Play and the Profane

In his performances, artist Samson Kambalu takes over, upturns, and redeploys the signs of power to refashion the self. These self-refashioning acts are particularly marked in Kambalu’s performance titled Holy Balls (2000), which involves kicking footballs which were created by plastering Malawian rag and plastic street soccer balls with pages of the King James Version of the Bible; his quasi-spiritualism of Holyballism, which is a doctrinal syncretic mixture of Gule Wamkulu philosophy of the Chewa, the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten’s sun-worshipping monotheism, the creed of Moses the prophet, Jesus Christ, and Nietzsche’s The Gay Science; and the performance-cum-installation (Bookworm) The Fall of Man (2003), featuring a ritual performance in which apples are eaten, surrounded by concrete poetry written on gallery walls. In these artworks, the artist adopts the transgressive performative elements of the Gule Wamkulu masquerade, Duchampian irreverence, and play and the profane to confront his legacy in the form of language, patriarchy, Christianity, and the hegemony of Dr. Kamuzu Banda, founder of the Malawi nation, in processes of subjectification.[1] In this essay, I use Jacques Lacan’s conception of the symbolic father, which constitutes all conventions that bind one to society, Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque subversion of power by the powerless, and Julia Kristeva’s abject and figure of “the deject” as “the one who strays” (as a “deviser of territories, languages, works”) to illuminate how Kambalu takes over and upturns the signs of power, and purges (“exercise and exorcise,” in the artist’s own words) the dark traces of his legacy. In short, with the performances Holy Balls, Holyballism and (Bookworm) The Fall of Man, Kambalu subverts his own religious, cultural, and sociopolitical legacy in order to refashion the self.