“This started with a nightmare. My mother dreamt of a snake on her back. When she turned to look at it, she saw an intense green creature, frightening and fluid, dangerous and beautiful. My journey started here, and led me to Congo’s Bushongo mythology and its creator god, Bumba, the god of vomit. He vomited up the sun, Earth, moon and stars, and then the rest of the natural world from that acidic pain and discomfort. Unlike most of our world’s origin stories, this one proposes that the beauty and life of our world could be purged instead of birthed.” Our first solo exhibition, ‘Nyoka’, finds its origins in a dream, a potent distillation of the strange interplay between beauty and terror. Mnisi’s narratives have always had their seeds in personal experience – an internal landscape in which his matrilineal heritage looms large – extrapolated in a way that finds wider resonance among his generation of young Black South Africans born after Apartheid, but still bearing its burdens. ‘Nyoka’ wrestles with the duelling forces of fear and pleasure, fright and freedom felt so keenly by this cohort, but that are also innate to the human experience. “To live is to embrace this duality. To accept that joy and tragedy, light and darkness, dreams and nightmares are connected, orbiting and defining each other,” Mnisi states. Show here: ‘Nyoka’ (Snake) Bronze, glass beads (beadwork by @monkeybizcape ) 137 x 51 x 124 cm Unique ‘Nyoka’ by Rich Mnisi is on view until 4 February 2022 Photo by @christofvdwalt