The second half of 'Self/Not-self' at Brodie/Stevenson features work by Conrad Botes, Michael MacGarry, Reshma Chhiba, Nicholas Hlobo, Sober and Lonely, Willie Saayman, Penny Siopis, Wim Botha and Avant Car Guard. It is a playful and energetic exploration of 'strategies of surrogacy, projection and alternative personae', rather than the embodied representation that defined the first half of 'Self/Not-Self'. The show manages a wide range of expressions, without compromising curatorial direction.

Nicholas Hlobo's work in 'Self/Not-self' is a characteristically sophisticated expression and interrogation of his own identity. Iqinile and Bhaxa (made for Hlobo's first solo exhibition at Michael Stevenson in 2006), is here joined by a third piece, Ikhiwane. The two ball-and-claw chairs and one two-seater are arranged in a semi-circle, recalling a traditional sitting room. The seat upholstery has however made space for melted and congealed sunlight soap, with the substance imprinted with the now absent buttocks of the sitter.

Ball-and-claw furniture has a particular colonial association, one which in South Africa has powerful nationalist overtones. It is maybe interesting to compare Hlobo's usage of this style of furniture to his contemporary Wim Botha. In Botha's well-known work commune: onomatopoeia, the solidity of the furniture stands in stark contrast to its seeming weightless suspension. The effect is ghostly, with the clinical remove of the execution even more so, and the installation reads as an elegy: a reflection maybe of the recently dead, inhuman ideology of apartheid, or equally the obsessive and terminally isolated Afrikaner nationalism that bore it.

In Hlobo's Iqinile, Bhaxa and Ikhiwane, the furniture stands for a stale domesticity and traditional mores, as characterized here by a conventional sitting room. The once-comfortable chairs are rendered useless, the original bamboo refurbished with a pink weave, and a delicate crocheted fringe emerging from broken trellis work. The traditional setting from which the work departs is subverted and in its treatment comparable to another of Hlobo's works not included in this exhibition, namely Umthubi In this work a kraal is reimaged and so doing stripped of its original cultural purpose and place, thus robbing it of the power it once held. Interestingly Hlobo imbues both spaces( the kraal of Umthubi and sitting room created by Iqinile, Bhaxa and Ikhiwane) with a new extended purpose, supplanting the original with a fantastical new vision or meaning, calling into question the inflexibility of the structure, rather than the validity thereof.

The human presence or trace is very important in Iqinile, Bhaxa and Ikhiwane. As noted by curator David Brodie in the accompanying catalogue, 'the absence of these [implied] bodies speaks of a continuous state of longing, hovering between melancholy and fulfillment.' Within the broader context of Hlobo's work, the use of material is particularly interesting. Issues of sex and sexuality have been fraught throughout the ages, with suppression, control and guilt accompanying much of its expression, and no more so than with homosexuality. In this context, soap, and sitting in soap, is a complex symbolic gesture. Similarly the attraction and repulsion of the green viscous liquid that holds the imprint of buttocks creates an unease and expresses in some way the complexity of desire, and a sexuality still considered trangressive in many societies.

Penny Siopis's Beast adds considerably to 'Self/Not-self'. The image of a woman dancing with a dark shapeless creature in a type of forced two-step is dream-like in its strangeness, and its familiarity. In context, it seems to call forth the idea of the alter ego, or Freud's thesis on the eternal struggle between the ego and id (the rational and moral, versus the instinctual, governed only by the pleasure-pain principle).

Siopis's amorphous shapes and fluid borders, ever open to suggestion or negotiation, perfectly describe fearsome abject spaces, with no skin to contain and define the beginning and end, at once reflecting on the malleability, or constant renegotiation, of identity and notions of self. The medium of ink and glue on canvas perfectly suits the idea, creating thick, opaque, wax-like surfaces where definition slips, and line is characteristically buried and uncovered by the artist's process.

Sober & Lonely's The Wanker, is an almost diametrically opposed treatment of the alter-ego. Here, one half of this all-female duo gets into character, a la Cindy Sherman. Koki-drawn hair covers The Wanker's exposed thighs as he looks out of the half open car window, we presume lecherously. The moustache and glasses are just as fake as the hair, an obvious disguise. He has that seventies-look sported by SA security personnel well into the nineties, and most importantly: the shape of The Wanker's penis is visible through his white underpants.

Avant Car Guard similarly uses disguise, appearing as Avant Car Guard: art world provocateurs, with sardonic smiles, playing the fool, the trickster, the 'virus'. Sober & Lonely remarks about their disguise: 'A basic second hand wardrobe is what we've always used to transform ourselves and mask our 'real' identities''

The idea of a 'second hand wardrobe' might be a singularly useful concept with which to look at this, the second half of 'Self/Not-Self'. Focussing on the metaphorical rather than literal self-portrait that dominated the first exhibition, the show considers the self as a constructed, borrowed, fashioned and refashioned thing ' instable and ever evolving. Energetic curating and a range of strong work engages the issue of self presentation in a meaningful and interesting way.

Opens: March 26
Closes: April 25

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