Motlhoki Nono | The Weight of a Kiss

Motlhoki Nono is pleased to present The Weight of a Kiss.

For the 22/24 Ernest Cole Award, Motlhoki presents 'The Weight of a Kiss'. Departing from the iconic side-angle profile that has canonically captured kissing in romantic productions, this time we are hurled to the front of the kiss to witness the moment between a lover kissing another. This angle renders rather strange and grotesque images that attempt to solicit other kinds of responses around the gravity of the kiss in romance.

Here, kissing becomes a language between supple bodies that bonelessly contort themselves against each other, tracing the contours of their mouths. In shifting the lens of this experience, we become a deeply intimate voyeur, a welcomed intruder and an unsuspecting participant in this conversation. These compressed kissing scans, in their uncanny nature, upset the ‘ideal’ kiss, suspending its weight in romance by inserting humorous and awkward interventions that become a pursuit towards the ‘unromantic’. Here, the scanner is not only the object of affection, but one of reflection as well; These unromantic portraits confront us with deeply vulnerable images of ourselves in intimacy, compelling us to consider ourselves as rather floundering in our interactions with romance – a consideration that can perhaps offer us less weighted ways of encountering, awaiting, experiencing and engaging love itself. To suspend cinematic ideals from this intimate act and it’s broader romantics allows us to encounter ourselves simply as we are.

The Ernest Cole Award was established to commemorate Ernest Cole and to acknowledge him both as a key figure in the history of South African photography and as a contributor to the struggle against apartheid. With the facilitation of Phototool and the endorsement of the David Goldblatt Legacy Trust, The Photography education Trust, Play Braamfontein and the mentorship of Lebohang Kganye, the show ´The Weight of a Kiss´ was exhibited as part of the Open City Programme, running alongside the FNB Joburg Art Fair, at 70 Juta Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg.