Abstract
Usha Seejarim’s 2021 six meter high public sculpture The Mundane and the Magical, situated in front of the Rosebank Radisson RED hotel, repurposes physical objects as well as literary and artistic antecedents. The artist alludes to a Victorian male-authored poem celebrating the domesticated pure figure of the “Angel of the House,” an oppressive, internalised being whom Virginia Woolf famously “murdered” in a 1931 speech detailing her emergence as an independent artist. Seejarim’s installation celebrates women’s agency through two composite angel wings incorporating hundreds of steam irons of the sort used by domestic workers, while also resonating with ancient winged mythological figures, including Isis and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The domain of the domestic, so long associated with undervalued female labour and the constraints of gendered hierarchies, is reimagined through retasking objects of domestic labour into building blocks of collective rebirth and liberation. The bright red-painted work also creatively summons up a South African history of struggle art as well as global revolutionary aesthetic practice, citing and transmuting images of collective labour and reclaimed means of production.