovery.