Exploring the mutability of traditions, at the Standard Bank Gallery
The Standard Bank Gallery presents three diverse and engaging exhibitions.
The highlight must be the curatorial team of Anitra Nettleton, Julia Charlton and Fiona Rankin-Smith's 'Engaging Modernities: Transformations of the commonplace', an exhibition of commonplace African objects. As the curators assert: "When different cultures meet, values are inevitably transformed and inverted. The west has long raided the rest of the world's cultures for their perceived 'exotic' qualities, and the resulting cultural collisions have also impacted on those raided cultures. Since pre-colonial times African societies too have drawn on cultures from far and wide to create new symbols."
Working from this simple premise, that there has been a reciprocity of influence, 'Engaging Modernities' displays a number of everyday objects that were created and exist in the cracks, in-between strict tradition and high modernity. "They engage with the modern world and appear engaging to the viewer familiar with the spaces from which they draw their material and images," the curators assert.
Some objects use the detritus of consumer culture, such as discarded medicine vials, metal snuff boxes, and used rubber gaskets, as metonymic equivalents for more traditional materials. Others refigure aspects of modern dress or objects of everyday use, for example waistcoats or tennis racquets, by incorporating or representing them in objects which have traditional uses. Still others, such as plastic front aprons and capes, remake traditional items using materials and images drawn from modern western sources.
In all these objects the west finds itself mirrored in surprising ways. Yet to the indigenous makers and users of these items, they are powerful statements of their belonging to the modern world of a cash economy, of safety pins, locks, keys, electric lights, tin cans and rayon or lurex thread. Images which invoke particular forms of power such as guns and telegraph poles, national flags, judges' wigs and kings' crowns are incorporated into the repertoires of African political symbols. Objects made in traditional or imported techniques grapple with contemporary issues such as Aids, imaging the realities of African modernity.
The objects on this exhibition remind the viewer of the flexibility and frailty of cultural constructions of identity, and the 'porousness' and mutability of traditions. But they also open up the vistas in which purposeful modern uses for objects are found, where an apparent whimsy masks a complete engagement with the ironies of global culture.
'Decorating the damaged' is the name of Gina Waldman's show, downstairs at the Standard Bank Gallery. Waldman's labour intensive and excessively repetitive art deals with "an inner, psychological human condition of the fa�ade, the mask, perfection, idealism and beauty". Sin her attempts to make 'beautiful' things out of the ugly - hence the title 'decorating the damaged' - Waldman attempts to turn the unsanitary, or that which is considered peripheral (or deemed 'low' art), into the sublime and the beautiful.
Art that intended as a kind of anaesthetic, to be beautiful, but to encourage a catharsis as well, Waldman's production invokes a particular catharsis for the artist, which is important to communicate her belief in the therapeutic and healing potential of the creative process.
'Tying the Knot: Courtship & Marriage in southern Africa' is a new permanent exhibition of traditional Zulu and Ndebele wedding regalia worn by women during courtship and engagement.
Opens: January 27
Closes: March 6
