Archive: Issue No. 70, June 2003

18.06.03 Christian Nerf's '24.7' Residency Programme at JAG
18.06.03 Recent Prints by the San people from Kuru, Botswana
18.06.03 Mashile and Hockney at Gallery on the Square
18.06.03 'Across the Divide' at Bag Factory
01.06.03 David Koloane at the Goodman Gallery
01.06.03 Tribute to Nhlanhla Xaba at the JAG
01.06.03 Obie Oberholzer at PhotoZA
01.06.03 Light-ness at HH Gallery
15.05.03 Trinity Session Solo at Standard Bank Gallery
01.05.03 'Art & Urbanisation' at Warren Siebrits
01.05.03 Brett Murray at the Standard Bank Gallery

01.06.03 'Erotica' at AAP
01.06.03 Anna-Carien Goosen at AAP

'24.7', the brainchild of artist and downtown raconteur Christian Nerf, is a weekly series of 24-hour residency programmes held over seven weeks in the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Combining art and social commentary in a live context, '24.7' is structured around a 'studio' space constructed in the downstairs area of the JAG.

Originally initiated in mid-2002 by Christian Nerf, at his City+Suburban studios on Commissioner Street, the initial 24-hour residency offered artists an opportunity to work in the city while also creating a platform for potential further collaborations between participating artists. The first participant was artist Barend de Wet, his project (knitted bikinis) subsequently exhibited at the C3 Gallery. Other participants at the City+Suburban studios residency programme have included Stephen Hobbs and Tracy Hennen.

For '24.7' each participating artist is permitted a flexible timetable to spend 24 hours on site during a week, that is 24 hours over six days, which equates with four hours a day. There are seven thematic 'chapters' of collaboration and experimentation taking place, which are broken down as follows:

Chapter 01: NEW MEDIA, June 24 - 29
Chapter 02: TRADITIONAL PRACTICE, July 01 - 06
Chapter 03: FASHION, July 08 - 13
Chapter 04: AUDIO, July 15 - 20
Chapter 05: CONCEPTUAL, July 22 - 27
Chapter 06: LENS-BASED MEDIA, July 29 - 03 August
Chapter 07: PUBLIC ART, 05 - 10 August

The bias is not strictly towards art practice, with participants drawn from a range of 'creative' disciplines ranging from computer programming to advertising, fashion photography to the highly indeterminate. Participants in each of the chapters have already been confirmed, although persons interested in taking part are advised to contact thefacilitator@christiannerf.info with a short proposal. The overall process can integrate new participants at short notice.

According to the projects initiator: "Documentation of this journey is key. Evidence of this nature is as valuable as the end product, if not the actual product." Daily downloads will be posted at www.247residency.blogspot.com. By way of summary, the JAG will host an exhibition of '24.7' evidence from August 30 through to September 20, and www.artthrob.co.za will offer regular updates of the event as it unfolds.

Opening function on Saturday, June 21 at 3pm with Tokyo Star of Melville providing musical accompaniment.

Opens: June 24
Closes: September 20

Johannesburg Art Gallery, corner Klein and King George Streets, Joubert Park
Tel: 011 725 3130 / 3184
Fax: 011 720 6000
Email: DavidB@joburg.org.za
Hours: Tues - Sun 10am - 5pm

This exhibition of prints by contemporary San artists from Kuru, Botswana bears evidence of the shift in focus from the exclusively historical art forms (the ancient rock paintings and engravings which are found across southern Africa), to art made by their descendants today.

San people are among the oldest indigenous populations of the world and are known to have inhabited southern Africa for more than 30 000 years. Discrimination, oppression and dispossession have characterised the San people's recent history. Today, about 100 000 San people live in small, scattered groups in South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana. Having had to abandon their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle due to the loss of land, they were not equipped for the new life in small settlements. Although there is no longer any tradition of painting or rock engraving among contemporary San people, the artistic skills that were part of their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, have survived and is evident in the prints on this exhibition.

In the same way as research on traditional rock art has come of age in the latest interpretation of rock art as an emanation of shamanic trance rituals, the new generation of San artists' work reinvent traditional art forms and require new interpretations. Although the work still teems with fabled creatures and animals, there is a bigger awareness of a functional society where people have to live their lives in conjunction with these mythical creatures. Next to the depiction of a chameleon, one now finds a bicycle (Bicycle and chameleon II by Qhaqhoo) signalling a shift in consciousness to a more ontological awareness of being and suggesting a functional approach to life.

Artists whose work are on display are associated with the San Arts and Crafts Trust, an organisation that grew from a grassroots effort to assist the Naro-speaking people from D'Kar to a regional, people's owned support programme in Botswana, with various departments for education and culture, agriculture, natural resources and business.

Opens: June 14
Closes: July 2

Art on Paper, 8 Main Road, Melville (next to Outer Limits bookshop)
Tel: 011 726 2234
Email: mwartonp@mweb.co.za
Hours: Tues - Sat 10am - 5pm

'Across the Divide' is an exhibition by two Bag Factory artists in residence, Senegal's Birame Ndiaye and Nigeria's Olu Amoda.

Opening on Wednesday, June 18 at 6pm.

Opens: June 19
Closes: June 25

Bag Factory, 10 Minnaar Street, Newtown
Tel/fax: (011) 834 9181
Email: bagfactory@acenet.co.za
Website: www.bagfactoryart.org.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 10am - 3pm, Sat 10am - 1pm

Commenting on Colbert Mashile's work recently, the JAG's David Brodie stated that this artist's work references a genre of production that is growing rapidly amongst young local practitioners. His work is couched in a language of challenge that claims agency for the participants themselves, "as opposed to using the participants as simply manifest entities towards capturing generalised representations of conditions or events."

This show at Gallery On The Square offers an opportunity to view the output of a Johannesburg favourite. Mashile will be exhibiting new works alongside Amos Letsoalo, Paul Blomkamp, Hermann Niebuhr and Hannes Harrs. Also on show will be graphic works by renowned international artists such as Frank Stella, Jim Dine, Henry Moore, David Hockney and Marino Marini.

Opens: June 28
Closes: July 12

Gallery On The Square, Shop 32, Sandton Square
Tel: 011 784 2847/8
Fax: 011 784 2849
Email: gots@mweb.co.za
Website: www.galleryonthesquare.co.za
Hours: Mon - Thurs 10 a.m - 6 p.m, Fri - Sat 9 a.m - 2 p.m, Sun 10 a.m - 2 p.m

Well-known Johannesburg artist David Koloane presents a series of mixed media canvasses in which objects are transformed from their mundane function into ritualistic and aesthetic symbols, the show appropriately titled 'rituals'.

As Nadine Gordimer eloquently observes in the introduction to Koloane's Taxi-006: David Koloane book: "When we receive his painting and drawings we are not merely looking, we are drawn into discoveries about the process and spaces of living. And its endless mystery." These rapturous words are not simply the invention of a writer penning words for a fee. Gordimer and Koloane have had a long professional, and personal association, this the result of Gordimer's late husband Reinhold Cassirer, in whose small gallery black artists such as Koloane were first shown.

"Koloane's interpretation of urban life," Gordimer further elaborates, "has struggled and triumphed in finding different visions and modes, techniques, materials to express the huge oppressions, upheavals, and hard-won freedoms that have been epitomised in our cities' sprawl." According to the artist, the title of the exhibition refers to various types and forms of ritual, which give meaning to our day-to-day living. The works themselves comprise an assemblage of various objects into compositions.

Opens: June 7
Closes: June 28

Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood
Tel: 011 788 1113
Fax: 011 788 9887
Email: goodman@iafrica.com
Hours: Tues - Fri 9.30am - 5.30pm, Sat 9.30am - 4pm

The Johannesburg Art Gallery will be holding a tribute show celebrating the work of Nhlanhla Xaba, winner of the 1998 Standard Bank Young Artist Award. Xaba died under tragic circumstances earlier this year, in March.

Xaba's artistic training began informally, with a three-year stint with artist and designer Madi Phaala in the late 1970's. Moving to Soweto in 1986, Xaba joined the Funda Art Centre in Diepkloof, where he received his first formal instruction in art. He went on to complete further degrees through UNISA.

Xaba was primarily a painter, using impasto techniques to work up rich, textured surfaces in oils and acrylics, but he also made drawings, sculptures and prints. In terms of visual language, Xaba drew directly on his experiences of living (and observing) in South Africa. "The kind of art that interests me explores ethnic-looking objects. I find rural scenes, objects and people more fascinating in terms of inspiration than the zigzag life of the urban setting." (Nhlanhla Xaba, 1998).

Journalist Fred Khumalo once noted, "...[Xaba] is producing some of the best paintings to come out of post-Apartheid South Africa. His work - gutsy, fresh and confident - has a strong rural accent. Verdant rural landscapes and people in ethnic gear rendered in striking colours and deft strokes are his signature." (Sunday Times, 12 July, 1998)

"In my art I attempt to convey a painter's struggle. I am concerned with shifting boundaries mental and physical. On the canvas and in life, these boundaries are continually shifting and are complex, centred around the economics and politics of place and time...These boundaries are also the urban and the rural, the contemporary and the traditional. I attempt to convey not the simplicity of representation but a more complex and layered process. Neither the painting nor the approach is an attempt to surprise the viewer. Instead, it recreates what everyone knows. It reflects the process of life and living."

Opens: June 8 at 11h00
Closes: July 13

Johannesburg Art Gallery, corner Klein and King George Streets, Joubert Park
Tel: 011 725 3130 / 3184
Fax: 011 720 6000
Email: DavidB@joburg.org.za
Hours: Tues - Sun 10am - 5pm

Officially christened Petrus Cornelius Jacobus Oberholzer, but otherwise known as Obie Oberholzer, this inimitable photographer presents a show of recent works titled 'Hotazel'.

Born on a small farm outside Pretoria in 1947, Oberholzer studied graphic design at Stellenbosch University in the late 1960s, and photography at the Bavarian State Institute of Photography in Munich, in the early 1970s. He returned to Germany in 1979 for his Masters' Diploma in Photography. In between he worked for the Deutsche Condor Film, as a commercial photographer and as a lecturer at the Natal Technikon. He has published numerous (and popular) coffee table books documenting his exploits through the African interior.

Opens: 18 June
Closes: 12 July

PhotoZA, 177 Oxford Road, Upper Level, The Mews, Rosebank (the old CD Warehouse)
Tel: (011) 880 0833 or Reney 083 229 4327
Email: info@photoza.co.za
Website: www.photoza.co.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 11am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 1pm

Light-ness, an exhibition focussing on lights and lighting, showcases the works of an unusual (and unexpected) array of talents. Sculptor Heath Nash creates works in monumental scale and flexible plastic, while Dirk Bauman, a Wits architectural graduate, designs lights inspired by nature. Also exhibiting their work will be Andrew Philips, one of a few master blacksmiths in South Africa, as well as Wilja Reitz, a BFA graduate from the University of Cape Town.

Opens: May 29
Closes: June 23

HH Gallery, shop 3, corner Jan Smuts and Bolton Rd., Parkwood
Tel: (011) 447 3683
Fax: (011) 788 8906
Cell: 082 378 8724
Email: merecohen@hotmail.com
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm; Sat 9am - 1pm

Occupying both downstairs galleries, 'M.O: Trinity Session Artministration' is the trinity session's first solo exhibition, and is being billed as a self-critical 'portrait' and autopsy of the trinity session's work ethic and strategies.

For the uninitiated, the trinity session (sic) is a Johannesburg-based independent contemporary art production team practising in public/social art projects, project initiation and production, curating, research and critical writing. Three multidisciplinary artists direct the activities of the consultancy: Stephen Hobbs, Marcus Neustetter and Kathryn Smith.

Founded at the end of 2000 in direct response to a radical change in how the local artworld was structured, 'M.O: Trinity Session Artministration' presents almost two years' worth of projects. These range from artistic experimentation to applying similar skills to research based and/or commercial projects. The exhibition is divided into two distinctive areas, one focusing more on the idea of 'project artefacts', presented as a multimedia installation that will integrate the viewer in an audio-visual sensation of multi-layered drawn, projected and screen-based content.

In the adjacent gallery, information will be clearly laid out to introduce a range of contemporary art practices that looks at the complex nature of working as artists, curators, administrators and facilitators. Presented as both critical and tongue-in-cheek, these definitions, documents and diagrams can be used to navigate one's way through the exhibition, laying bare the intellectual property that makes up so much of what the trinity session is about.

The M.O of the title refers to both 'modus operandi' and 'mobile office', two requirements developed in response to common needs expressed by a growing network of artists and colleagues. Where possible, the trinity session acts as a facilitator, collaborating with or publicising young artists in various ways (international festivals, broadcast - online and television). This facilitation that takes advantage of building a knowledge base, while taking care of promotion and collaboration.

The exhibition will have a strong educational aspect, including guest speakers and an information handout. Penny Siopis, who wrote about the trinity session for Art South Africa, will speak at the opening of the exhibition.

Opens: 6pm, May 20
Closes: June 21

Standard Bank Gallery, corner Simmonds and Fredericks streets, Johannesburg
Tel: 011 636 4842
E-mail: bjfreemantle@sbic.co.za
Website: www.sbgallery.co.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 8am - 4.30pm, Sat 9am - 1pm

'Art & Urbanisation' examines the profound impact of the urbanisation process on aspiring black South African artists during the period 1940 to 1971.

Bringing together a host of pioneering black artists the show records the transition from rural to city life, as the townships and slums of Johannesburg and Pretoria became home to many black South Africans. Featuring Gerard Sekoto, Andrew Motjuoadi, Lucas Sithole, Gerard Bhengu, George Pemba, Ephraim Ngatane, Durant Sihali, Ezrom Legae, Dumile Feni and Julian Motau, this show presents a selection of gallery acquisitions made over the past two years.

Writing in the catalogue that accompanies this show, Warren Siebrits comments: "These pioneers of black African fine arts in South Africa� have all made a significant contribution towards evolving a unique visual language. Their works capture pictorially the effects of the urbanisation process on the rural population, having made this difficult transition to the urban centres. We see the loss of tribal custom and culture as Western forms of dress and codes of conduct became the norm. The sub-economic conditions of the townships and slums are frozen in time allowing us to ponder the great hardships faced socially, economically and politically by African people in their struggle for self determination."

Opens: Thursday May 8, 6.30pm
Closes: June 29

Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art
140 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg
Tel: 011. 327-0000
Fax: 011. 327-5999
E-mail: seymour23@icon.co.za
Hours: Wednesday to Friday 12 - 6 pm, Saturday 12 - 4 pm

Following its run at the SANG, Brett Murray's 'White Like Me' comes to Jo'burg.

Typically abrasive, Murray manages to raise laughs as well as a few eyebrows in a series of pieces that take a thought-provoking and penetrating satirical look at post-Apartheid society. Many of the works take as their starting point the bland cartoon so typical of old American weeklies like the New Yorker. Twisting these, Murray exposes the vulnerable underbelly of both white and black South African society. Made in his signature mild steel cut-outs and perspex inlay, the works' attractiveness belie their satirical bite.

Murray, who resides in Cape Town, is currently completing a commission for the Cape Town International Convention Centre, which he won with San artist Tuoi Stefaans Samcuia.

Opens: May 21
Closes: June 21

Standard Bank Gallery, corner Simmonds and Fredericks streets, Johannesburg
Tel: 011 636 4842
E-mail: bjfreemantle@sbic.co.za
Website: www.sbgallery.co.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 8am - 4.30pm, Sat 9am - 1pm

'Erotica' presents a selection of works by artists closely connected with the Association of Arts Pretoria. The show will be opened by Professor Ronel Rensburg.

Opens: 6pm, June 1
Closes: June 19

Association of Arts, 173 Market Street, Nieuw Muckleneuk, Pretoria
Tel: (012) 346 3100
Fax: (012) 346 3125
E-mail: artspta@mweb.co.za
Website: www.art.co.za/artspta
Hours: Tues - Fri 9.30am - 5.30pm, Sat 9.30am - 1pm

'Unplugged' is an exhibition of recent work by Anna-Carien Goosen, and will be opened by Peter Binsbergen.

Opens: 6pm, June 8
Closes: June 26

Association of Arts, 173 Market Street, Nieuw Muckleneuk, Pretoria
Tel: (012) 346 3100
Fax: (012) 346 3125
E-mail: artspta@mweb.co.za
Website: www.art.co.za/artspta
Hours: Tues - Fri 9.30am - 5.30pm, Sat 9.30am - 1pm