Hybrid and Unapologetic: Common Efforts Across Cultures
Drawing inspiration from cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s Traveling Concepts in the Humanities (1946–), I have explored and analysed the exhibition Common Efforts by South African painter Lulama Wolf (1993–) and late Danish sculptor Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984). Bal emphasises the importance of approaching cultural analysis with an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on methods and insights from multiple fields to gain a more holistic understanding of objects and practices. Through the concept of hybridity, I examine the complexity of Ferlov Mancoba’s practice and its significance when exhibited alongside Wolf’s paintings.
According to Bal, hybridity originated in biology, implying as its “other” an authentic or pure specimen and presuming that hybridity leads to sterility. This notion, prevalent in imperialist discourse with its racist overtones, has since traveled across disciplines to indicate an idealized state of postcolonial diversity.
The concept of hybridity has “traveled” across time and disciplines—from biology to literature, through Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and postcolonial theory, particularly Homi K. Bhabha (1949–), and into the social and political realm. In the foreword to Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism (2015), Bhabha describes hybridity as a form of incipient critique that does not come from the outside but works within the cultural design of the present, reshaping our understanding of the “gaps” that link signs of similarity with emergent signifiers of otherness.
To understand how Ferlov Mancoba’s practice might be reinterpreted in this light, I invite the concept of hybridity into dialogue with the exhibition Common Efforts.
Common Efforts: An Exhibition by Lulama Wolf and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba
Common Efforts is the title of one of Sonja Ferlov Mancoba’s sculptures; for this exhibition, Lulama Wolf borrows the name to foreground what is at stake in the pairing, shared labour, shared curiosity, and an attention to how forms, materials, and ideas travel across time and geography. Staged in Copenhagen’s meatpacking district, the exhibition unfolds as a quiet but insistent dialogue between sculpture and painting, between generations, and between different conditions of making.
Approaching the exhibition through Mieke Bal’s concept of “traveling concepts,” hybridity becomes less a fixed theoretical framework and more a method for reading how meaning moves within the space. Rather than treating hybridity as a celebratory condition or a resolved state, the exhibition allows it to remain unsettled, visible in material choices, spatial arrangements, and in the tension between historical context and contemporary interpretation.
Ferlov Mancoba’s sculptures, made by a woman born north of Copenhagen in 1911, carry the weight of early twentieth-century European modernism and its fraught relationship with so-called “primitive” art. Her early fascination with African sculpture emerged through collectors and museum contexts at a time when non-Western art was often framed as degenerate, hybrid, or culturally inferior. In this historical moment, hybridity functioned as a pejorative term, suggesting impurity or lack of authenticity. Yet her sculptures resist these classifications. Using Western materials and modernist abstraction, Ferlov Mancoba produced forms that are at once corporeal and spiritual, suggesting figures without fixing them, gestures without narrative closure.
Wolf’s paintings enter this space not as corrective statements but as parallel investigations. Her smearing, scraping, and use of earth-derived pigments echo architectural and rock-art traditions rooted in pre-colonial African practices. The figures that emerge, distorted, incomplete, often ambiguous, refuse legibility in much the same way as Ferlov Mancoba’s sculptures. Here, hybridity is not a matter of mixing styles but of inhabiting uncertainty: between abstraction and figuration, history and intuition, personal spirituality and collective memory.
Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s understanding of hybridity as an internal critique that works from within cultural structures rather than outside them, Common Efforts can be read as an exhibition that operates through proximity rather than opposition. The works do not explain one another, nor do they collapse difference into sameness. Instead, they produce what Bhabha describes as “gaps”, spaces where similarity and otherness coexist without resolution. These gaps are palpable in the exhibition’s installation, where sculptures and paintings seem to listen to one another rather than compete for attention.
The presence of Wolf, a contemporary Black South African artist, inevitably reframes how Ferlov Mancoba’s engagement with African aesthetics is read. Yet the exhibition resists a simplified narrative of appropriation or influence. Ferlov Mancoba’s partnership with South African painter Ernst Mancoba, and her lifelong commitment to communal and spiritual forms of making, complicate any singular reading of her practice. In this context, Wolf emphasizes continuity rather than correction, positioning hybridity as a productive condition shaped by care, exchange, and shared effort.
Seen through Bal’s interdisciplinary lens, Common Efforts becomes less about categorizing artistic lineage and more about how concepts, form, spirituality, abstraction, Blackness, community, move and transform across bodies and histories. The exhibition does not attempt to resolve the contradictions embedded in these movements. Instead, it allows them to remain present, felt through material, texture, and spatial relation.
In this sense, Common Efforts embodies hybridity not as an aesthetic choice but as an ethical position: one that acknowledges the uneven histories of cultural exchange while insisting on the possibility of shared human experience beyond hierarchy. The exhibition does not offer conclusions. It offers a space in which histories touch, hesitate, and continue.
Photo: Eighteen (V1 Gallery)
