ArtThrob News, Reviews and Listings Updates

Trade Routes Over Time

2012-05-11T00:00:00+02:00

'Trade Routes Over Time' is a dazzlingly academic exhibition, exceptionally installed, such that whole new rooms have been constructed from dry-walling to accommodate various video works, each in their own space. Walking through Stevenson’s most recent exhibition, it was easy to forget that I was actually in the hallways of one of Woodstock’s commercial galleries rather than an international art museum. 'Trade Routes Over Time' is the first of a three-phase exhibition programme revisiting the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale 'Trade Routes: History and Geography', which opened 15 years ago in October 1997 (sadly the last of South Africa’s biennales).

It was a fairly quiet opening night: something of a relief as the majority of works on show are video-based, requiring a level of dedicated engagement that precluded polite chatter about the onslaught of another Cape Winter. 'Trade Routes Over Time' is the forerunner of a larger, fascinating, 'Trade Routes Project' aiming to calibrate the impact of the Johannesburg Biennale on contemporary art history.

Revenant

2012-05-10T00:00:00+02:00

Baubo is the embodiment of positive feminine energy, sexual liberation, and seemingly unattainable glee. She symbolises above all else the healing power of jest, inappropriate at times, as can be seen in the Greek myth of Demeter. While mourning the abduction of her daughter, Persephone, by Hades, Demeter - the goddess of the Harvest - let the crops die and the earth suffer. Her sorrow was only eased when she met Baubo, whose jesting caused Demeter to laugh. Historical depictions of Baubo have taken the form of figurine sculptures, traceable back to the fifth century BC. In these representations a female head sits atop a proportionally impossible pelvis and legs. Baubo’s vulva is emphasised as it amalgamates with her face, forming the chin. This juxtaposition leaves the contemporary viewer aware of certain unsettling absences.

Booty

2012-05-09T00:00:00+02:00

Accumulo ergo sum. It seems silly to point out the obvious, but in today’s social terrain, where any sense of the fixity of meaning has long since been obliterated, there remain imaginary anchors which weight our selecting, discarding, borrowing, appropriating, layering, deconstructing of the visual. 'Booty', an exhibition of what can best be described as a cacophony of encrusted collages, employs and valorises such semiotic voyages – and in fact, adds a few to the fray for good measure. Julia Rosa Clark’s ensembles, presented in her recently opened solo show at Whatiftheworld gallery, explore the realms of colonial appropriation, history, memory and representation. At the same time however, Clark manages to steer an idiosyncratic path, exhibiting her own agency and position when encountering these broad themes, using chance and contingency to unsettle such notions.

Brice, Gratrix, Busuttil and the Principles of Painting: A review of three exhibitions

2012-05-03T00:00:00+02:00

The recent exhibitions of Carla Busuttil, Lisa Brice and Georgina Gratrix at various venues in Cape Town and Johannesburg have seemingly delivered some more hammer blows to the coffin lid of that incessant postmodern verbal tic, ‘painting is dead’. To add to this, Lisa Brice herself, perhaps unknowingly, delivered a few more nails to the undertakers at her walkabout at the Goodman Cape by sanctioning a liberal humanist theoretical stance.

Brice, in an off-the-cuff answer, said that she felt that painting is an investigative process, where one discovers how and what one is trying to communicate while painting. She added that her more conceptual works lacked that exploratory quality in that they were planned and constructed to a predetermined specification. The comment could have come straight out of that apotheosis of liberal humanist art theory, R.G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art. This was, after all, precisely the distinction he made between what he called ‘art proper’ and ‘technical theory of art’, or craft.

Art, Collingwood claimed, is an investigation into an emotional state while craft, or technical art, is limited by its planned understanding of the final object. Certainly all three of the artists mentioned above seem to exemplify painting’s investigative underpinnings. To be sure, the strengths and weaknesses of each of their exhibitions rely on how intimately they seem to understand their subjects.

Very Real Time 3

2012-05-02T00:00:00+02:00

The following is based on an interview conducted with Gregg Smith on April 17, 2012, Cape Town. Unless otherwise stated, his comments and responses are paraphrased from that conversation.

The historian Timothy Mitchell once wrote that ‘the contemporaneity of time is haunted by the ghost of space.’[1] And in the 3rd edition of 'Very Real Time' – a Cape Town-based artist residency programme initiated by Gregg Smith – one wonders just how much time one needs to kill in order to exorcise the spectral expectations of ‘real’ experience in a foreign space. From March 20 to April 20 2012, five artists participated in a project collaboration with the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and a number of other cultural sponsors. The South African self-described ‘practitioner’ (i.e. not curator) Gregg Smith attended the Rijks from 2001-2 and since then has been facilitating month-long stays in South Africa for artists connected with that institution.

Fired: An exhibition of South African ceramics

2012-05-01T00:00:00+02:00

Looking ahead to Cape Town’s 2014 status as the World’s Design Capital one hopes that recent history will remind the cultural sector of how easy it is to create white elephants by ignoring long-term planning. Attempting to contextualise and historicise South Africa’s place in the design world is one way to take the long view, and this is where ‘Fired’ at the Castle of Good Hope enters the frame.

Esther Esmyol and her team at Iziko Museums opened ‘Fired’ this February and it will remain in place throughout the 2014 Design Capital events. ‘Fired’ takes advantage of the new Iziko structure, which merged over half a dozen museums into a single administrative entity. This ceramic historical retrospective draws upon the previously separate collections from the South African Museum’s Archaeological and Anthropological holdings, South African Cultural History Museum, William Fehr Collection, and South African National Gallery (SANG), all of which except the SANG now fall under Iziko’s newly-formed Social History Collections Department. Ceramics collected over a century are on view and will hopefully temper the intensity of the commercial wildfire that is bound to flare up during 2014.

Exit Mode

2012-04-30T00:00:00+02:00

Somewhere between young New York painter Dana Schutz’s colouration and late South African great Robert Hodgins’s fluid development of figures and compositions from a few squiggles, you’ll find the terrain occupied by Carla Busuttil’s latest body of work ‘Exit Mode’.

Like Hodgins, Busuttil has a keen eye for the ridiculousness of power. For this young painter, already fêted by career-defining über-collector Charles Saatchi in her late twenties, the dynamics of a group of gun-toting men translates readily into a few slashes of muddy aquamarine and Alizarin crimson, a portrait of some unnamed authority figure into bruises and scabs of impasto. And in this vein, you’ll find virtuosity aplenty.

Unfortunately, though this is a bawdy and frequently diverting show, the comparisons to Schutz and Hodgins are too obvious for this to be a convincing enough statement of intent. Especially Hodgins’s amorphous, frequently ectoplasmic heads, rendered from barely-modified blotches and painterly accidents, are recalled by Busuttil’s approach to the single portrait, as evident in We Conspired with the Shadows and Blues Super Swinger. An image such as The Mayor of Mad Iberia is too similar to the seminal Hodgins work Ubu - the official portrait from 1981 to be taken terribly seriously.

A History of Failure

2012-04-23T00:00:00+02:00

Remember the furore when the de la Rey number reemerged a couple of years ago? At the time, the Department of Arts and Culture acknowledged the composer’s right to free speech, warning however of the tune’s subversive potential. Interesting: that line between subversion and critical potential. And it is the de la Ray which has once again surfaced as a vehicle of critique – a float, as it were, upon which to suspend what Chad Rossouw’s exhibition calls ‘A History of Failure’.

The young Rossouw (writer, lecturer and artist – the order given by his exhibition pamphlet) is a recent graduate of Michaelis, UCT, and the exhibition was submitted in part towards his Masters thesis there. As Rossouw’s first solo show with the Brundyn + Gonsalves gallery, there is a certain irony to his chosen title, allowing little room for expectation or the possibility of underachievement. Indeed it is the imminence of an Icarus landing which greets the viewer in the artist’s The Union of South Africa (2011).

In Living Colour

2012-04-23T00:00:00+02:00

‘In Living Colour’, a recent two-person show of paintings by Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi and Lonwabo Kilani at the Barnard Gallery, shares its name with a 1990s sitcom. And like its namesake, it is abundant with humour. For Ngqinambi and Kilani humour is not necessarily a new trope, but it certainly is a recurrent one, which both wield as an agent to subvert and transpose meaning. Within the exhibition, humour doesn’t merely mean the empty triggering of laughter without substantial content; rather it invokes the complete opposite, becoming a mechanism for reflecting our own perversities.

After 1994, the South African public cannot but be gobsmacked by how the <i>ipso facto</i> reality of politics plays out like a hollow farce – an engendering of the typical Fanonian postcolonial fate. With ‘In Living Colour’ the intention is to tease out those same pitfalls via humorous portrayals and pictorial dexterity. Comedy and metaphor operate side-by-side with politics – a poetic trope central to much African artistic practice.

Messages in the painted process

2012-04-17T00:00:00+02:00

On entering Tom Cullberg's latest exhibition at Brundyn + Gonsalves, I noticed the particular, side-by–side arrangement of paintings. These arrangements consist of paperback novels and vinyl album covers paired with clearly titled abstract partners. I thought immediately of Stephen Park's description of abstraction as an action, a move with direction that necessitates a negation – defined by what it is moving away from. In this exhibition Cullberg quite clearly defines that terrain from which his abstract works are a ‘move away’.

I found myself navigating the works from the position of a reader-sleuth (resonating with the book title 'The Spy Glass' in Cullberg’s The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By [2011]). Active choices have taken place on the canvas that appear as a series of messages in a painted process. Cullberg operates in an open-ended fashion, leaving it up to the viewer to construe the mimetic clues: those moments that figuration fragments into abstraction, and explodes into pure plastic painting.

'Unexpected Pleasures - The Art and Design of Contemporary Jewellery'

2012-05-11T03:43:00+02:00

'Unexpected Pleasures' looks at what we mean by jewellery from a number of different perspectives. Taking as its starting point the radical experiments of the Contemporary Jewellery Movement that challenged a conventional understanding of the language of personal adornment, and looking instead at the essential meanings of jewellery, the exhibition brings together important work from around the world, and looks at it from the point of view of the wearer as well as the maker. Contemporary Jewellery in this sense is at the intersection of art and design.

Included in the exhibition is the work of South African jewellery designer Beverley Price, who addresses the democracy of often-paradoxical materials used in post-Apartheid South Africa. Price centralises the moving, living human body as an artistic forum for designing, making and wearing jewellery, as well as consideration of the kinesis of jewellery on the body.

Exuberance Project

2012-05-10T00:00:00+02:00

Convened by Raél Jero Salley and Jay Pather; presented by the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) as part of the UCT Africa Month celebrations. The Exuberance Project will investigate what is abundant, enthusiastic, overflowing, unrestrained and joyful in contemporary creative and performing arts of Africa.

The Exuberance Project points to a welcome turnaround in the enactment of all that emerges from the African continent. Embracing themes that shift from lack to abundance, from Afro-pessimism to exuberance, from myths of a dark and brooding continent to vibrant, dynamic realism, The Exuberance Projectcomprises a symposium, panel discussions, performances, exhibitions and film screenings.

11-13 May 2012, UCT Hiddingh Campus. Exhibition at Mandela Rhodes Gallery opening Saturday 12 May, 2012 at 18.00.

'Rewind'

2012-05-09T00:00:00+02:00

Khaya Sinyile presents Rewind in the Artsstrip. When your arm stretched over your head, can touch your ear, then you can go to school. Throw your baby teeth onto the roof of the house, and then your grand mother will bring you new ones. These are the transient processes, child hood rituals, games and stories Sineyile remembers from his youth. Rewind is a body of paintings that rework the stylised visual language of the cartoons Sineyile watched as a child. Through this series of paintings, Sineyile rewinds, retells and reviews remembrances from a childhood passed with wit, whimsy and humour.

'Didn't want to be your Ghost'

2012-05-09T09:12:00+02:00

In Didn't want to be your Ghost, Fourie offers the viewer insight into a collection of intimate moments. The exhibition hangs like a poem of photographs in which Fourie explores her personal curiosities and fears. Gravitating towards content that scrutinizes the complexities of companionship, intimacy and the vulnerability of the human body, Fourie’s images capture how we share our thoughts, feelings, lives and bodies. Fourie and her subjects are at times perfumed with a spray of sentiment, emotion, fantasy, and in other instances they are stripped raw, reflecting realties of decay, mortality and ruin.

'Vlakplaas'

2012-05-09T00:00:00+02:00

Renzske Scholtz presents Vlakplaas in the Main gallery. In 1979 Scholtz's grandfather sold his farm whose name 'Vlakplaas' (Shallow farm) had, for years, signalled the flat, peaceful plains of the Highveld, to the State Security Department. He did not know that it would become the headquarters of the C1 Unit from 1979 to 1993. Operating as a parliamentary hit squad, the C1 unit captured political opponents of the government, tortured them and then either turned them, making them Askaris or executed them. This exhibition examines the ways in which land can become transformed by the events that it bears witness to. Vlakplaas the exhibition confronts both the artists irrepressible attachment to an ancestral home and the ways in which land itself can appear changed, not by any physical alteration, but by the events that occur on it.

'Canaries in the Coalmine'

2012-05-09T08:43:00+02:00

Canaries in the Coalmine is Barbara Wildenboer’s sixth solo exhibition. 'Solastalgia' is the premise for this exhibition, the term was coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2004 by combining the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek word algae (pain). It is used to describe the emotional distress experienced when one realises that one’s home environment is under threat or changing; a form of homesickness one gets while one is still at home. Wildenboer uses a wide variety of media including paper sculpture, paper cutting, altered books, photography, animation and installation.

'Out of Focus: Photography'

2012-05-08T00:00:00+02:00

The Saatchi Gallery's first major photographic exhibition since 2001's ‘I Am A Camera', ‘Out of Focus' is a wide-ranging exploration of photography at a time when the medium is in the midst of a complicated but rich moment in its history and old assumptions are being challenged. The exhibits range from classic documentary to collaborative set pieces, with featured artists offering an international perspective on recent trends in photography.

White Termite

2012-05-08T11:22:00+02:00

Brundyn + Gonsalves is proud to present Liza Grobler’s 9th solo exhibition. The show is loosely based on Eugene Marais’ book, “The Soul of the White Ant”, which draws parallels between the ant nest as a compound animal and the human body. White Termite is a mixed media installation consisting of a constructed space that interacts with the gallery’s interior and visitors moving through it. Digital projections and collaborative processes (the crocheting performance) will continuously redefine and transform the space; much like water, the viewer’s experience evolves over time as they negotiate the interior installations. White Termite includes an array of media such as painting, drawing, beadwork, sculpture and performance.

'Artistic Practice and Social Imaginaries' - 11th Havana Biennial

2012-05-06T00:00:00+02:00

The 2012 Havana Biennial explores the relationship between visual productions and the social imaginary, referring to the way people imagine their social space and express themselves through cultural and historical references. Besides fine arts exhibitions, the Havana Biennial will include lectures, workshops and master classes, documentaries, performances and video screenings in sites across the city.

Very Real Time 3

2012-05-02T11:46:00+02:00

Very Real Time has been happening in various forms, mostly in Cape Town, South Africa, since 2003. The main objective is to try and set up suitable conditions for meaningful exchange between artists working in a contemporary and global context. For exchange to be meaningful as well as ongoing, the intimate and interpersonal dimension becomes a central component to the project’s content. Visiting artists live in the homes of local artists and in this way quickly become implicated the networks and interpersonal dynamics of the city. In this way the project has nourished personal relationships and artistic exchanges between local and visiting artists, which remain active to this day.

Previous residents include : Bridget Baker (SA) James Beckett (SA, The Netherlands), Michael Blum (Austria), Jo O’ Connor (SA), Cinthia Marcelle (Brazil), Thembinkosi Goniwe (SA), Jean Meeran (SA), Jimmy Robert (France), Mieke Van de Voort (NL), Sung Hwan Kim (Korea), Conrado Tostado and Jeannine Diego Medina (Mexico) and Ed Young (South Africa).

The 3rd Very Real Time residency runs from March 20 – April 20 2012, in Cape Town. Participating artists are: Claire Harvey (UK, NL), Julia Rosa Clark (SA), Milena Bonilla (Colombia, NL), Leonid Tsvetkov (RU, NL, USA), Kianoosh Motallebi (IR, NL), James Beckett (SA, NL).