These three pieces are a study of three specific years which compounded my grief. In January 2020, I learned that my favourite cousin had died three months prior, and her side of the family had kept it quiet. It wasn’t unusual for her to go months being unreachable. But it was gut-wrenching to learn that there would be no other side where she would quietly surprise us with a visit, while I was sleeping. On Valentine’s Day 2022, I experienced the end of a romantic connection that impacted me deeply; in the subsequent months after its end, I realized how deeply I appreciated it, for its sweetness, for its hope-renewing forthrightness. I still remember the joy of it as though it happened yesterday. In 2024, I am moving through the grief of accepting that the world I live in, is crueller and more brutal than over two decades of galvanizing awareness has prepared me for. I am learning that governments are willing to let scores of people die (via genocide, human-made famine, environmental disasters, and COVID) as long as they have thriving economies to boast about. They are not actually here to allow their constituents to lead full, safe, and fortifying lives. I grieve the optimistic, less disillusioned versions of myself that existed before this year. I have titled each of the works after the years when the grief of each experience really affected me. Lately, I feel like I am caught in an unending plummet into deeper grief. It feels like my heart is stretched taut over so much love – for what is gone forever, what is fondly remembered, what is possible and should be – with nowhere to go.
About the artist:
Mercy Thokozane Minah (b. 1992) is a gender-expansive, queer multidisciplinary maker who was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. They create work that centres the experiences of Black trans-queer (transgender and queer) people. Their favourite theme to explore is intimacy. Mercy creates across visual, theatrical, and literary mediums. They are a law-school dropout and recipient of the Taubie Kushlick prize for Drama, received in lieu of their degree in Theatre and Performance. They are also a published author of several short stories appearing in international queer anthologies such as the Lambda award-winning Queer Africa: new and collected fiction and bklyn boihood’s Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity. Mercy’s visual artwork has been displayed in virtual and physical – group and solo – exhibitions on Superrare (as part of the Black*rare group show), Quantum Art (with a sold-out solo auction titled Press Play), in Johannesburg (with Bkhz’s if not now, then when?), Cape Town (as part of Fede Arthouse’s Fullhouse), Paris (in the NFT Factory’s Indigo showcase), London (at 1-54 London’s contemporary African Art fair, represented in Bkhz’s Intimate), and Maputo (in a solo show at the French-Mozambiquen Cultural Centre, ‘a burst of light’). Their work has also been featured in three volumes of activist anthologies for the Gay and Lesbian archives (GALA, published via Taboom Media) and Ruth de Cerff’s Dwelling: a collection of South African fine art and literature, on the concept of “home”; along with appearing in – and on the cover – of the 4th issue of the Massachusetts Review in 2023. For Mercy art is a crucial tool for possibility modelling; that is, crafting realities in which the oppressions of the current world no longer exist, and Black trans-queer people are radically safe and free. Mercy is interested in how personal, interpersonal, and societal notions of self-determination, connection and solidarity can help actualize widespread liberation.
Audre Lorde: “Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone, who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.”
Isele Magazine 