Listing(s)

'Home and Away: A Return to the South'

Various Artists at Iziko Michaelis Collection

For the last five years, the Ifa Lethu Foundation has been instrumental in repatriating South African art that was produced during the apartheid years but which found its way overseas due to the fact that there was no market for the work of black South African artists in the country at the time.

The exhibition 'Home and Away: A Return To The South' explores this previously lost artistic heritage with a selection of works from the Ifa Lethu collection alongside the Art Against Apartheid collection, currently under the curatorship of the Mayibuye Robben Island archive at UWC. Curated by Carol Brown (former director of the Durban Art Gallery and now an independent curator) the show examines the similarities and differences between works produced by South African artists experiencing the oppression of apartheid and those from beyond our shores who created works in support of the struggle. Although produced from different perspectives, the two collections are united in their focus on human rights.

15 October 2010 - 30 January 2011

'The Lie of the Land: Representations of the South African Landscape'

Various Artists at Iziko Michaelis Collection

Landscape is both the oldest and most popular genre in this country. Landscape painting and drawing commemorated the first contacts of European explorers at the Cape, and it is still widely practised throughout the country to this day. In this long history, the representation of landscape has taken many forms, not just because the physical geography of South Africa is so varied, but because different groups, and different individual artists, at different times, have wanted to communicate different things about their natural environment.

This exhibition is arranged in five sections to cover some of this wide range of purpose in landscape representation: from statements of awe in the face of a new landscape; to records of various methods of exploiting the landscape; to commemorations of struggles over possession of the landscape; to expressions of poetic or patriotic feelings through the medium of landscape; and to recent questionings of the very means of representing landscape.

10 June 2010 - 11 September 2010