Listing(s)
'Imperfect Librarian'
Various Artists at Michaelis GalleryThe story in history lies not necessarily in the what but in the ways of its telling. With the exhibition, Imperfect Librarian, a group of artistic researchers with the ARC: the visual university and its columbarium focus, University of Cape Town, present a new body of works in progress, developed over the last year. Confronted by the impossibility of faithfully reproducing, arranging and freeze-framing certain facts as they appear, the group enter into “the library” a set of unorthodox practices and materials which challenge the notion of archival practice. Taking its title from Borges’s short story, Library of Babel, this exhibition seeks to reflect on the unusual research paths, unruly classificatory systems and multiple dimensions operational in the production of history.
Participating artists include: Joanne Bloch, Jessica Brown, George Mahashe, Brenton Maart, Andrew Putter, Jon Whidden and Clare Butcher acts as coordinating curator of the exhibition, and as a member of the ARC initiative.
For further information, please contact Cara van der Westhuizen, Tel 021 480 7170 and cara.vanderwesthuizen@uct.ac.za
12 March 2012 - 26 March 2012
'Artist in Residence'
Mark Dion at Michaelis GalleryMark Dion (born 1961) is an American artist best known for working across many disciplines and for his use of scientific presentations in his installations. Dion has exhibited internationally, including at the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art. He has received numerous awards, and lives and works in New York. Mark Dion will be using the Michaelis Upper Gallery as a studio during his residency, working on a project based on the Schildbach Xylotheque that will be exhibited at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, this year.
The Schildbach Xylotheque, a wood-library crafted by Carl Schildbach from 1771 to 1799 and housed in the Natural History Museum, Kassel, Germany, is one of the treasures of Enlightenment scientific culture. The first of its kind, it consists of 530 volumes of 441 local tree and shrub species, comprised in an encyclopedic arrangement. Each “book” is carefully crafted from wood, with bark spines, and contains a three-dimensional representation of the tree’s life cycle composed of dried plant parts and delicate wax replicas.
Dion, who works about and with living things, respectively, their dissected and preserved remnants, is adding six new books to the xylotheque, each presenting a specific wood from one of the five formerly missing continents, to symbolically complete the library’s encyclopedic endeavor. Dion’s six books will be created during various residencies around the world; the first book was made from one of Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks (1982) in Kassel, the second in Seattle, the third in Bogota and the fourth will be made in Cape Town.
Though shadowing the scientific methodologies and classification systems of archeology, biology, biochemistry, ethnography, museology, or ornithology, Dion’s approach to science and dominant culture is rather skeptical, playful, and anti-authorial, introducing methods and traditions from other fields to embrace the rich interrelatedness of various—cultural, political, and natural—ecologies. Dion breaches the cultures of nature, science, and art, focusing on the rich materiality of both the natural and the artificial world to foster a critical thinking toward ecology.
16 February 2012 - 26 February 2012
'Context'
Various Artists at Michaelis GalleryCurated by Fabian Saptouw, Context draws together artists who use the book-object as a conceptual point of departure for the exploration of the printed text. The artists’ projects engage the history, value and institutional importance afforded to the book-object. The works on display grapple with the materiality and influence of the idea of the book and the way the notion of the book is related to artistic practice.
Traditional approaches to the production and preservation of books will be artistically explored through loans from public and private collections, including the UCT Rare Books library. Other pieces on display include book-printing equipment such as movable type and printer’s quoins, which will be exhibited alongside the art of prominent and emerging artists.
Participating artists include:
Fritha Langerman, Colin Richards, Pippa Skotnes, Phillip Raath, Chloe Reid, James King, Tanya Barben, Morne Visagie and Fabian Saptouw
15 February 2012 - 06 March 2012
'Rendezvous'
Various Artists at Michaelis GalleryJoin us for the opening of Rendezvous Focus Painting, a traveling exhibition of artists who use painting as their medium. The Rendezvous art project was established in 2007 and endorses the development of relationships between business, educational and art practices.
17 January 2012 - 27 January 2012
'Threshold'
Various Artists at Michaelis GalleryCoinciding with this year's Moving Planet climate action campaign, 'Threshold' is a timely exhibition of environmentally-conscious art curated by Virginia MacKenny.
'Threshold' implies an upper limit to tolerance levels as climate change shifts the balance long established in ecosystems. This is a tipping point moment when environmental change is happening dangerously fast. The exhibition engages environmental change through the remaking of traditional genres such as landscape and flower painting. It presents work that calls viewer’s attention to things ofter overlooked. Major South African artists such as Thomas Mulcaire, Jeremy Wafer and Lucas Thobejane and Lien Botha are included on the show plus younger emerging artists such as Claire Jorgenson and Nina Liebenberg.
This year COP17, the United Nations Earth Summit meeting on climate change, will be held in South Africa. The exhibition underlies the vital importance for the country as a whole to be aware of the concerns of the COP17 meeting. Given the particularly susceptible Western Cape eco-system, it is here that South Africa will most feel the effects of climate change. The exhibition forms part of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA)'s Hot Water Symposium, and is accompanied by A Conversation with Bolus: Science, sensibility, sensuality in the Michaelis Upper Gallery, curated by Nadja Daehnke.
2011 sees the centenary of the world-renown and scientifically important Bolus Herbarium, housed in the UCT Botany Department. Harry Bolus (1834 – 1911) was an amateur botanist who devoted much of his life to finding, classifying and cataloguing the flora of the Western Cape. Billed as 'A Conversation', this exhibition will incorporate a selection of contemporary artworks to play off manuscripts, art and objects from the Bolus collections, considering the aesthetic merit of the wider Bolus collections.
On the opening night Brendhan Dickerson will perform a fire sculpture piece entitled Complicit as night falls.
24 September 2011 - 19 October 2011
