Although I missed the walkabout, Bosland's catalogue essay offers a clearly thought out and well-written explanation of the curatorial premise for the the show, which is framed by two quotations also appearing in the introductory text to the exhibition. The first is taken from a speech by Barack Obama on a pre-election tour through Europe:
‘Will we acknowledge that there is no more powerful example than each of our nations projects to the world? Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands and shun discrimination against those that don't look like us, or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people? People of Berlin – people of the world – this is our moment. This is our time’.
The second comes from a note scribbled under a drawing of Felix Gonzales Torres's seminal piece Perfect Lovers, to his partner Ross Laycock, which reads:
‘Do not be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. We conquered fate by meeting at a certain TIME in a certain space. We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit where it is due: time’.
Through these two quotations, Bosland sets up the terrain which the exhibition traverses, an exploration of 'politically engaged' artistic practice that, premised on the image of a group of people whose time has come, speaks of a shift in attitude towards a culture of involvement that is hopeful rather than cynical, possibly idealistic, and (arguably) increasingly evident in both global politics and the arts. It also seeks to question who this 'we' might be, what it is to be of one's time, and in what context.
In South Africa, where much contemporary artistic production is strongly tied to a heritage of activism, these are pertinent questions for us as we stand at a very particular moment, reflecting on where we have come from, what we have achieved, and in relation to whom. To which communities do we, as citizens and as artists, belong, and which do we sustain?
Participating artist Thomas Hirschhorn asks, in an accompanying catalogue essay, what it means to 'do art politically', as opposed to making political art. Inherent to this is the question: How does one take a stand that embraces the oppositional, that is positive while remaining critical? Activism and resistance, as we have come to understand from the failure of overly simplified 'race card' politics, requires a far more nuanced approach. It is Bosland's intention that the show explore some of the current strategies through which artists engage with the political and how resistance takes form, situating the work of South African artists within an international framework that reflects our own concerns as much as it contextualises them.
The question of community is one that both Zanele Muholi and Sabelo Mlangeni address in their respective bodies of photographic images. Muholi's formally styled portraits of black lesbians from both South Africa and America compliment Mlangeni's series 'Country Girls', focussing on the everyday lives of gay black men in the small dorps and rural areas in Mpumalanga like Driefontein, Ermelo, Standerton and Sekunda. Both seek to articulate the relationship between the individuals of a particular community, and the other communities to which they belong.
Akram Zaatari's images of a collection of photographs of Lebanese prisoners belonging to one Nabih Awada, tell of a different kind of community. Imprisoned for ten years from 1988, Awada was eventually allowed, along with other prisoners in Israeli jails, to exchange photographs with family and friends in 1993. The significance of this gesture is indicative of both the intense vulnerability and extraordinary power of group identity.
Dutch artist Marc Bijl's text piece We will maintain, spray-painted onto the wall at the entrance to the exhibition, extends this nicely. A translation of the French text in the Dutch coat of arms 'Je Mantaindrai' - but with the first person singular changed to the plural - the phrase captures the sense of a community coming together in a spirit of resistance and determination. It is perhaps communities like the ones mentioned above whose time has come. Bijl also collaborates with the Joburg collective 'Made You Look', who delivered a performative lecture on 'power, paradoxes, contradictions and the difference between art and life' on a Metrorail train bound for Khayelitsha.
To be contemporary is defined as being of one's time, but sometimes understanding where we are requires us to step outside of the present. Looking backwards in time, three hand-drawn portraits by American artist Frohawk Two Feathers depict distinguished military men from 18th century 'Frengland', an imaginary era in which the French and English joined forces to colonise the world.
Looking ahead, Michael MacGarry's two densely rendered graphic line-drawn cityscapes depict the skyline of Lagos, Nigeria, 2026. Replete with wikipedia reference, the work imagines a possible but unlikely near future mega-metropolis that has grown out of Africa's wealth of oil and other natural resources. This fracturing of the accepted/expected narrative of our time into possible pasts and futures, allows us to re-imagine the present, and ourselves within it. It is a pity, perhaps, that these two artists' works were not shown in the same gallery.
MacGarry's images also resonate with Pieter Hugo's apocalyptic photographs of burning electronic waste in Accra, Ghana (also shown in Jo’burg). African countries have become favoured dumping grounds for discarded technology from developed nations. The dynamics of global economy are also the subject of Meshac Gaba's installation The rules of the game, a ping-pong table with bats emblazoned with national flags and balls imprinted with banknotes, which reminds us that the logic of commerce is the context, if not the defining feature, for all forms of exchange.
Time is taken literally as the subject of Simon Gush's homage to Gonzales Torres, consisting of a small metronome and Soviet-era wristwatch placed next to one another on a shelf. Linear and cyclical expressions of time respectively, these items serve to contextualise our notions of how time is experienced, and in so doing underline the historicity of the artwork itself and the influence of the past on our reading of the present.
The latter is evident in a number of other works on show - Anton Kannemeyer’s illustrations of Congolese people drawn from children's encyclopedias c1950, Penny Siopis' languid shimmering film about Dimitri Tsafendas, Lucia Nimcova's photographic archive from communist Czechoslovakia, Natasja Kensmil's historical paintings.
Bosland refers in closing to Theodor Adorno's notion that art has the potential to create resistance through form, and not merely to point at a possible alternative. Although this is a fairly generalised concept to apply to politically-engaged practice, Hirschhorn's Ur-collages of fashion models and headless corpses, which use the simplest combination of two different images, are perhaps exemplary.
Installed at the entrance to the gallery, Serge Alain Nitigeka's equally simple 'tunnel' constructed from packing crates and other bits of woods, creates a precarious walkway and makes of access an ordeal. There is something similarly resistive in the materiality of Jane Alexander's installation, Yield, a collection of familiar anthropomorphic figures captured on CCTV camera, all of which appear to be wandering listlessly amongst a field of 1000 machetes, 1000 sickles, industrial strength rubber gloves and Bushmanland earth. The effect is uncanny.
In this expansive show, Shepherd Fairey, Berni Searle, Glenn Ligon, Jo Ractliffe and Mohau Modisakeng all make valuable contributions. It seems unfortunate that, with the breadth of the concerns encompassed, the exhibition should have been split in two for what can only really be pragmatic reasons. The exhibition at Michael Stevenson feels fractured as a result, in contrast to the cohesive sense of the curatorial intention that one gains on paging through the exhibition catalogue which encompasses both. Congratulations no less to Bosland for curating an exhibition in which there is not a single soccer ball in sight.
