Meleko Mokgosi's Democratic Intuition : Decolonizing History Paintings as Democratizing Exercise

ABSTRACT: Meleko Mokgosi's series, Democratic Intuition (2013–2019), is a six-year project consisting mainly of a diversity of paintings and several sculptures, which surface several challenges democracies on a global scene are currently facing. In this article, I argue that Mokgosi does not only work through the challenges contemporary democracies face—such as structural racism ingrained in democratic institutions, unequal access to education, which impedes democratic participation and the exercise of one's citizenship, the (neo)-colonial entanglement between democracy and capitalism and the white supremacy thinking that underlies it, but also pleads for more democratic jouissance to overcome these challenges. My hypothesis is that in opening up the genre of history painting for influences from southern Africa, Mokgosi requests a widening of the art historical canon, which goes hand in hand with the demand for the broadening of forms of democratic representation, too.