Upcoming:

Inga Somdyala

The Mountains of My Youth

image credit: Sihle Sogaula

opening:

Gallery Night | Berlin Art Week

September 10, 2026

6 – 10 pm

PSM presents The Mountains of My Youth, a solo exhibition by South African artist Inga Somdyala. Bringing together installation, painting, photography and sound, the presentation takes ulwaluko, the Xhosa rite of passage into ‘manhood’, as a point of departure. Across the gallery, Somdyala creates a continuous environment in which material gestures condense to form a landscape shaped by experience, perception and transformation, bringing school, the mountain, the body, the object and ideas of home into close proximity.

Ulwaluko is a significant rite of passage within Xhosa culture through which boys enter into ‘manhood’. The initiation takes place away from everyday life, with initiates separated from their families and brought into seclusion in the bush, often in the mountains. During this period, knowledge is acquired not through the formal structures of school, but through the body, through instruction, ritual and the experience of being removed from the familiar. The passage marks a transformation in both the individual and his relationship to the community. It is this movement between different forms of knowledge, and between states of belonging, that Somdyala brings into this body of work.

Upon entering the gallery, one is met by an intense field of red. Surface and structure lose their distinction as redness blushes across the white of the walls, establishing a perceptual condition before any single object comes into view. We are drawn into the installation through recognisable objects whose meanings begin to shift in relation to one another. A school desk has been taken apart and bears the stripes of an Aranda blanket. Its tabletop lies on the floor, separated from the structure that once supported it. Fourteen okapi knives occupy the same space. They are closed. Their potential remains contained, but not neutral. At the far left, a crop of clear blue sky offers another kind of distance.

The school desk is an object of preparation. It belongs to a system in which knowledge is taught, tested and measured: one learns, passes, and progresses. Its presence in the installation brings this familiar structure of education into proximity with forms of learning that are rooted in Xhosa knowledge systems. The two are not offered as equivalents. They prepare the young person for different forms of life, and ask different things of the person being prepared. The desk therefore sits at an interesting threshold: between childhood and ‘manhood’, between institutional education and the knowledge that lies beyond it. 

The mountain represents a further departure from the structures of everyday education. During ulwaluko, the initiate is removed from the familiar world of home and school and enters a period of seclusion in which the body becomes central to the acquisition of knowledge. Among other initiates, he encounters a different relationship to time, environment and instruction. The mountain and the bush become spaces of transformation: cold, heat, darkness, the movement of the sun and moon, and the presence of others undergoing the same passage all become part of an experience that cannot be reduced to the classroom or translated entirely into language. Imbola, the red ochre applied to the body after initiation, makes this transition visible. The body becomes marked as belonging to a person who has entered a different state: separated from childhood, yet not simply arriving at an already defined adulthood. The mark registers a process that is otherwise difficult to see. 

This relationship between marking and transformation returns in a new series of paintings. Somdyala works with oxides, charcoal, and ash, grinding and mixing the materials with linseed oil to produce a substance that marks the surface. The paintings emerge through this physical process of grinding, mixing, applying and accumulating. Their dense surfaces hold traces of labour and transformation, while resisting complete translation into words. What has been experienced is not reproduced as an image or explained through a narrative; it is registered materially. This may account for the particular stillness of the paintings. They seem to suspend the experience between having being lived and being contemplated, much as the rite of passage places the initiate between one social state and another. The surfaces hold the evidence of something that has been worked, transformed, and brought into being, but which remains open to contemplation. 

The exhibitions furthest point introduces a different red. Iron oxide pigments replace the intense carpeted field of the opening, carrying the colour into the material vocabulary of earth and residue. Into this altered atmosphere come the voices of men singing in unison. The sound, recorded on the occasion of the return of the artists relatives from their own rites, draws the body into a shared space, moving the experience away from the encounter with individual objects and images towards something communal: a homecoming. Here, voice becomes material. Singing carries Xhosa cultural knowledge through the body and across the room, connecting what is heard to what has been encountered elsewhere in the exhibition. The songs do not simply mark a return; they give form to what has been carried back. 

The return suggested by the exhibition is therefore not a return to an unchanged point of origin. What has been encountered elsewhere remains present in the body, in memory and in the materials that have travelled with it. Home is reached, but the person who returns is not quite the person who left.

The title The Mountains of My Youth takes its point of departure from Moshekwa Langa’s 1997 installation of the same name. Langa’s work brought together hundreds of lengths of string dispersed across a red floor, forming irregular intersections reminiscent of a topographical map, alongside collages and drawings incorporating maps, signs and fragments of text. Somdyala’s presentation enters into correspondence with this earlier work through its own use of a red ground and its attention to landscape, movement and the relationship between physical and imagined terrain. The reference establishes a material and conceptual resonance between the two practices.

At its core, The Mountains of My Youth considers how a young person moves between different forms of knowledge and how those experiences shape what it means to return. The exhibition brings institutional and cultural forms of learning into close proximity without resolving their differences. Through installation, painting, photography and sound, Somdyala creates a landscape in which the familiar can become strange, where distance can alter perception, and where what is encountered elsewhere continues to register on the body after the journey home.

Inga Somdyala is a Cape Town-based artist and lecturer whose practice explores relationships between material, place, memory and land-scape. He studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, completing an MFA in 2019, and was awarded the Cecil Skotness Scholarship and Mellon Foundation Award. He is the recipient of the 2022 MTN New Contemporaries Award, and his work is held in the permanent collections of the IZIKO South African National Gallery, Kunstmusem Wolfsburg, the University of Cape Town and the Scheryn Art Collection.

Working across installation, painting and drawing, Somdyala uses textiles, soil, ochre, oxides, ash, bronze, brick and sea salt as carriers of memory and time. In recent work, fabric has become central to his practice, allowing him to work at an architectural scale with colour, light, texture, tension and gravity. Large sail-like textile forms are configured in response to specific spaces, inviting viewers to move into, through and around the work.

For the traveling exhibition Layers: Rock Art Across Space and Time, the artist contributed a variant series of dyed textile-soil works titled The Deep History; The Long Past, which were reconfigured for each installation at Nirox Foundation (2022), Brundyn Arts & Culture (2023) and finally at Wits University’s Origins Centre (2023). These works were installed with local soils and adapted to each new space. This site-responsive approach has characterised his most recent works. 

This approach is visible in Somdyala’s large scale installations at Liljevalchs Konsthall for Stockholm Cosmologies in 2025, and the Javett Arts Centre at the University of Pretoria for the One and the Many exhibition (2025-26). He has contributed work to local institutions for We The People: 30 Years of Democracy in South Africa at the Norval Foundation (2024-25), as well as Matereality V2 at the IZIKO South African National Gallery (2026). 

for German translation click here

Exhibition dates:  September 10 – October 17, 2026

Open: Tuesday – Saturday 12 – 6 pm