Jacob Kotzee: Stimela

by Grace Coppola.

Jacob Kotzee’s Stimela show at Light Works presents two new works, Moses and Untitled (Porosity) (both 2026) alongside a pair of older works. These are Untitled, an oil on canvas by Jacob’s father, Dirk Kotzee, painted 14 years ago, and a live version of Hugh Masekela’s “Stimela” recorded on the 24th of February 1974, which plays from a small, outmoded radio in the gallery. Installed in Light Work’s main gallery is an aluminium light-frame construction of a small room or shed made by Kotzee. Mounted within that frame are both Dirk and Jacob’s untitled paintings and the radio playing “Stimela.” The Kotzees’ works are placed on parallel walls, mounted to face one another exactly. Dirk Kotzee’s Untitledis a vibrant green, stylised representation of a garden scene; Jacob’s work is a non-representational, unbroken colour field painting, rusted in colour and texture. Mirroring one another in placement, identical in dimension (30 x 40cm), and placed at our eye level, one is intimately aware of interrupting their interchange as we look at them closely and cross between them.
        We are perhaps saved from feeling like intruders upon a private, familial conversation by the voice of Hugh Masekela and his band. The sound of “Stimela (Coal Train)” permeates the space more profoundly than either the severe exchange of the two paintings or the presence of viewers. The song laments the miserable existence of Black South African migrant labourers displaced by apartheid policy, who were daily separated from their homes and families when they boarded a stimela (coal train) to the underground mines surrounding Johannesburg, where they toiled for a meagre wage. This song, and its objectified presence in a radio adjacent to the Kotzees’ works, ceaselessly recontextualises these paintings. The paintings themselves have been produced in a new context, delineated by a permeable steel frame, seemingly far from apartheid South Africa and without reflection on apartheid (unless the rustiness of Untitled (Porosity) limns a tarnished history), yet the pervasiveness of the song within the shared space intimates that a relation can be drawn between “Stimela” and the adjacent paintings. We thus sense an uncertain, indirect and diasporic—yet nevertheless persistent and inexorable—connection to apartheid South Africa in the relations between these objects.
        That the song is not spectral, playing through hidden speakers, but afforded objecthood via a radio, also admits it to the scene as a legacy already well-known to the artist. While the paintings are produced in a present-day context beyond the purview of apartheid, Masekela’s “Stimela” resounds and projects the legacy of apartheid as an inescapable memory into that new context of artistic production. As a manifest object, its inevitable presence is acknowledged by Kotzee, and it evinces an undeniable but nevertheless inexact relation of apartheid to the new context and new paintings.


In the tunnel outside of this space is Kotzee’s second work, Moses, a confounding figural sculpture and plywood plinth assemblage. A dedication in the exhibition pamphlet tells us this eponymous Moses is Moses Taiwa Molelekwa, a South African jazz pianist whom Hugh Masekela invited to join his band in the late 1980s, thus establishing a second intergenerational connection within the exhibit, alongside Dirk and Jacob Kotzee. Moses consists of an outsized plinth which has elevated a wooden bust against the ceiling. The figure’s forehead is pushed into the rock and disappears, but several metres from this plinth, it emerges from the floor of the gallery, producing an unnerving effect of simultaneous wholeness and rupture.
        Reflecting again on the works in the main gallery, the sense of space and spectatorhood that those works impart is remarkably different to that imparted by Moses. In the first room, our freedom of movement contrasts the starkness of steel, art objects, and sound. In walking between the steel beams of the structural frame and amongst the artworks, spectators contribute a dynamism that is at odds with those very precisely oriented objects and their overwrought familial-historical relations contained within a free-standing structure. This incongruity excludes the spectator from the field of relationality these objects produce; we are made curious spectators to private histories laid before us.
        In Moses, however, spectators are captivated by the work, snared into an intimacy with it. The narrowness of the tunnel limits the movement of the spectator and confines them in close proximity to the artwork. Spotlighting on both parts of the sculpture conducts and holds one’s attention, as well as further limiting the space by setting the work against an abyss, a background of abstruse darkness. In this strange, barren space—at once claustrophobic and a chasm—one also becomes acutely aware of one’s own physicality while bending to see the top portion of a head on the floor, peering up to see the bust-section level with the ceiling, apprehending the confines of the walls by one’s body and the abrasive brightness of light.


As viewers of Moses accede to the force of the spotlight, limited confines of the space, close proximity and the physical adjustment to the work, they are effectively conducted into a deferent, reverential attitude towards the wood figure. A curator’s tool has been augmented to elevate the sculpture into seemingly sacred significance and function for the reverence of spectators. This same gesture, which raises the wooden figure to an idol, simultaneously severs head from body—the head which burgeons from the ground unharmed, by some miracle of spatial continuity. Spectators of this bipartite gesture are thus implicated as living witnesses to violence or miracle which has occurred under revelatory spotlighting. The reverent piety which Moses dedicates to Moses Taiwa Molelekwa, a victim of racial violence, cannot be separated from that violence, as this work cannot dissociate the miraculous restoration from the violent severance.  
        There is an additional sense, standing before this work, of being on a stage without actors, even while in the presence of a figure. The plinth is not invested with ill-will towards the plywood bust, but more akin to an unfortunate stalagmite; the head breaching the floor attests more to the leniency of this strange space than the inner perseverance of the head and figure. Set in what could be an underground mine, one feels they are unearthing evidence of some partly violent and partly sacred act that took place many years ago, not knowing who else has set foot here. I get a similar feeling thinking of the Birdman painted in the “Shaft of the Dead Man” deep within the Lascaux caves, painted with a taut body and a bird head, on the cusp of being brutalised. This work and Moses are equally menacingly enigmatic and revelatory: the Birdman of the history of human sympathy for suffering, Moses of what retributive forms such sympathy may take today.
        Stimela was, unfortunately, only open for three nights but it was an incredibly profound showing from Jacob Kotzee. The intergenerational dimension of the show, the continuity between Dirk and Jacob Kotzee and between Hugh Masekela and Moses Taiwa Molelekwa, frames the past as inescapably present and devastatingly personal. The elusiveness of miracle, stunted as miracle is in Moses, makes more poignant the recognition of the inescapable persistence of violence which these works impress, as does the song which keeps resounding from a past that no longer stands.

Jacob Kotzee, Stimela, Light Works, 13–15 February 2026.

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Header images: Installation documentation of Jacob Kotzee’s Stimela at Light Works. Artworks: Dirk Kotzee, Untitled, 2012, oil on canvas, 30 x 40cm; Hugh Masekela, Stimela  (Live At The Record Planet 24th February 1974), 1974, Single-channel audio, 05:20; Jacob Kotzee, Untitled (Porosity), 2026, oil on canvas, 30 x 40cm. Photography by Scott Burton.