Prophecies are at the heart of Mohau Modisakeng's surreal self-portraits

The son of a prophetess, artist Mohau Modisakeng casts a mystical eye on South Africa's political and psychological crises, writes Oliver Roberts

Such is Mohau Modisakeng's gift for drawing that when he was at school, his biology teacher would call him up to the chalkboard to sketch diagrams of plants and body parts for students to copy.

Years later, Modisakeng is using that same knack for bodily aesthetic to live and succeed as an artist, except now, instead of it merely being a body of proteins and organs and processes, the body he examines and presents is a body that carries a deep history of conflict and change and mystery, related both to his own story and the story of South Africa.

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Modisakeng, 29, won this year's Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art. The award, he says, changes his perception of what he's doing.

"At various points over the past couple of years I've had doubts about whether this [being an artist] is what I should be doing," he says. "But after this, there's no turning back."

It's remarkable to hear an artist admit such a thing, especially one who has exhibited internationally and whose work is included in the permanent collections of, among others, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, IZIKO South African National Gallery and the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Self-doubt and trepidation about the nature and meaning of your work are emotions that almost every artist deals with at some point, but very few are prepared to admit it, especially to a journalist. It's a confession that could raise questions of authenticity and commitment, even longevity, but this is how he has always approached things: with unflinching honesty and public self-examination, exposing mind and body for all to see. Eff the consequences.

"A few people who have written about my work have said things that have nothing to do with it. They come with judgments and say they don't understand why I'm making these objects, making it this way. But that doesn't mean the work is contrived or coming from a dishonest place. When you approach an artwork, you come in with everything you know and bring it to the artwork, and different people bring different things to an artwork. It's a very difficult balance to arrive at, where the artist is putting something out and it is understood and appreciated according to how he intended it."

Modisakeng uses large format photography, film and performance (and very often his own form) to explore the meaning and impact of the black body within South Africa's dark history, especially the early-1990s, when the artist was a little boy and all this shit was going on that he didn't really understand but he definitely felt.

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It was during this time that his older brother was murdered in what appeared to be a politically motivated act of betrayal. At his graduate show years later, at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Modisakeng made a large-scale version of the okapi knife that killed his brother. He also made large-scale snuff boxes. Snuff, apart from its obvious uses, is also burnt as an offering to spirits and ancestors during meditation and mourning. The exhibition was entitled Ukufa Unezindaba, which means "death has many revelations/stories".

Modisakeng began working with large format photography during his Masters degree. Now he uses it as a form of sculpture wherein he doesn't have to concern himself with the dense planning and gathering of raw materials involved in traditional sculpture. In his photos, he himself becomes the sculpture and he brings in other elements - props, clothing, body language - to symbolise and express meaning. He captures these images on camera - very often in the form of a triptych - and there you have it: still, rigid and representative forms, just like a sculpture.

In the triptych Metamorphosis (on display at WHATIFTHEWORLD gallery in Woodstock), he is a man that turns to dust and transforms.

"In my work I've been dealing with how history, or the events of history, still affect us to this day," he says. "The narrative of South African history up to this point has been about transformation, overcoming the past, this movement from one terrible history and skipping over to the new. In Metamorphosis I was responding to my own growth and the growth of the nation as a collective and contradictions within that. It's a reference to the violent nature of transformation and change, the idea that it is leading towards something but I don't think there's a linear conclusion to this process of metamorphosis; it lingers."

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Much of Modisakeng's work has a dream-like, saintly, even funereal quality to it. Doves. Angelic figures. Bodies dressed in black. Blurred faces. Bowed heads. Man as martyr, Man as sacrifice. The crucified and the redeemed. The risen from the dead. Ash. Dust. Resignation.

Modisakeng's face lights up when I tell him I recognise these qualities in his art. Perhaps it goes back to what he said about having doubts about what he's doing, about the misinterpretation of his work. Perhaps it has something to do with the satisfaction of knowing that his mother has a significant and palpable impact on his art, just as he intended. His mother was a medium, a sort of prophet.

"In a lot of African families there's usually someone who has some kind of gift, passed on from a previous generation," says Modisakeng. "She would have a dream and tell me about it the next day. I would receive the dream as an image, a visual narrative. I grew up with that, dealing with images and messages that need to arrive at some kind of audience; that's how I make sense of how I work with images.

"I respond to some of my visual frustrations and happiness, and these come through in images, visions and weird connections."

About a year before the Marikana massacre, Modisakeng took a photo of himself in a black robe, squatting, holding a machete. It was supposed to symbolise a process of mourning. Following Marikana, he saw a photo of miners as they waited to be addressed. They were squatting, wrapped in blankets and holding either sticks or machetes.

"It's scary because it's not something I'm in control of," he says of this apparent presentiment. "I think these two things relate because I'm generally thinking about history and violence and the nature of politics in South Africa, and seeing that they repeat themselves. I'm not necessarily having a premonition though. It's more about being in tune with the way history repeats itself."

Modisakeng, whose soft, gentle manner defies or even compliments the somber nature of his work, is, for now, preoccupied with bringing his artistic gifts together with the gift that was apparently passed onto him through the mystery of his mother's blood.

"When the spirit is suppressed, when the environment is negative, as it is in South Africa right now, people tend to gravitate towards the spiritual. Defining the social context based on religion and spirituality, that's a connection which is very difficult to make," he says. "I'm trying to figure it out."