Pieter Hugo

Current Review(s)

'Life Less Ordinary' at Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham

Athi-Patra Ruga, Berni Searle, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo at Djanogly Art Gallery

While thematic constructs such as ‘identity’ and ‘performance’ are familiar paradigms within the South African art circuit, often even fatigued, the rise of racialised nationalism in the UK and Europe (witness the 'immigration' policies of the British National Party and Italy's Lega Nord) gives the Djanogly Art Gallery’s latest exhibition, 'A Life Less Ordinary', a politically incisive edge.

Curator Anna Douglas takes her conceptual cue from a seminal essay by Ash Amin on today’s charged politics of difference. Aptly titled 'The Racialisation of Everything', Amin’s essay explores how racial categorisation is founded on ‘fictions of difference made to count as the irreconcilables of essence, sometimes justified on grounds of biological difference, sometimes on grounds of so-called cultural incompatibility’. With its focus on contemporary South African art, the exhibition explores personal fictions set in dialogue with some of identity’s grandest narratives. The resultant conversations are at turns satirical and subversive, interrogative and whimsical.

05 September 2009 - 15 November 2009

Permanent Error

Pieter Hugo at Stevenson in Cape Town

In what seems the accepted current format for South African photographers, a Pieter Hugo exhibition takes the form of an extended essay in which the photographer turns his camera on a subject of interest, and stays with it. In this way, his audience is provided with a long, slow look at a particular corner of the world, a specific group of people. This is very different from the approach of a Wolfgang Tillmans, say, a former Turner Prizewinner, whose antic camera seems to light on whatever catches his eye at any particular moment, constantly calling on the viewer to assess each new image for what it is.

Last time around, Hugo gave us his Nollywood series, a progression of extraordinary images in which actors in the Nigerian film industry posed in full cimematic costume for Hugo. The melodramatic situations were based on the kinds of plots built around ritual murder, voodoo worship and the belief in zombies.

Arresting, highly colourful and memorable, opening up fascinating narrative possibilities for the viewer, these were for me amongst Hugo’s strongest images. The criticism that the series reinforced negative images of Africa seemed to me misplaced: the series gave an insight into a film language about which not much is known in many parts of the world, and in so doing produced a number of striking images in gorgeous colour, worthy of their provenance. And the actors were doing what they always do anyway – posing in character for the camera in exchange for a fee.

29 July 2010 - 04 September 2010

Listings(s)

Nollywood

Pieter Hugo at galleria e x t r a s p a z i o

Pieter Hugo exhibits his Nollywood series an exploration of the third largest film industry in the world, which releases onto the home video market approximately 1000 movies each year. Hugo’s vision of Nollywood’s interpretation of the world results in a gallery of hallucinatory and unsettling images.

The series depict situations clearly surreal but that could be real on a set.  In his images the boundaries between documentary and fiction become very fluid.

 

25 November 2009 - 09 January 2010

Hugo's 'Nollywood' in New York

Pieter Hugo at Yossi Milo Gallery

Yossi Milo Gallery follows up their 2008 showing of Pieter Hugo's
'The Hyena and Other Men' with a solo exhibition of the artist's  'Nollywood' photographic series.

25 February 2010 - 10 April 2010

'Life Less Ordinary' at Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham

Athi-Patra Ruga, Berni Searle, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo at Djanogly Art Gallery

'Life Less Ordinary' considers fictions of categorization and difference - be it the idea of race, nationhood, ethnicity, sexuality, religion or belonging -explored by a range of contemporary artists from South Africa.

This exhibition brings together works of photography, performance, film and installation by a younger generation wishing to shake loose from the epic narrative of race to play with, stage, transcend, celebrate and deconstruct more complex and nuanced subjectivities.

Artists include Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Nandipha Mntambo, Steven Cohen, Dineo Bopape, Berni Searle and Andrew Putter.

05 September 2009 - 15 November 2009

'Permanent Error'

Pieter Hugo at Stevenson in Cape Town

For the past year Hugo has been photographing the people and landscape of an expansive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. The area, on the outskirts of a slum known as Agbogbloshie, is referred to by local inhabitants as Sodom and Gomorrah, a vivid acknowledgment of the profound inhumanity of the place. When Hugo asked the inhabitants what they called the pit where the burning takes place, they repeatedly responded: 'For this place, we have no name'.

Their response is a reminder of the alien circumstances that are imposed on marginal communities of the world by the West's obsession with consumption and obsolesce. This wasteland, where people and cattle live on mountains of motherboards, monitors and discarded hard drives, is far removed from the benefits accorded by the unrelenting advances of technology.

29 July 2010 - 04 September 2010

'Breaking News: Contemporary Photography from the Middle East and Africa'

Bob Gosani , Guy Tillim, David Goldblatt, Jodie Bieber, Daniel Naude, Pieter Hugo and Mikhael Subotzky at Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena

'Breaking News' presents the third group of acquisitions for the international contemporary photography, art film and video collection of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena. Curated by Filippo Maggia, this major survey features 21 artists from 12 countries. 'As the title suggests,' says Maggia, 'the idea for this exhibition is to use a selection of emblematic works that recently became part of the Fondazione di Modena collection to shed light on a part of the world that only makes the news with conflicts and bloody events. "Breaking News" is the journalism launch - typical of TV news - that announces the latest news'. Dominated for more than a century by the views induced by colonialism, Africa now expresses a variety of creative voices investigating not only the legacies of the past but also the complexities of the present.

28 November 2010 - 13 March 2011

'Nollywood'

Pieter Hugo at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts

They say Nigeria's Nollywood is the world's third largest film industry. It releases up to a thousand titles a year onto the local home-video market. Produced and marketed in the space of a week, they use cheap equipment, basic scripts, actors cast the day of shooting, and real locations. While drawing on genres and typologies drawn from Hollywood, Nollywood movies are a rare instance of mass-media self-representation. The stories-including tales of romance, comedy, witchcraft, bribery, and prostitution-speak to the experiences and values of their local audiences. The narratives are overdramatic, and deprived of happy endings. The aesthetic is loud, violent, excessive; nothing is said, everything is shouted.

South African photographer Pieter Hugo became intrigued by Nollywood's fictional worlds, where the everyday and the unreal intertwine. He asked a team of actors and assistants to recreate Nollywood myths and symbols as if they were on movie sets and photographed them. The resulting images recreate the stereotypical characters that typify Nollywood productions, including mummies, satanic demons, and zombies, all casually posed in the backlots of Enugu. 'Nollywood' is on loan from the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.

05 February 2011 - 27 March 2011

'Possible Cities: Africa in Photography and Video'

Guy Tillim, Pieter Hugo and Sabelo Mlangeni at Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery

The exhibition 'Possible Cities: Africa in Photography and Video' includes photo installations by Sammy Baloji, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni, and Guy Tillim, and video installations by Salem Mekuria and married artists and collective IngridMwangiRobertHutter. Curated by Mellon Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Ruti Talmor, the exhibition seeks to complicate representations of Africa through a set of works on cities as sites of convergence of multiple pasts and futures and as collections of changing and changeable sites that may or may not be geographically contiguous.

18 March 2011 - 29 April 2011

'ARS 11'

Mary Sibande, Pieter Hugo, Steven Cohen, Kudzanai Chiurai, Nandipha Mntambo and Andrew Putter at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

'ARS 11' is a major international art event filling Helsinki's Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art with artworks, performances, screenings, discussions and workshops, and extending to eight cities in Finland as well as to Stockholm, Sweden. Investigating Africa in contemporary art, the exhibition includes not only artists living in Africa, but also those who live outside the continent; artists of African descent as well as Western artists who address African issues in their work. The exhibition features some 300 works by a total of 30 artists, including Mary Sibande, Kudzanai Chiurai, Nandipha Mntambo, Andrew Putter, Steven Cohen and Pieter Hugo.

15 April 2011 - 27 November 2011

'Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity'

Jo Ractliffe, Guy Tillim, Kay Hassan, Berni Searle, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Hentie van der Merwe, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Candice Breitz, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at The Walther Collection

The Walther Collection opens to the public on June 17, 2010 with 'Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity', introducing works from its African collection. Under the curatorial direction of Okwui Enwezor, the exhibition comprises a series of four projects filling all nine galleries in the three buildings of the new exhibition space in Burlafingen near Ulm, Southern Germany. The exhibition integrates the work of three generations of African artists and photographers with that of modern and contemporary German photography. This combination of African and German works will serve as a model for the kind of curatorial process that animates the character of the collecting program.

Works in the collection include those by Berni Searle, Candice Brietz, Nontsikelelo Veleko, Zanele Muholi, Hentie van der Merwe, David Goldblatt, Kay Hassan, Pieter Hugo, Guy Tillim, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Santu Mofokeng and Jo Ractliffe.

17 June 2010 - 17 October 2010

'The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989'

Ruth Sacks, Pieter Hugo, Zander Blom, Meschac Gaba and Moshekwa Langa at ZKM - Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

Globalization as a phase of geopolitical vicissitude of the world signifies a change in art and its circumstances of production and the possibilities of its distribution and perception. At the same time, artists and most of all the institutions of art – large-scale exhibitions, museums, the market – are confronted with the question of how far art can be and has to be thought of as global – and how this affects their own modes of production. With the aid of documentary materials and artistic standpoints, the exhibition 'The Global Contemporary' will demonstrate how globalization, with its dominant market mechanisms on the one hand, and its utopias of connectivity and liberalness on the other, influences the different spheres of art production and reception.

17 September 2011 - 05 February 2012

'For a Sustainable World': Recontres de Bamako 2011

Jo Ractliffe, Lien Botha, Brent Meistre, David Goldblatt, Hasan and Husain Essop, Daniel Naude, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni and Tracey Rose at Bamako Photography Biennial

In 2010, many African countries celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of their independence. For many, this event was the time to take stock of national achievements and to look critically at political and social structures, as well as the distribution of wealth. For these 'Rencontres', we invited photographers and videographers to witness, to denounce, but also to identify areas for action, evidence of resistance or prevention, and the possibilities for the construction of a sustainable world. The variety of themes and languages ??chosen by the artists provides a survey of the diverse artistic production today on the continent and in the diaspora.

The Pan-African Exhibit, in the temporary exhibition rooms of the National Museum of Mali, brings together 45 photographers and 10 videographers from 27 countries, including a number from South Africa. Other South African artists, including Tracey Rose, appear in 'A World Beyond the World': The Sindika Dokolo Collection, and there is also a 'Monograph' exhibition of David Goldblatt's work.

01 November 2011 - 01 January 2012

'This Must Be The Place'

Pieter Hugo at The Hague Museum of Photography

The South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s monumental photographs, centred around contemporary Africa, are now well known around the world, catalysed by recent awards including the KLM Paul Huf award in 2008 and a nomination for the 2012 the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. The Hague Museum of Photography will be the first museum to exhibit a comprehensive survey of Hugo’s work from 2003-2011. Together with many previously unseen works, the exhibition will include a curated selection of his most well-known series: The Hyena & Other Men, the bizarre Nollywood and the striking Permanent Error. His impressive portraits tell personal stories about recurring themes throughout his oeuvre, namely those people who inhabit the margins of society in sub-Saharan Africa.

03 March 2012 - 20 May 2012

'Permanent Error'

Pieter Hugo at Stevenson in Johannesburg

Pieter Hugo's compelling show of photographic images taken on a digital dump in Ghana shows at Brodie/Stevenson until mid-December. Hugo puts the focus on European countries' questionable practice of dumping digital waste in Africa.

The waste is sent ostensibly to help underdeveloped Africa bridge the digital divide; but instead the obsolete hardware gets pulled apart and melted down for its precious metals. The resulting dump on the outskirts of Agblogbloshie becomes an environment-scarring blight, contaminating the people forced to scavenge on it as much as it sustains them.

04 November 2010 - 15 December 2010

'Permanent Error'

Pieter Hugo at MAXXI - National Museum of XXI Century Arts

Pieter Hugo's apocalyptic portraits of a high-tech dump in Ghana feature in the Carlo Scarpa Room on the ground floor of Rome's MAXXI - National Museum of XXI century arts.

01 December 2011 - 29 January 2012

'On Reality and Other Stories'

Pieter Hugo at Forest Centre Culturel, at BRASS

Hugo's first solo show in Belgium, this exhibition covers three bodies of photographic work: Looking Aside, the Hyaena Men, and Nollywood. Through these varied series, Pieter Hugo reveals the complexities and paradoxes of Africa, an ethnically diverse continent where traditions and beliefs blend with occidental influences inherited from colonialism. The digital era, with its disturbing manipulations of truth, confirms what Pieter Hugo is fully conscious of: that whenever we are faced with photography, there is that omnipresent but also creative doubt, stimulating us to forge new ways forward and to construct a lyrical universe complete with its own distinct features.

27 August 2010 - 26 November 2010

Paris Photo

Jodi Bieber, Joel Andrianomearisoa, Billy Monk, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Andrew Tshabangu, Cedric Nunn, Pieter Hugo, Mikhael Subotzky, Viviane Sassen, Moshekwa Langa, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at Grand Palais

The annual Paris Photo will celebrate its 15th anniversary at the Grand Palais, featuring 117 galleries from some 23 countries presenting the best of 19th century, modern and contemporary photography in the heart of the French capital. This year's special focus is on African photography from Bamako to Cape Town, with several South African artists in the spotlight in the main venue as well as on other shows around the city (such as the skyroof of the Gare du Nord station). South African galleries  STEVENSON, Goodman Gallery, Bailey Seippel, and Gallery MOMO will be exhibiting.

10 November 2011 - 13 November 2011