Disturbance: Contemporary Art from Scandinavia and South Africa at the Johannesburg Art Gallery
by Anthea Buys
The allure of foreignness has preoccupied artists, storytellers and their ilk since the notion of paradise first slithered beyond human grasp into the fabled undergrowth of Eden. To jump fig-leaf clad to a historically more transparent period, the 'discovery' of geographically or intellectually uncharted territories has been associated with inspiration, artistic productivity and enlightenment throughout the Modern era.
'Disturbance', an exhibition of works by contemporary Scandinavian and South African artists, recalls this phenomenon, since it represents an encounter between polarities - or a polar encounter - literalised, and packed into the downstairs exhibition space at JAG. The chief difference between this meeting and its early Modern prototypes, however, is that Africa now plays host rather than resource. Dialogues about identity and dislocation replace dictations, or so goes the curatorial mandate, and both parties are entitled to reflect on one another without the dominance of either.
Curated by Clive Kellner and Maria Fidel Regueros, 'Disturbance' is divided into contributions from artists from Nordic states and South Africa. Although there is no glaring curatorial hierarchy amongst the works, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland seem to be lumped together as one exotic arctic entity, while South Africa is represented with relative variety and subtlety. Of course, this is a function of convenience, the curators being JAG staff and the bare fact that few South African viewers are likely to be familiar with Nordic cultural nuances. Still, this unevenness provokes questions about the validity of this particular alliance beyond its novelty value.
A theme that pervades the exhibition is the failure of reason. In certain works, like Eija-Liisa Ahtila's video installation titled The Present, psychosis brings on the marginalisation of afflicted subjects from common society where conventions of 'sanity', self-reflexivity and productivity are prerequisites for inclusion in a community. In other works, transgressions of the limits of the rational order are metaphorised. Athi-Patra Ruga's series of photographs Even I Exist in Embo depicts Ruga's Injibhabha character - a stylised black sheep bodysuit - as a disruptive presence in pristine Swiss landscapes. For Ruga this series points to the anxiety incited when the presence of the outsider is witnessed in a familiar landscape.
This indistinct anxiety seems Heideggerian: an anxiety in the face of the nothing, or if that were too definitive, an anxiety in the face of an ellipsis. Danish artist Astrid Kruse Jensen's Hypernatural, a series of photographs of public swimming pools in Iceland, is alarming precisely because the night-time scenes captured are so empty. The pools, which during the day teem with begoggled Icelanders, are entirely abandoned. They are apocalyptic symbols of solipsism, of the dizzying edge of the self beyond which nothing is truthfully sensible without the projection of self, and because no human presences populate the images, they lack anchors from which to project that anything is at all.
In other works such grave timbres sprout absurdity. Mika Ronkainen's documentary Huutjat - Screaming Men follows the escapades of an all-male Finnish screaming choir, who travels across Europe to perform the national anthems of host countries. Huutjat's pieces are arranged to be shouted, spoken and whispered rather than 'sung' in any traditional sense of the word, creating a live choral cacophony that brings to mind sports fanaticism, riots and hysterical nationalism (the French objected vehemently to having La Marseillaise shouted at the Museé de l'Art Modern in Paris). The performances are critiques of all of these, and the obsessions that inform them, yet Ronkainen's work soars above the sombre tones that proliferate in much of the rest of the exhibition.
Huutjat ÔøΩ Screaming Men pre-empts a similar work by Norwegians Toril Goksyoyr and Camilla Martens entitled This is no Dream. This work is a short 'documentary opera' about the dreams of pupils at Barnato Park High School in Berea, Johannesburg. Two classes from the high school were given the task of writing a libretto after the artists had interviewed Norwegian and South African school-goers about the dreams they have at night and their thoughts on the futures of their respective home countries. Performed at the opening of the exhibition by the Barnato Park School Choir, the libretto strings together a selection of these short dream narratives and is set to a score of shouting and speech by composer Lars Petter Hagan. As the piece reaches its final crescendo, accounts of night-time dreams slip into expressions of the pupils' wishes for a safe, peaceful South Africa which they are integral in creating.
This is no Dream is the only true instance of Nordic-South African collaboration on the exhibition, and hints at the potential fruitfulness had the time and budget been available to facilitate specific collaborations between artists from opposite ends of the planet. Ultimately, despite the overlap of a cluster of motifs, the proposed connections between South African and Scandinavian artistic practices are, in this instance at least, rather superficial and hung up on the notion of 'contemporariness' and its vocabulary of buzzwords. Still, fraternising with the Scandinavians appears to have provided a pretext for curatorial breathing space, and a respite from the socio-political drudgery that encumbers so much new South African art.
Anthea Buys is a Johannesburg-based writer who works for the Mail & Guardian as an art journalist
Opens: October 26
Closes: February 28
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