Archive: Issue No. 130, June 2008

8.06.08 David Koloane at the Goodman Gallery
8.06.08 Mercedes-Benz Award at the Pretoria Art Museum
8.06.08 Mimi Cherono Ng'ok at the Market Photo Workshop
8.06.08 'Ars Moriendi' at the Johannesburg Art Gallery
8.06.08 Anima at Resolution Gallery
8.06.08 Reshma Chhiba at Art Extra
8.06.08 Bronwen Findlay at David Krut Projects
8.06.08 Brendon Cahill at Artspace
8.06.08 Olaf Bisschoff at Rooke Gallery
8.06.08 Pall Stefansson at Gordart
8.06.08 Ellen Papciak-Rose and John Hodgkiss at Gordart Second Gallery
8.06.08 Carla Liesching at Gordart

11.05.08 Pieter Hugo at Standard Bank Gallery
11.05.08 'Aftermath' at Art Extra
11.05.08 Pieter Hugo at Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary
11.05.08 Alfred Thoba at Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary

David Koloane's first solo show in five years opens at the Goodman Gallery. 'Revival' includes recent work which continues his exploration of urban spaces and their diverse inhabitants, exploring issues around urban dwellers, dark claustrophobic spaces, morning traffic, Johannesburg's animal inhabitants and the grime and detritus of the sprawling metropolis.

Opens: May 31
Closes: June 21

The Mercedes-Benz Award, formerly the DaimlerChrysler Award, is now in its eight year. The focus for 2008 is on art projects in public spaces and the exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum looks at each of the eight nominees' contributions. Vincent Baloyi, Marco Cianfanelli, Jane du Rand, Jan Jordaan, Samson Mudzunga, Strijdom van der Merwe and Usha Seejarim are all included alongside Kevin Brand who scooped the award.

Opens: May 30 Closes: July 13

The Market Photo Workshop in association with AngloGold Ashanti shows Cherono Ng'ok's I am Home, the body of work she created as part of her Edward Ruiz Mentorship.

Of Kenyan birth herself, Ng'ok documented immigrants from different African countries living in Cape Town, exploring what it means to be black, but not South African, in a post-apartheid South Africa. This body of work is particularly timely and Ng'ok hopes to expose stereotypes and to capture the experiences of people who are part of South African society, yet are forced to exist on its margins.

Opens: June 4

The awareness of our own mortality has long been the subject of philosophical and artistic reflection, and imagery on this reflection permeates art history. 'Ars Moriendi: How to die well' engages notions around death, mortality, salvation and transcendence. Drawing from both the historical and contemporary JAG collections, works on exhibition will show death from a religious perspective, including the crucifixion and the assumption of the Virgin; explore the notion of the allegorical figure of death and its symbolic manifestations, and examine contemporary deliberations on memorialisation and issues around death.

Closes: June 8

Resolution Gallery's new exhibition, 'Ánima', combines photography by Fernando Maquieira and drawings by Pascual Tarazona in a contemplation on death and mortality.

Maquieira is a Spanish photographer who documented the samples of stuffed primates in a Belgian museum of Natural History's basement. Tarazona's delicate ink drawings (translated into print) of tadpoles complement this body of work.

Opens: May 8
Closes: July 5

For her solo at Art Extra, Reshma Chhiba uses the Hindu goddess Kali to challenge patriarchal values and explore specific female stereotypes and gendered expectations, particularly within traditional and contemporary Hindu society.

Defiant and ferocious, goddess of creation and destruction, Kali is traditionally depicted as a dark-skinned goddess who wears a girdle of arms around her waist and a necklace of human skulls with a severed demonic head, a lotus flower and a sword in three of her hands and the fourth making the gesture of 'abhayam' (protection). Chhiba depics Kali and her associated symbols through paintings in earth-based pigments, photographs and video work and 'draws on aspects of sexuality and identity as understood through her embodiment of female defiance and aggression'.

Opens: June 11
Closes: July 12

'Floating and Falling', an exhibition of monotypes and mixed-media oil paintings, is Bronwen Findlay's first solo show in Johannesburg since her major painting exhibition at the Standard Bank Gallery in 2006 and a show of prints at Artist Proof Studio in 2007.

In this exhibition Findlay continues her interest in the everyday, using her doilies, flowers, flowered prints and household objects to revell in rich shades and bright, contrasting colours.

Opens: May 24
Closes: June 21

Brendon Cahill's 'Vi vi' investigates age-old and contemporary mythologies, religion and technology, looking for key insights these fields might offer - a code for greater understanding. Cahill considers the centrality of narrative or myth in our lives, making sense of our immediate world and our place in the universe. In 'Vi vi', comprising sculptures and prints, the artist constructs his own creation myth drawing on technological and scientific iconography.

Opens: June 7
Closes: June 28

For his solo at Rooke Gallery, Bisschoff makes paintings of an imagined version of early cartographers' Terra Incognita. The product is oddly melancholic, maybe even sentimental - in rusty oranges and browns it sketches a vague landscape. Incorporating found objects, such as vintage frames, and using projections, Bisschoff disrupts the physical limits of his canvas.

Opens: May 29
Closes: July 14

Pall Stefansson's 'Iceland' comprises photographs he took on his travels to that country. Stefansson says of this body of work, 'Iceland is sparse; just over 300 000 inhabitants formed by the wind, the light, the short winter days. But it's the wind in particular that I've never quite managed to photograph. This, despite the fact that I've scrutinized every shape and colour, the light, and anything else I am able to see.'

Opens: June 8
Closes: June 28

Using digital compositions, painting, photography, and objets d'art, Ellen Papciak-Rose and John Hodgkiss collaborated to create 'The writing is on the wall'. The two invite the viewer to read the writing on the wall - literally, figuratively, and hopefully with some sense of humour and urgency.

Opens: June 8
Closes: June 28

In 'Masked Portraits' Carla Liesching investigates the false certainty of history and identity through video and photography. Liesching concludes that these are mere 'fiction or a series of disparate instances - an artifice which can do no more than point us to the truth.'

Opens: June 8
Closes: June 28

The Standard Bank Gallery is the final stop of 'Messina/Musina', the body of work Pieter Hugo created as Standard Bank Young Artists 2007, which has travelled the country since its debut in June last year at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.

Once Messina - a colonial misspelling corrected in 2002 - Musina is named after the Musina people who lived in the region. Musina is the last town en route to the Zimbabwean border and with its proximity to diamond mines, farms and on the major trucking route, much of the disparate populous is migrant labour. The town is in constant flux and Hugo's work, through portraits, interiors and landscapes, examines the larger themes of transition and the indelible scars of race, class and nationality.

Opens: May 27
Closes: July 5

Curator and theorist Ralph Rugoff in his book, Scene of the Crime, examines artists from the west coast of the States, who, over a period of 35 years, produced a body of work that embraced the logic of forensics - evidentiary markers, traces, and residues that speak of an 'aftermath' of an event, action or happening.

For 'Aftermath', curator David Brodie looks at contemporary South African artists that similarly treat the art object as evidence and cast the viewer as investigator, piecing together a narrative from traces. The show also raises 'reasonable doubt' around the singular narrative truth.

'Aftermath' includes work by Bronwyn Lace, Sandile Zulu, Stephen Hobbs, Joni Brenner, Natasha Christopher, Churchill Madikida and Gutto Bussab.

Opens: May 7
Closes: June 7

In 'Nollywood', Pieter Hugo explores the multilayered reality of the Nigerian film industry, a rare instance of mass media self-representation in Africa.

The third largest of its kind in the world, the Nigerian film industry tells stories of romance, comedy, witchcraft, bribery and prostitution. The narrative is overdramatic and largely tragic and violent. While Hugo was intrigued by the brash aesthetic, his first attempts at taking photos on actual film sets proved unsatisfactory. Hiring a cast of 40 actors and assistants and asking them to recreate stereotypical scenes and traditional myths, Hugo feels he was able to better mirror the intensity of these dynamic environments.

Opens: May 6
Closes: June 6

Alfred Thoba's paintings are strident reactions to the social and political dilemmas facing him. Themes in 'Making War to the World about Images of God' are inspired by newspaper articles which Thoba reads and then meticulously files to be used at a later stage as reference material for painting and for the handwritten letters that accompany each work. The recent spate of muti murders, the ongoing crisis in Zimbabwe (particularly with reference to the illegal immigrant situation), child rape and prostitution, as well as sexual misconduct by senior clergy of the ZCC church, are the subjects for this body of work.

A catalogue documenting his paintings and letters, as well as a video interview with the reclusive Thoba, forms part of the exhibition.

Opens: May 6
Closes: June 6