Blessing Ngobeni’s series of hand-coloured linocuts revisits the conceptual and visual language first introduced in his 2016 exhibition, The Song of the Chicotte, presented at CIRCA, Everard Read. In that earlier body of work, Ngobeni employed the chicotte, a colonial whip ,as a potent metaphor for systems of control and subjugation. While rooted in histories of colonial violence, the symbol extends beyond the past, pointing toward contemporary forms of psychological, social, and relational bondage.

Ngobeni’s framing of “slavery” resists a purely historical reading. Instead, it implicates the present: the ways in which inherited patterns of domination, trauma, and internalised oppression continue to shape both individual and collective experience. The suggestion is unsettling yet precise ,we are not only subjects of these systems, but, at times, their perpetuators. Cycles of harm repeat, often unconsciously, as “the sins of the fathers” echo into new generations. Against this, Ngobeni proposes the possibility of rupture: a reimagined world no longer governed by the same enduring forces of control ,figured here as predatory, shape-shifting powers that persist under new disguises.

Four years later, Blessing Ngobeni returns to this pivotal series through the medium of printmaking. These hand-coloured linocuts translate his earlier large-scale, densely layered collages into a more restrained and intimate visual language. The shift in medium is significant. Where the original works confront the viewer with boldness and complexity, the prints draw one closer, inviting slower looking and deeper reflection.

Rendered in softened tones of blue, purple, and grey, the linocuts temper the visual intensity of the original compositions while retaining their conceptual weight. This subtle palette introduces a contemplative atmosphere, transforming the works into spaces of quiet reckoning. Rather than repeating the earlier series, these prints function as a form of
return, an artist revisiting his own archive to reconsider past urgencies in light of present
realities.

In this way, the series becomes both retrospective and forward-looking: an intimate dialogue between Ngobeni’s past statements, his evolving concerns, and the persistent conditions that continue to shape his practice.