Listing(s)

'The Other Half: Past and Future Now'

Michael MacGarry at Stevenson in Cape Town

Stevenson presents a solo exhibition by Michael MacGarry, a coherent body of work comprising new sculpture, installation, photography and video.
At the nexus of The Other Half: Past and Future Now is the shift from the mechanical processes of the 20th century to the sublimation of industry into service and information in the 21st century. MacGarry writes:

My basic, animistic intent is to articulate and remake the products, objects and physical things I owned and experienced during my youth in the last century, [but] projecting, manufacturing and assembling these things for the second half of the 21st century - a time when I will be dead.

MacGarry's chief concern here, manifest across diverse media, is with the material reality of objects from the past envisaged for the second half of this century, when the number of lives on Earth will have increased dramatically. The objects of The Other Half are analogue - imagined, consumed, commissioned, assembled and designed. The process is the rationalisation of objects into commodities, coupled with the simultaneous standardisation of the industrial objects used to make them, and shadowed by the rationalisation of human beings themselves through coercion, consumerism and urbanisation into the kaleidoscopic carnival of contemporary advanced capitalism.

24 May 2012 - 07 July 2012

'Trade Routes Over Time'

Various Artists at Stevenson in Cape Town

Trade Routes Over Time is the first installment of the gallery's Trade Routes Project, marking the 15th anniversary of the second - and last - Johannesburg Biennale.

The biennale organised by Okwui Enwezor in 1997 was a pivotal moment in the presentation of contemporary art in South Africa. The response on the ground was marked (and arguably marred) by tension between the local and the international and, in essential ways, the immensity of the achievement of the biennale team went unacknowledged. Combined with a fraught relationship to its principal funder, the City of Johannesburg, these tensions illustrated an event that was, or so it appeared, out of sync with its context.
At the time, the Johannesburg Biennale was at the cusp of an explosion of biennales in likely and unlikely places. In a Frieze review of the exhibition, Christian Haye presaged this development: 'The effect of having so many shows will inevitably produce a discourse of its own ... The next couple of years will see biennales in Berlin, China and a theatre near you.' The ubiquity of biennales is now a given, and to critique it has become platitudinous, but in 1997 (and before in 1995) the notion of a biennale in Johannesburg was still a radical one.

When the biennale is invoked in South Africa in the present day, it is mostly as an illustration of the country's seeming inability to realise a recurring international exhibition. Its theme, Trade Routes: History and Geography, as well as the positions it staked out, the structure it invented, and the debates it sparked, appear to have been forgotten, although they have significantly influenced most large-scale international exhibitions since.

In this exhibition, some artists present the same works that they showed in 1997. These are works that are central to these artists' development but have not been widely seen. Other artists show works that might be familiar to international audiences but are not part of our local consciousness. The three South African artists present new works made especially for this exhibition. Taken together, Trade Routes Over Time explores both how a contextual shift of 15 years affects the way one approaches works of art, and how the development of these artists' careers over time affects the way one looks at the second Johannesburg Biennale.

The Trade Routes Project provides an opportunity to revisit, both literally and figuratively, an important exhibition whose impact on the global art world can still be felt today, as well as a place that continues to play a unique role in the trade routes, history and geography of the world.

Artists included on the show are: Diller + Scofidio, Stan Douglas, Olafur Eliasson, Ângela Ferreira, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, Isaac Julien, Wangechi Mutu, Odili Donald Odita, Jo Ractliffe, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Penny Siopis.

 

04 April 2012 - 12 May 2012

'Second Nature II'

Guy Tillim at Stevenson in Cape Town

The second half of Tillim's 'Second Nature' was taken in São Paulo in 2011. In many respects, these images of the contested urban terrain of a megalopolis appear to be the antithesis of the Polynesian landscapes of the first half of the series, with their reverence for nature and awareness of the elements of water, wind and light. Yet, on closer looking, it becomes clear that Tillim is seeing and perceiving the landscape of these two strongly contrasting places in the same way. In all these images he does not offer the conventional point of focus or easily identifiable subject that is the standard premise for photography; instead, he gives equal treatment to the many elements that comprise an image. A person walking is not more important than a signpost, or a sculptural tree, or a zebra crossing, or a strange building; the eye roves across the image and is entertained by these identifiable aspects but never halts and concludes that this element is the reason for the image. As a result, one is never sure what is actually being photographed, yet one's eye remains engaged and active within the frame of the image. The paradox that Tillim is photographing nothing yet everything, and that he conflates the notions of subject and object, reminds us that the premise for the 'Second Nature' series is not the qualities of the landscapes of Polynesia or São Paulo, but the way we perceive them.

29 February 2012 - 30 March 2012

'The Unspoken'

Nandipha Mntambo at Stevenson in Cape Town

The exhibition comprises sculptures and drawings made with cowhide and cow hair, and paintings in oil on canvas. Unlike the distinctive figurative forms that the artist has previously made familiar to us, the drawings and paintings are abstract and ambiguous. They could also be perceived as parts or fragments of bodies such as bums, elbows, bellybuttons or toes, or the ears, nose, mouth, anus and vagina through which we draw in and expel life forces.
Mntambo describes the impulse behind The Unspoken:

The work I am making gives form to the loud silences in our lives that seem to be hidden but are actually in plain sight, if we choose to see them - or the conversations that one only ever has with oneself, even though others are having similar conversations, also with themselves. In terms of forms, I think of folds, holes, bumps, crevices and spaces that are indeterminate in some respect. They engage our attention and draw us into a space, but an element always remains hidden from view, never fully revealing itself. In this way we are reminded of the sentences that are edited out of our exchanges even though others may well be aware of our unspoken thoughts and feelings.

19 January 2012 - 25 February 2012

'Parasomnia'

Viviane Sassen at Stevenson in Cape Town

Parasomnia brings together photographs from Sassen's recent Parasomnia series and some from her previous series, Flamboya.

Sassen spent her childhood years in East Africa. She describes that, on her family's return to the Netherlands, she felt like a foreigner in her homeland but knew that she had also been an outsider in Africa. Parasomnia animates these feelings of dislocation between home and away, night and day, life and dreams. The series comprises photographs taken in West and East Africa over the past two years, as well as a few taken in Europe, which frame her enigmatic and often haunting narratives.

As a New York Times critic recently noted (in a review of the Museum of Modern Art's New Photography exhibition), Sassen's images 'convey how strangely vivid and tantalizingly sad the world can seem to a mind and eye divested of the usual filters of perception'. Her photographs constantly disrupt our usual perceptions because some are carefully constructed while others are incidental scenes she encounters on her travels, leaving us unsure which are her imaginary fictions and which scenes from life. Her distinct visual language is articulated by a deep awareness of the formalist concerns of painting, sculpture and photography, as well as an acute sense of colour and the optical resonances of pattern and design.

19 January 2012 - 25 February 2012