2.06.06 João Ferreira Gallery at the Liste Art Fair
2.06.06 Penny Siopis in Belfast

5.05.06 Gregg Smith in Belgium
5.05.06 Gregg Smith in France
5.05.06 Hylton Nel in Dublin
5.05.06 Mandy Lee Jandrell in Southampton
5.05.06 'There & Back. Africa' at La Casa Encendida, Madrid

2.03.06 'Black, Brown, White: South African Photography' in Vienna
2.03.06 William Kentridge in Italy

THE AMERICAS

2.06.06 Zwelethu Mthethwa in New York

THE MIDDLE EAST

2.06.06 South African artists in Bethlehem

FAR EAST

5.05.06 'Africa Remix' opens at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo
5.05.06 'Off the Record' in Tokyo
 

After Julia Rosa Clark's sell out show at last year's Liste young artists' fair in Basel, João Ferreira Gallery returns there this year with work by Clark, Ruth Sacks, Bridget Baker and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt. These irreverent young contemporaries will undoubtedly be met with enthusiasm at this year's international art exposition. Liste takes place at the same time as the Basel Art Fair and is regarded as a springboard for galleries and artists to get onto one of Europe's most prestigious art events.

Opens: June 13
Closes: June 18

'Migrations' is part of a multi-stranded project being developed in Belfast exploring different experiences of migration. The show will will feature major works on the subject of migration by well-known contemporary artists and researchers including Anthony Haughey, Andrea Lange, Breda Beban, Penny Siopis and Terence Wright.

Penny Siopis is to show 1997's My Lovely Day , a piece which combines spliced sequences of 8mm home movies that the artist's mother shot in the 1950s and 1960s in South Africa with sound and visual text which tell an elemental story of migration, displacement and exile. The narrative text is that of of Siopis' maternal grandmother telling her grandchildren of her emotional and literal journeys between Europe, Greece and South Africa in the early part of last century. The moment of her telling is apartheid South Africa, as are the scenes captured on film, yet her references to social turmoil and catastrophe are those of an earlier time and another place. The quality of the found footage - the jumps, sprocket tracks, scratches, light flares, camera movements, frail focus and intrusion of peripheral images - dramatises the quality of the film as artefact and in a way stand for the fragmentary nature of memory.

Opens: June 15
Closes: August 25

Gregg Smith presents a new video installation which will be produced by and shown at the arts development centre, FLACC, Centrum voor Kunsten en Beelcultuur in Genk, Belgium. Cape Town-born Smith has been resident in France for a few years, before which he was living in the Netherlands.

Opens: May 18
Closes: June 18

Gregg Smith is taking part in the exhibition 'Marcher' at the Maison des Arts Georges Pompidou, in Cajarc, France. The exhibition is curated by Martine Michard and includes works by the likes of Francis Alys, Mircea Cantor, Hamish Fulton and Stalker.

Opens: March18
Closes: June 11

Peter Ting, homeware designer for Asprey, London, has brought together an international cast of highly respected and collected ceramic makers, Hylton Nel included, in 'To Hold' at the Farmleigh Gallery in Dublin. As the exhibition title suggests, the works are all vessels associated with containing, carrying and holding.

Opens: April 27
Closes: June 10

Capetonian Mandy Lee Jandrell shows photographs in 'Green' at the Winchester Gallery in Southampton. This is an exhibition of contemporary photographic and video works in which the colour green figures prominently, with its inevitable connotations of the environment, the rural landscape, and the dubious notion of a 'green and pleasant land', which sits uneasily alongside questions of heritage, ownership, access and use.

Jandrell's large scale photographs reflect the 'themed' environment increasingly popular in the UK and elsewhere. Safari parks, botanical gardens and nature trails are all part of a highly controlled rural landscape. Jandrell explores these territories across Europe and beyond to create images that are comical and curious: the rhinoceros strolling through green English parkland, or the plastic Tyrannosaurus Rex looming aggressively in the traditional green of a stately garden. These images invite us to question the cultural filters through which we view the countryside.

Opens: May 10
Closes: June 8

In the wake of 'Africa Remix', the Danielle Tilkin-curated show, 'There & Back. Africa' invites viewers 'to undertake a two-way journey, from South to North, and examine the similarities and differences between the work of those artists who emigrated and the work of those who stayed'. It also interrogates the concept of what is 'African', with work representing several generations of artists who have penetrated international circuits in recent years.

The wide ranging show includes a substantial number of works from many of the artists - for instance, Moshekwa Langa is represented by nine drawings, paintings or collages, and the video projection Where do I Begin in which the artist has focused his camera on to the patient, weary feet of people in a bus queue stepping on to a bus. Romuald Hazoumé from Benin shows photographs which demonstrate the infinite variety of uses to which old gasoline cans are put, and stacks a mound of them in a pile which looks like a heap of skulls.

Tilkin is a curator who knows her territory, and judging by the fine catalogue, the visual dialogues set up by the work in this exhibition bear witnessing.

Participating artists are: Anmar Bouras (Algeria), Frédéric Bruly Bouabre, (Ivory Coast), Mbongeni Richman Buthelezi (South Africa); Soly Cissé (Senegal); Viyé Diba (Senegal); Modou Dieng (Senegal); Moustapha Dimé (Senegal); Touhami Ennadre (Morocco); Frances Goodman (South Africa); Romuald Hazoume (Benin); William Kentridge (South Africa); Bodys Isek Kingelez (DRC); Abdoulaye Konaté (Mali); Moshekwa Langa (South Africa); Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria); Marie Blanche Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso); Miguel Petchovsky (Angola); Chéri Samba (DRC); Djibril Sy (Senegal); Emeka Udemba (Nigeria).

Opens: March 31
Closes: June 11

In 'Black, Brown, White...' at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, South African photo artists of various generations, who see themselves not as political documenters but rather as observers of everyday life, will show thematic series of their works which represent diverse facets of a country between apartheid and new departures. Work included ranges from David Goldblatt's famous 'Kwa Ndebele' series, which treated the compulsory commuting of black workers from the townships to the centre of Pretoria in the days of the passport law, to Omar Badsha's 'Imperial Ghetto', a study of everyday life among the Indian population of the harbour city of Durban.

Also participating are Pieter Hugo, Thando Mama, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Jo Ractliffe, Berni Searle and Andrew Tshabangu.

Opens: February 24
Closes: June 18

Kentridge shows alongside other art superstars, including Kiki Smith and Jake and Dinos Chapman, in the 'Biella Prize for Engraving 2006' at the Museo del Territorio in Biella, Italy. The exhibition represents the work of 34 contemporary artists from a number of different countries including Argentina, Austria, China, Denmark, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Israel, Mexico, Holland, Palestine, Poland, the US and South Africa.

The aim of the Biella Prize, which takes place every three years, has traditionally been to give prominence to contemporary printmaking. It takes an international outlook and showcases a broad spectrum of techniques, from woodcuts to photogravure, thereby demonstrating the continuing vitality of the graphic arts as an instrument of expression. The theme of the exhibition this year, 'Art in the Age of Anxiety', is a critical reflection on the social and political realities of our times. 'Insecurity, anger, escape from a painful reality, satirical criticism, idealisation of the past, an interest in ecology, a focus on the contingent, the informal and the worthless, the numbing of feeling, dystopia, regeneration, extinction and chaos are among the themes of the artists I have selected for the show. Consciously or unconsciously, artists mirror the world. They are sensitive barometers of our time, expressing opinions, observing its complexities and displaying our ambivalences.' writes Jeremy Lewison in the catalogue.

Opens: March 19
Closes: June 4

Zwelethu Mthethwa's well known and increasingly well traveled Gold Mine series of photographs will be shown at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York this month. These recent photographs retain the artist's signature realism while showcasing his remarkable photographic and lyrical eye.

Opens: May 25
Closes: June 24

South African artists Alison Williams, Sonya Rademeyer and Miss C. Johnson are some of the 200 artists participating in this month's 'Self Portrait: A Show for Bethlehem' at the Al Kahf Art Gallery at the International Centre of Bethlehem. The show is focused on using new media to explore notions of self portraiture, and is curated by internet artist and curator Agricola de Cologne.

Opens: July 7
Closes: July 30

The mega show of contemporary art from the continent of African and the diaspora, 'Africa Remix', opens at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo on the fourth leg of a world tour which opened at the Kunstpaleis in Düsseldorf and continued to London's Hayward Gallery and the Pompidou in Paris.

Under the artistic direction of Simon Njami and a team of international curators and featuring the production of 88 artists showing work made over the past 10 years, the show also includes furniture design, music, literature and fashion.

South African born artists make up 14 of the total - Jane Alexander, Andries Botha, Wim Botha, Willie Bester, Tracey Derrick, Marlene Dumas, David Goldblatt, Jackson Hlungwani, William Kentridge, Moshekwa Langa, Santu Mofokeng, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Rodney Place, Tracey Rose and Guy Tillim.

Marlene Dumas' work is a sober grid of ink and wash portraits of blindfolded or hooded figues, Jane Alexander shows her African Adventure mixed media installation, Tracey Derrick presents a commissioned series of photographs of Western Cape farm workers, Tracey Rose is represented by her seminal video, TKO, in which cameras concealed in a punching bag record her attack on the bag, and Jackson Hlungwani exhibits one of his majestic carved wooden figures.

The exhibition is divided into three categories, with somewhat unoriginal titles - History & Identity, City & Land, and Body & Soul. This may not have been the curator's fault, however. Njami's original title for the entire exhibition was not the one the show now carries. His choice was the much more interesting 'Chaos and metamorphosis', but institutional pressure insisted on the inclusion of 'Africa' in the title.

In London, some critics took the attitude that while what was on offer was undoubtedly art from Africa, it could not be called 'contemporary' in terms of the British art world's understanding of the term. In Tokyo, the Mori is under the direction of David Elliott, curator of the first major show of art from South Africa in Britain, with his 'Art from South Africa' at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1990.

Elliott's framing of the show for a Japanese audience will, one imagines, be an important factor in the reception of the show in Tokyo. Next stop for 'Africa Remix': the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Opens: May 27
Closes: August 31

Timed to coincide with the opening of 'Africa Remix' at the Mori, is a project much lighter in weight and more ephemeral in concept: 'Off the Record', devised by Belgian artist Eric van Hove, now based in Tokyo, will hi-jack X-Cube storage lockers found in subway stations in the city.

These lockers are opened not by a key but by utilising a cell phone number designated by the storer. Invited artists will make an artwork to fit into one of these lockers, which measures 30 x 30 x 60 cm. An SMS to a friend inviting him/her to come and view the artwork will set the process in motion. The invitee will then invite someone else in turn, setting the new cell phone number as the new code. 'Think of Chinese whispers', says Van Hove.

Participating artists include Lara Baladi (Egypt), Federico Herrero (Costa Rica), John di Stefano (New Zealand) and Sue Williamson (South Africa).

Will the artwork be stolen by a viewer? Will the next invited viewer take the trouble to pay a visit? Will an earthquake destroy Tokyo and all the artworks? The agenda is open.

More information? http://www.transcri.be/projects/offtherecord/downloads.html

May 2006 - until such time as the project ends itself.