Archive: Issue No. 111, November 2006

5.11.06 Val Lafon and Leonie van der Loo at Hyde Park Gallery
5.11.06 Tinus Horn at Upstairs @ Bamboo
5.11.06 Anni Snyman at University of Johannesburg Art Gallery
5.11.06 Zwelethu Mthethwa at Everard Read
5.11.06 Leon Radegonde at Afronova
5.11.06 Stephen Inggs at Art on Paper Gallery
5.11.06 Alison Kearney at The Premises
5.11.06 Manfred Zylla at Gallery Momo
5.11.06 Aaron and Debbie Cloete, and Sybrand Wiechers at gordart Gallery
5.11.06 David Gerstein at Rabbi Harris Community Centre
5.11.06 'Women: Photography and New Media - Imaging the Self and Body through Portraiture' at JAG
5.11.06 Sam Nhlengethwa at Goodman Gallery
5.11.06 Ulricke Lourens at Fried Contemporary Art Gallery and Studio
5.11.06 'Distant Relatives/Relative Distance' at the Standard bank Gallery
5.11.06 Jacki McInnes at Constitution Hill
5.11.06 Bronwyn Millar at Obert Contemporary Melrose Arch
5.11.06 Berni Searle at the Johannesburg Art Gallery
5.11.06 Society of Photographers at the Premises

6.10.06 Clive van den Berg at Goodman Gallery

 

Anni Snyman, in association with Janine Lewis, Erica Luttich, Katty Vandenberghe and Retief van Wyk, presents a show of work entitled 'Memory of Water'. Snyman, who taught creative processes for much of the 1990s, was a 2006 recipient of the Ampersand Fellowship, and spent August of this year at the Foundation's New York residence.

The show explores Snyman's idea that water retains the memories of its journey around the globe. The show highlights the paradox between this idea and the common notion that water functions to cleanse, to absolve us of guilt and wrongdoing. The opening of the show will include a performance, animation screenings and meditation on water.

Opens: November 1
Closes: November 22

Veteran political cartoonist and portraitist Tinus Horn, whose previous occupations include working for the now defunct yet pivotal Vrye Weekblad, presents a show of paintings at Upstairs @ Bamboo this month. 'The Law of the Jungle' explores Horn's acerbic sense of humour and satire, and operates interestingly in a fine art context. Fantastic figures exist in a high-key colour world, poking fun at various aspects of contemporary society.

Opens: October 31
Closes: November 8

'All You Need To Know Is Never Enough' explores existing norms and the perceived truths they enforce. This show of paintings, digital prints and sculptures by Aaron and Cloete alongside Sybrand Wiechers, seeks to challenge these truths to find a personal, individual code. Debbie Cloete has made digital prints and paintings based on her seven year old son Aaron, exploring the influences on his world and his own development of a personal iconography. Wiechers has made sculptures of the child's drawings, giving real 3-dimensional form to his imaginings, and thereby exploring the interstices and gulfs between their two modes of seeing the world. The show is essentially about learning and teaching, and about Debbie Cloete's experiences as a parent.

Opens: November 5
Closes: November 25

One of the highlights of our Founding Editor Sue Williamson's important 1980s book Resistance Art in South Africa was the section on the work and philosophies of Manfred Zylla. Recently Zylla has seen something of an upsurge in visibility, and this show, his second solo at Gallery Momo continues this trend. 'Mixed Messages' is an exhibition of woodcuts, consisting of two separate series of images - 'News Mix' from 2004 and 'Friends' from 2005/6. The former takes inspiration from photographs from newspapers, and is made up of juxtapositions of a variety of seemingly disparate images. With these images Zylla explores the idea that everything is connected: 'If something happens in America, or in my home town', he says, 'it can have an effect here.'

'Friends' explores the artist's personal relationships with those around him: the large-scale woodcuts are in the form of portraits, produced in a four-colour woodcut process.

Opens: November 4
Closes: November 24

Taking his cue from the paintings of George Pemba and Gerard Sekoto in which townships and township life were 'monumentalised', Sam Nhlengethwa's new solo is entitled 'Townships Re-Visited'. In this show, Nhlengethwa seeks to explore how life in South Africa's townships has changed over the years, and how the characters of townships in various parts of South Africa differ. Nhlengethwa conducted research by visiting townships all around the country, from Gauteng and the Free State to the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. He found that the apparent differences in character were underpinned by a similarity in infrastructure, and the works explore these ideas.

In this show Nhlengethwa has moved away from working on canvas, and has instead employed his hallmark collage and montage techniques on paper. He has also moved increasingly to using his own photographic sources, which serve as direct connection to his research.

Opens: November 11
Closes: December 2

An exhibition that explores the work of women artists working in photography and new media opens at the Johannesburg Art Gallery this month. Specifically, the show focuses on works that image the self and body through portraiture, dealing with identity and mirroring the self. Featuring work by established and emerging artists, the works on show are drawn in part from the JAG's collection. Artists represented include Bridget Baker, Zanele Muholi, Usha Seejarim and Nontsikelelo Veleko.

Opens: November 9
Closes: February 28

Recently returned form a three month residency in Melbourne, Australia, Alison Kearney presents a show of work that interrogates notions of value that underpin acts of exchange. 'About Context: an Exploration of Value in Four Parts' was sparked by something she saw in Australia. During her stay there, Kearney came across an authentic kitchen-set from the soap opera Neighbours in the Melbourne Museum, under the section entitled 'Australian History'.

The show was created in four parts: parts One and Two of this exhibition include the documentation of a series of performances that happened inside and outside the Melbourne Museum. During the performances members of the public were invited to swap anything from Kearney's collection for an item of theirs: they were allowed to take something out if they put something in. The fourth part continues this exploration in South Africa: titled 'Put Something in to Take Something', this part of the show invites gallery visitors to bring any small object to exchange in the gallery space.

Opens: November 4
Closes: November 18

Photographic artist Stephen Inggs presents a show of new work at Art on Paper Gallery in Johannesburg this month. Representing a conceptual shift away from his previous work, 'Silentium' broadens his focus from exploring the sacredness of everyday objects to searching for a similar spirituality in the 'seemingly empty' Karoo landscape. Inggs says of his working process: 'The visual intensity of the land and its corresponding air of isolation provided the starting point for my engagement with the Karoo and simultaneously with personal questions around the meaning and impact of solitude as a way of being. I wanted to capture the emotional and spiritual register of the landscape of the Karoo, where - in a sense - time seems to stand still.' Through the very particular handmade quality of his work, which foregrounds the physical and tactile, Inggs seeks to highlight the importance of re-engaging with the overlooked object.

Opens: November 4
Closes: November 23

Painters Val Lafon and Leonie van der Loo present a show at the Hyde Park Gallery this month. Entitled 'Points of Departure' the show explores the preoccupations of each artist, and reveals their respective journeys with the medium. Lafon's characteristic style sees her immersing spectral, attenuated figurative suggestions in complex, often treacherous-looking landscapes. Subtle dramas of desire and searching play themselves out in spaces that seem to consume them.

Van der Loo's contemporary, quirky takes on traditional conventions of portraiture are filled with a mercurial yet tangible intimacy. Favouring a bold, often impasto approach to paint application, her technique underscores the physicality of her subjects. She speaks of a desire to trace moments of intensity thought through facial expression.

Opens: October 26
Closes: November 5

Pretoria-based multimedia artist Ulricke Lourens presents her MA(FA) exhibition entitled 'Reconstructed Constriction' at Fried Contemporary Art Gallery and Studio. The works on show deal with the impact of 'waist training' on the female body. Waist training is the act of wearing a corset for the purpose of body modification. The show provides an ironic commentary on the extremes of body modification that exist in the fashion and health industries. The works on show range from video to photographs and video stills.

Says Lourens' press release: 'By performing waist training and documenting it, as part of the creative process, a comment is made on identity, but it is an identity that is disguised and screened. As such the waist trained torso becomes an iconic representation for femininity. By mimicking the elaborate and painful processes which women use to compel the body to conform to a shape they do not have at the beginning of the process, the performer deploys sexuality in such a way that what is visible is construed as absurd, extremely uncomfortable and shocking by the viewer.'

Opens: November 15
Closes: November 25

Painter and photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa shows a series of new works at the Everard Read Gallery this month.

Opens: November 2
Closes: November 19

Afronova and the French Institute of South Africa present a show of work by Leon Radegonde entitled 'Salanm Sorti Ladig'. Radegonde is considered to be a leading artist in the Seychelles and Indian Ocean area, and will be showing a variety of sculptures and mixed media works in this, his first solo exhibition in South Africa. The work reveals an expansion of the ideas, techniques and motifs explored in earlier assemblages, collages and paintings. The starting point for all his sculpture is the found object, just as found paper, 'unloved, distressed and discarded' is the starting point for his two dimensional work. The opening of this show will be followed by an 'Artist's Dinner' at Gramadoelas Restaurant.

Opens: November 3
Closes: November 25

Renowned Israeli painter, sculptor and draughtsman, David Gerstein attempts through his work to break down the existing barriers between the work of art and its audience, by creating enchanted yet simple straightforward images, which render sometimes intimate, dream-like, naïve scenes and at other times a cinematic, large scale, choreographed reality. His work endeavours to challenge the limitations of two dimensional painting by extending into the sculptural. The works explore the full gambit of genres, from still life and landscape to human activity, yet always retain a sense of the biographical. Gerstein has exhibited in Israel, Europe, the UK and the USA, and his sculptures have been installed in public places in Israel, France and the UK.

Opens: November 5
Closes: November 19

During November, 'Distant Relatives/Relative Distance', curated by Michael Stevenson Contemporary, comes to the Standard Bank Gallery. The exhibition brings together six artists with African connections who now live in either European or American cities. The common thread is that these are all artists who are 'displaced' persons, dislocated from their countries or places of origin, as is common in context of globalisation. The show defines these artists as 'Afropolitans' rather than persons with a clearly defined sense of nationhood, home and self: they belong to 'no single geography, but (are) at home in many'.

Works on show range in media and aesthetic sensibility, and deal with issues around Aids, power, exchange between the West and Africa, identity, femininity, Hurricane Katrina and modernism.

Opens: November 1
Closes: December 2

A site-specific exhibition of sculptural works by Jacki Mc Innes is to be shown at the Women's Jail, Constitution Hill, as part of the national '16 Days of Activism' campaign. This is billed as a 'thematic extension on previous work where the artist explored whether the lived experience of South African women had changed since they had obtained the right to opt for legal abortions.' 'Patterns in Silence' endeavours to investigate the social and psychological ramifications specifically associated with infanticide.

By the very nature of the subject, the exhibition touches on marginalised groups most severely affected by poverty, alcoholism, unemployment and sexual abuse. Deliberately avoiding sensationalist imagery, McInnes employs kitchen knives, salt, steel and lead, exploring her ideas through metaphors.

Opens: November 24
Closes: December 10

Following on the success of her 2005 show 'Selfish', Bronwyn Millar presents a new show of work at Obert Contemporary. 'The Devil I Know' explores Millar's teenage experiences of learning to disguise herself. She states that she would apply make-up to the point where she looked 'airbrushed', hiding the idiosyncrasies of her own face under a mask of disguise. The show looks at the roles of masks and altered identity.

Opens: October 19
Closes: November 9

Renowned performance, video and photographic artist Berni Searle presents a show of work at the Johannesburg Art Gallery this month. 'Approach' recently showed at Michael Stevenson in Cape Town. Searle will host a walkabout and a lecture at 11am and 1pm, November 21.

Opens: November 19
Closes: February 28

The Society of Photographers, an international organisation which was formed at the end of 2005, is launching an international exhibition at the Premises. The 'TEN' show and book launch is the culmination of a process in which photographic artists were asked to submit entries for possible inclusion in the show and book. The resultant final selection of 10 will be announced at the opening of the show, which will in turn travel to London and New York. Our own Guy Tillim and Jo Ractliffe, amongst a host of noteworthy internationals, served as judges in this process .

Opens: November 23
Closes: November 25

Established and important South African artist Clive van den Berg presents a show of work at the Goodman Gallery this month. 'Skin and Ghosts' incorporates some works that were shown at New York's St John the Divine Cathedral as part of the 'Personal Affects' show from 2004, dealing with concepts of human frailty and the humbling effects of ageing, and the attendant re-negotiations of desire, beauty and strength. In particular, some of these works explore different ways of materialising skin, and energise the relationship between interior and exterior. Here van den Berg explores a conception of the body as radically porous rather than contained and integral. Elsewhere, works delight in the sensual qualities of skin and muscle.

Works on show range from large scale mixed media sculptures and sculptures carved from soft wood, to smaller paintings and monoprints. As is characteristic of his output, van den Berg explores the visual and tactile qualities of his chosen materials, and the works reflect highly considered decisions relating to light, space and structure.

Opens: October 14
Closes: November 4