Rineke Dijkstra

Listings(s)

'Nightclub Photographs', 'Drawing Picasso' and 'Arcadia'

Billy Monk, Rineke Dijkstra and Deborah Poynton at Stevenson in Cape Town

Deborah Poynton's new exhibition, Arcadia, comprises 11 large paintings hanging together in one room. The installation creates the space of a decayed concrete folly at twilight, with the viewer looking out through the pillars into a liminal, overgrown landscape on all sides - a wilderness once tamed and now reverting to its natural state. A Grecian pastoral idyll, Arcadia is a place where human beings lived in peace with nature, impossible to re-enter, like the Garden of Eden. In this work the folly creates the illusion of a threshold, but also acts as a framing device, symbolic of the human need to construct an illusion of safety within an otherwise unpredictable world. In addition to Arcadia, there will be 16 smaller works on show, in the form of boxed dioramas.

Michael Stevenson also presents Nightclub Photgraphs a selection of 47 images by the legendary photographer Billy Monk taken in Cape Town nightclubs in 1967-9 when he worked as nightclub bouncer. His close and long friendships with many of the people in the images allowed him to photograph them with extraordinary intimacy. The contact sheets and negatives from these photos were discovered 10 years later by Jac De Villiers who organized an exhibition in Johannesburg in 1982. Monk was tragically killed before he saw the show. Monks original images will be on exhibition as well as others not included in De Villliers selection.

Internationally acclaimed photographic and video artist Rineke Dijkstra shows Ruth Drawing Picasso (2009) as part of the Forex series. Dijkstra's work often focusses on adolescents, teenagers and young adults - in this video, a schoolgirl sits on the floor of a museum, drawing Picasso's painting Weeping Woman (1937). As viewers, we do not see the painting, only the girl lost in concentration, drawing what she observes.

01 March 2011 - 09 April 2011