Archive: Issue No. 136, December 2008

15.01.08 Pieter Hugo at Michael Stevenson
15.01.08 Conrad Botes at Michael Stevenson
11.12.08 William Kentridge at Goodman Gallery Cape
10.12.08 'Big Wednesday' at Whatiftheworld / Gallery
11.12.08 William Kentridge at Iziko SANG
03.12.08 Kate Gottgens at João Ferreira
08.12.08 'Home is my Castle' at Erdmann Contemporary
03.12.08 Greg Marinovich and Leonie Marinovich at Bell-Roberts
03.12.08 Kevin Brand at Bell-Roberts
04.12.08 Pippa Stalker at blank projects
04.12.08 Esther Ernst and Jörg Laue at blank projects
04.12.08 Adrian Kohler at 34 Long
15.12.08 17th Art Salon at Rose Korber Art

27.11.08 'Summer 08/09' at Michael Stevenson
27.11.08 'Bad form' at blank projects
03.12.08 Michaelis Graduate Show at the Michaelis School of Fine Art
12.11.08 Andrew Verster at Iziko SANG
26.11.08 Cathy Abraham and Jenny Schneider at João Ferreira

In the Nollywood series, Pieter Hugo explores the multi-layered reality of the Nigerian film industry. Photographs from the series were included on 'Disguise: The art of attracting and deflecting attention' at Michael Stevenson in May 2008. Hugo has subsequently returned to Nigeria to extend and deepen this body of work, and the series will be published in book form by Prestel in October 2009.

Nollywood is the third largest film industry in the world, releasing between 500 and 1 000 movies each year. It produces movies on its own terms, telling stories that appeal to and reflect the lives of its public: it is a rare instance of self-representation in Africa. The continent has a rich tradition of story-telling that has been expressed abundantly through oral and written fiction, but has never been conveyed through the mass media before. Stars are local actors; plots confront the public with familiar situations of romance, comedy, witchcraft, bribery and prostitution. The narrative is overdramatic, deprived of happy endings, tragic. The aesthetic is loud, violent, excessive; nothing is said, everything is shouted.

In his travels through West Africa, Hugo became increasingly intrigued by this hyperactive industry, in constant production. He compiled a list of the iconic images and scenes that had attracted his attention, and imagined photographing in these settings. Initial attempts to photograph on actual film sets however failed, in Hugo's mind, to capture the intensity of the situations. He decided to take his interpretation of these staged realities into another realm by assembling a team of actors and assistants. He asked them to recreate the stereotypical myths and symbols that characterise Nollywood productions, reproducing the dynamic of movie sets.

In 2008 Hugo was the winner of the KLM Paul Huf Award and the Arles Discovery Award at the Rencontres d'Arles Photography Festival in France. He had solo exhibitions at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool and Ffotogallery in Penarth, Wales. Group shows in 2008 included 'Street & Studio: An urban history of photography' at Tate Modern, London, and 'Make Art/Stop Aids' at the Fowler Museum, UCLA. Hugo was the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art in 2007.

Opens: January 15
Closes: February 21

Conrad Botes' exhibition, titled 'Cain and Abel', is a reflection on the origins of violence, a return to the very first tale of murder as related in the Bible and Qu'ran, as if to grapple with the notion of aggression itself. The story was translated into a gritty black and white comic published in Bitterkomix #15, a detailed allegory of rivalry, jealousy, corruption and lust which forms the point of departure for many of the works on this show.

The comic strip 'Cain and Abel' is reworked here as a series of reverse-glass painted panels, a medium that Botes has made distinctively his own, translating the graphic immediacy of his drawing into paint. In Crime and Punishment and Cain's Lament, horned male figures, their bodies inscribed with symbols, are seen to worship lofty female figures, but the impulse is less one of veneration than covetousness and the desire to possess. Large-scale landscapes form the backdrop for the archetypal figures of two men fighting, and a series of generic portraits of men is entitled Hostile Territory. There is a pervasive atmosphere of violence, horror, grit, a feeling the artist describes as 'like shrapnel under the skin'.

Botes is the co-founder and editor, with Anton Kannemeyer, of Bitterkomix, issue #15 of which was published in 2008. He participated in the third Guangzhou Triennial, China, in 2008; other recent group exhibitions include 'Apartheid: The South African Mirror' at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (2007); 'Africa Comics' at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2007); 'Turbulence' at Hangar-7 in Salzburg, Austria (2007); and the ninth Havana Biennale, Cuba (2006).

Opens: January 15
Closes: February 21

In his first solo exhibition in Cape Town since his celebrated retrospective at Iziko South African National Gallery in 2002, William Kentridge shows a new body of projections, sculptures, drawings and prints at Goodman Gallery Cape. Commissioned to produce a new video for the fire screen of Teatro La Fenice in Venice, Kentridge has developed an extraordinary method of drawing in three dimensions where the image, once set in motion, coalesces into sculptural form.

Kentridge has been hailed as 'one of the most compelling interdisciplinary artists of our time' by Dan Cameron, former Chief Curator of the New Museum in New York. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1955, Kentridge has sought, through his films, drawings, sculptures, graphics and music, theatre and opera projects, to come to terms with the fragmented and fractured nature of his home town and country and with broader global divisions.'

Future exhibitions include a solo show opening at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and touring to MoMA, New York amongst other museums.

Kentridge's three new projections, Breathe, Dissolve and Return, premiered at Teatro La Fenice in Venice on November 27 before being seen at Goodman Gallery Cape in December. His production of Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse is currently touring Italy and France. Kentridge has been included by the Director and Curator, Dan Cameron, in the inaugural biennale of Prospect.1 New Orleans, running until January 18, 2009.

Opens: December 11
Closes: January 24

For its final show of 2008, Whatiftheworld / Gallery will present a major group exhibition entitled 'Big Wednesday', the first in a series of annual summer group shows. This year's exhibition is co-curated by Julia Rosa Clark and Daniel Levi, and features a collection of new works by both resident and associated artists.

The gallery's stable includes up-and-coming young painter Andrzej Nowicki (now based in New York), who will be submitting a series of new watercolours and works on paper in his signature style. Matthew Hindley has recently returned from a successful three-month residency in Berlin, and will be showing a selection of new large scale oil paintings. Michaelis Prize winner Rowan Smith will be submitting two new works, and has just been selected for the exhibition 'Objects of a Revolution' at Gallerie Fiat in Paris in January 2009. In collaboration with Brodie/Stevenson in Johannesburg, Athi-Patra Ruga will be exhibiting selected works from his recent solo exhibition 'ÔøΩ of bugchasers and watussi faghags'.

Other participating artists include: Absa L'Atelier Winner James Webb, Zander Blom (who will be featured at Kucke+Kuckei in Berlin in January), new paintings by Tom Culberg as well as a new work by Dan Halter (MTN New Signatures 2008). Also expect to see selected works by Avant Car Guard, Stuart Bird, Linda Stupart, Liam Lynch, Georgina Gratrix and others.

Opens: December 10
Closes: January 17

William Kentridge's multi-channel projected work entitled I am not me, the horse is not mine is on view at Iziko South African National Gallery. Based on the short story, 'The Nose' (1837) by Nikolai Gogol, and part of the process of developing Kentridge's production of Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose, commissioned for the Metropolitan Opera in 2010, it was first presented to international acclaim at the Biennale of Sydney in June this year.

The work stems from Kentridge's ongoing interest in the roots and trajectory of modernism: a mixture of the absurd, the self-reflective (and the 'self-divided') and the forms of fragmentation that one associates with modernism, its crushing in Russia in the 1930s and the long-term trajectory of the terrors of hierarchy.

Opens: December 11
Closes: March 8

At the heart of Kate Gottgens' latest body of work, 'Asleep inside you', lies a sense of entrapment; a quiet dissonance that emerges in the use of evocative imagery, painted in ash.

Gottgens started photographing the contents of a props warehouse in Voortrekker Road. 'The warehouse stored a surreal assortment of objects - blankets, horns, mannequins, books, radios - a melancholic coming-to-rest of the discarded and forlorn that drew me into the space', she says. At the time, she was reading Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, a book about Auschwitz, in which he writes of a 'grey zone', an ethical no-man's land where the border between guilt and innocence is examined. The ideas and the imagery led Gottgens to a theme of entrapment: physical and psychological; to explore the dynamic between, accused and accuser, victim and perpetrator, prisoner and jailer.

In the translation from in situ reality to the camera, and from camera to canvas, there is a natural process of abstraction. Gottgens thus creates a powerful dissociation of shapes and marks from the things originally represented. Although there are recognisable elements in the paintings - faces, bodies, animals, buildings - these are vehicles symbolising a deeper, internal struggle, depicted in the grey ash that provides the matrix out of which these painterly diagrams arise. Subjects distort, ambiguities shift and a sense of unease is manifested. The ash evokes a realm between worlds, a liminal universe of dreams and nightmares.

Opens: December 3
Closes: December 27

This end-of-year exhibition is now an annual institution at Erdmann Contemporary, in 2008 entitled 'Home is my Castle'. This mixed media group exhibition includes works by KwaZulu-Natal-based artists Bronwen Vaughan-Evans, Themba Shibase, Nontobeko Ntombela and Angela Buckland. The exhibition also introduces work by Johannesburg-based artists Collen Maswanganyi and Diek Grobler. Acclaimed photographer Jurgen Schadeberg, now living and working between France and South Africa, will be represented on the exhibition by previously unseen works.

Opens: December 8
Closes: January 31

'Prospects of Babel' is an exhibition of selected photographic images by Pullitzer Prize winner Greg Marinovich and Leonie Marinovich. These works are the result of their collaboration with three other photographers for a book of the same title. The images explore life in the Democratic Republic of Congo; a country the size of Western Europe which is populated by approximately 250 ethnic groups using over 700 languages and dialects. This is a country of tremendous wealth in natural resources, yet it is one of the poorest countries in the world.

Concentrating on two interlinked themes - money and God - Greg's work captures the sense of the foreboding that underlies almost all interactions in the volatile DRC. Leonie on the other hand captures two aspects of the DRC with her compelling work on mineral diggers as well as street life on the teaming streets of Lubumbashi.

The book will be available for purchase at the gallery.

Opens: December 3
Closes: January 17

This body of work, entitled 'Pieces of 8', references various elements found on PC motherboards (resistors, capacitors, diodes and anodes) to represent fruit-like objects attached to tree or shrub-like forms which are also sourced from electronic systems. Through these works the artist evokes biblical references like the burning bush and the tree of life.

The process of carving and whittling the works from jelutong is very much in evidence. The fruits themselves are lushly painted and positioned against the more subdued foliage of the tree or shrub-like structures. These works are maquettes for a future installation on a much larger scale. Integral to the works are the stands on which they are displayed. The pleasure which the artist derives from the materials he uses and the bringing together of the volume, the planar and the linear aspects of the sculptures, is quite evident from the works themselves.

Brand was the winner of the prestigious 2008 Mercedes Art Award for South African art projects in public spaces.

Opens: December 3
Closes: January 17

Violence is an extremely contentious factor in the playing and marketing of games in the global market. Whilst playing videogames, the player experiences a sense of identification with the character, where not only do they view and empathise with the character onscreen but also emotionally they often become very deeply associated with the avatar. Most players refer to their chosen characters as 'I', perceiving themselves as the perpetrator of the actions taking place in a constructed digital environment. In 'Point Blank', Pippa Stalker inserts herself into the logic of killing in the controversial game 'Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas', and then manipulates that process for aesthetic effect. 'Point Blank' documents her killing of approximately 2000 people. Except that none of these people are real...

Stalker is a Wits alumnus and lecturer, holding a BAFA and MAFA (Digital Animation). Her research negotiates the appropriation of the videogame medium in fine art practice.

Opens: December 4
Closes: December 19

Esther Ernst (Switzerland) and Jörg Laue (Germany) are artists-in-residence of IAAB (International Studio and Exchange Program Bale, Switzerland). The residency is run locally by Pro Helvetia Cape Town in collaboration with blank projects.

At blank projects, the two present works that are the direct result of their experiences of Johannesburg and Cape Town. The main focus of is the relationship between varied modes of production, media and techniques in a compact, homogeneous installation, wherein diverse art works become legible as a complex netting of heterogeneous experiences and points of view.

Ernst's work-in-progress is a large-scale drawing (1,1 x 6,5m), a kind of literary multilayer diary. It condenses cartographic and architectural elements, subjective everyday observations and idiosyncratic motives for drawing in a non-chronological way which accentuates an interior view. Laue's series of comic-like drawings of a 360ÔøΩ-panorama view from a Johannesburg Inner City roof, combined with a video loop of the same view at night present an entirely distant view, which emphasizes the roof as the only easily reachable secure hideaway, and an unavoidably voyeuristic place at the same time.

Ernst lives and works in Berlin and Bale. She completed a Master's degree in 2006 at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. The scope of her production (exhibitions, performances, projects and residencies) reflects her background in fine art and stage design.

Laue studied Applied Theatre Studies at Universität Giessen. Soon afterwards he founded LOSE COMBO in 1994 through which he has since realised live-art-projects on the borderline of stage-performance, visual arts and contemporary music. His solo artistic practice includes sound- and video-installations, writing and lecturing. Laue lives and works in Berlin.

Opens: December 4
Closes: December 19

Adrian Köhler is one of Cape Town’s upcoming generation of sculptors. His second solo show at 34Long Fine Art presents his continuing exploration into transformations of meaning that accompany transformations of material.

His straight-faced skill in painstaking reproduction destabilizes apparent meaning in subtle ways, drawing the viewer into existential questions about what is valued, what is displayed, what is used. So for example, a hammer drill and a model aeroplane engine presented in exploded view, technical manual style, expose embedded concepts of masculinity. A meticulously reproduced chipboard Ming vase, complete with ashes, brings value systems to mind; and everyday objects like firewood, matchsticks and a pencil, carved with careful attention and consummate skill, are elevated from the mundane to the sublime.

Köhler offers no conclusions, only questions that grow more penetrating the more one searches for answers.

Köhler, previously a model-maker for film and advertising (the industries of fakery and deception), now produces art full-time.

Opens: December 2
Closes: January 24

Cape Town art consultant and curator Rose Korber hosts her 17th annual Art Salon this year, with works on show from a selection of 50 leading and emerging contemporary South African artists, working in a variety of media. Since its inception in 1992, the Salon has aimed at presenting a comprehensive and varied overview of the current state of South African art. Artists featured include William Kentridge, Willie Bester, Sam Nhlengethwa, Robert Hodgins, Colbert Mashile, Richard Smith, Kevin Brand, Stephen Inggs, Robert Slingsby, Deborah Bell, Claudette Schreuders, Nina Romm and Wendy Anziska.

In keeping with current international trends this year's Salon will see a subtle shift towards more cutting-edge art, while still maintaining its backbone of 'classics', such as John Kramer, Erik Laubscher and Peter Bonney. Younger artists such as Pamela Stretton, Sanell Aggenbach, Dan Halter, Jaco Sieberhagen, JP Meyer, Nontsikelelo Veleko, Ryan Arenson and Andrzej Nowicki are well represented.

The Salon will also feature photography, ceramics and contemporary beadwork. According to Korber: 'This year's Art Salon promises to have a more focused selection, and is more directed towards the demands of the contemporary collector than ever before'.

Opens: December 15
Closes: January 11

Michael Stevenson's 13th annual summer exhibition will take on a fresh format in the gallery's new space in Woodstock. The exhibition will focus on 10 projects, some by well-known gallery artists including Nicholas Hlobo, Deborah Poynton, Zanele Muholi and David Goldblatt, others by artists showing with the gallery for the first time, such as Paul Edmunds, Andrew Putter and Daniel Naudé.

Hlobo's large-scale sculpture, Umphanda ongazaliyo, the focal point of his solo show for the Momentum series at the ICA in Boston, will be installed in the gallery. Edmunds will show new works that are part of a larger series to be exhibited at the gallery in late 2009. This body of work began with a story Edmunds wrote about growing up on Johannesburg's East Rand in the 70s and 80s, and his relationship with surf and skate culture of the time. The works draw on the shapes, forms, materials and other concerns of this facet of popular culture, which Edmunds describes as 'always seeming to remain just out of my reach, but which have apparently branded themselves indelibly into my memory'.

Putter, in a new series of photographs, continues to explore the term 'Hottentots Holland', which was the starting point for his Spier Contemporary award-winning video installation Secretly I Will Love You More. Putter's photographs meticulously recreate 17th-century Dutch still-life paintings, but in these arrangements the flowers, vessels, rocks and insects are all indigenous to the pre-colonial Cape. A group of new self-portraits by Youssef Nabil will be exhibited to accompany the release of his major monograph, just published by Hatje Cantz. A new series of portraits of lesbian women by Muholi will also be shown, as well as works in Goldblatt's ongoing Intersections Intersected series, including his poignant image of the new stadium in Green Point, Cape Town.

Opens: November 27
Closes: January 10

'Bad form' is curated by Kathryn Smith and Christian Nerf and will be the inaugural show at blank projects' new space in Woodstock.

Opens: November 27
Closes: January 31

An increasingly important event on the local and national arts calendar, the Graduate Show at the Michaelis School of Fine Art is a unique opportunity to view the emerging talent graduating from one of South Africa's top art schools and to get a first glimpse of the new face of art that will, if previous shows are anything to go by, dominate the market.

Many past graduates have gone on to have significant solo shows and gain international exposure. Institutional and private collectors make a point of attending the show to see what new and fresh faces may be out there.

This year the graduate show will be opened as part of the launch of the Daniel Gordon Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts. This institute will include Music, Dance, Fine Art, Drama, Film and Creative Writing, and will generate projects in all these areas, encouraging, in particular, interdisciplinarity. The Graduate show will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue that will contextualise the work on display.

Opens: December 3
Closes: December 19

'Past/Present' is a survey of works by Andrew Verster who turned 71 this year. The exhibition's point of departure is 1994 - the start of democracy in South Africa - and shows work produced from that time to the present. The artist places significance on this particular period as it has been a milestone for personal and political freedom, mainly due to the new Constitution which grants equal rights to all. Speaking as a gay man, Verster claims that 'For the first time in my life I became legal.' His work reflects a sense of liberation and joyousness which seems to have recently burst forth.

Curated by Carol Brown, 'Past/Present' is a multi-media exhibition consisting of paintings, drawings, stage sets, costume designs and wax panels. The intention is to showcase the diversity and consistent creativity of one of the country's most prolific and respected artists.

Opens: November 12
Closes: March 22, 2009

Cathy Abraham has produced a multi-dimensional body of work over the past year, culminating in the collaborative exhibition 'Naked'. Primarily using a classic Hasselblad camera, Schneider produces photographic images which she makes available to Abraham. Her carefully-chosen and sensitive black and white nature photographs are digitally printed onto canvas and subtly sepia-toned. Out of and onto these images of rock, water and trees, Abraham layers multiple films of muted glazes, creating figures that merge diaphanously with their natural environment and become indissolubly part of the landscape. The glazed bodies meld with the bark and twisted tree forms, irreducibly part of them; elsewhere, they seamlessly waft through the very fabric of rock and seawater: the sinuous crack in a submerged rock is a human spine; the mottled skin of the figure is that of the lichen-encrusted, ever-changing seabed.

Filled with nuance and suggestion, embracing notions of light and dark in both metaphorical and aesthetic senses, and employing the naked body as a vehicle through which to explore such themes as truth, courage, personal growth, honesty and intrinsic value, the body of work as a whole evokes a hidden transcendence. Here, the nakedness of the figures is not a political statement, but a deeply felt internal truth. It functions as a metaphor for Abraham's core, her very essence. At times, an oddly contorted pose that nevertheless makes physical and psychic sense, a human figure blends and merges with its surroundings. Skin becomes an ephemeral garment.

Opens: November 26
Closes: December 20