The Melrose Gallery’s new show – Junkyard Dogs – stars two celebrated South African artists, Willie Bester and Pitika Ntuli. Both are fixated with junk, upcycling, recycling, and reenvisioning waste. They are both retrofitters, fabricators – each in his own way gifted in disassembling and reassembling metal parts into radically unforeseen new wholes. As such, they are classically African artists, for the artists of no other continent have displayed a more ingenious and innovative capacity to reboot-retool the excesses of industrial surplus. Africa is the dumpsite. African artists the diviners.
As for ‘Junkyard Dogs’? They are fierce guardians, ruthless, unbreakable. If the descriptor fits Willie Bester and Pitika Ntuli, it is because both were forged out of a resistance culture, both the products of an on-going fight for freedom. This is because Ntuli, like Bester, understands art as an embodied force. Sculpture is the key medium. As Ad Reinhardt wittily remarked, ‘Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.’ It commands and consumes space. In the case of Bester and Ntuli, the mediums are metal and granite, a fusion of the man-made, and the organic. The scale is commanding. Demanding. We cannot unsee a gesture or proposition, because both artists possess a declamatory power.
Do not expect piety or composure in this show. Its thrust is to up-end convention, disorient value, open truth. While both artists have emerged from a culture of resistance, neither is an ideologue. Rather, politics is implicit – a by-product of a given works animus, its concentrated energy. In African art – namely in its wooden masks – this force is ancient. In the case of Bester and Ntuli, this energy is worked through industrial waste. After Donna Haraway, it is a cyborg art – a fusion of Man and Machine. Co-curated by Ashraf Jamal and Tumi Moloi, Junkyard Dogs places its emphasis on the animistic rather than the political, the Dionysian rather than the Apollonian, the vitalism at the core of two very dynamic artists. After Ad Reinhardt, it is a show one bumps into, negotiates, confronts. At every point, we are answerable to the artists’ love-songs to decay, their desire in-and-through the revitalization of waste matter to restore an invigorated beauty into our overwhelmed and exhausted lives. In this show, installation meets soundscape meets sculpture. It is about art as ambient event. If it is a reckoning with our past, it is also an engagement with our default current moment and our possible future. As the saying goes – rust never sleeps.
The exhibition runs from 29 August until 31 October 2025 at The Melrose Gallery in Johannesburg.
I was sort of brainwashed all my life to believe that I'm less than other people and I thought, Art can restore your pride. When you don't agree with something, art is so strong it will come out and state that you are also here, you are also somebody, and you are just like anybody else. - Willie Bester
