Listing(s)

'Mamiya'

Nomthunzi Mashalaba at blank projects

"Mamiya, I do not presume to know the course of her life nor will I ever understand her predicament, motherhood and the pursuit of family.
Seventy six at present, she grew up to mother five children;  Nodumo (1959), Tembani (1964),  Noxolo (1969),  Linda (1972) and Nomthunzi (1979)."

blank projects is pleased to present Nomthunzi Mahalaba’s second solo exhibition, Mamiya. In this exhibition, Mashalaba explores the possibility of rematerializing moments in her past by using old family photographs as tools to reincarnate the past in the present. This exercise is centred on the artist’s relationship with, and memories of her mother. With a light hand, Mashalaba tests photography as a relational medium through reworkings of the source images in large-scale charcoal and mixed media drawings on stretched cotton fabric, and intimate smaller drawings and collages.

17 May 2012 - 09 June 2012

'Strange Days'

Jan-Henri Booyens at blank projects

We linger alone
Bodies confused
Memories misused
As we run from the day
To a strange night of stone
-Jim Morrison 1967

blank projects is proud to host the fourth solo exhibition of critically
acclaimed painter Jan-Henri Booyens. Strange Days is a body of work
created in 2012 in Pretoria that expands the abstract/landscape
iconographic structures Booyens developed in his previous bodies of
work.

In Strange Days these structures evolve into isolated forms that vary from the severely monochrome to the exuberantly polychrome. His abstracted compositions evoke landscapes built on systems of fractal geometry, and yet they retain the spontaneity of an intuitive creation process. Booyens’
reluctance to completely undermine figurative representation adds to
this body of work’s feeling of internal dissent, a conflict between the
order of recognisable forms and the vitality of chaos.

12 April 2012 - 12 May 2012

'Modal Approach and Accent'

Gerda Scheepers at blank projects

'Modal Approach and Accent' is the title of Gerda Scheepers's show at Blank Projects. By applying imagery as short-hand for both her own art making process or specific (cultural) signs and figurations, Gerda Scheepers explores the medium of painting. Content and formal elements of painting are remixed through cut, copy and paste with the results actively pursuing ambiguity. The sculptures and paintings operate like devices for containment that, ultimately and crucially, fail to contain.
 
Scheepers often works within series or groupings of work, creating environments for (often repetitive) motifs and gestures. In this selection of work the shape of a t-shirt is at the same time motif in a picture and picture surface for another layer of signifiers, similar to the way that sculptural elements with a very concrete heritage act as support structure to  paintings that have shifted through methodical gesture and moved to abstraction.

The work is caught up in a system signifying progress, which is reconfigured in a careful orchestration that deliberately fails to deliver the complete and self-contained result that they seem to promise.

01 March 2012 - 31 March 2012

'MINOR RIOT'

Michael Ilias Linders at blank projects

'MINOR RIOT' is a probe of imagined views of the ordinary, which are collected from the multicultural reservoir of global visual media. The collected works are after-reflections or afterthoughts brought together under the ethos of the 'clusterfuck aesthetic'*. They are about intuitively playing with the moment of thought that happens when an idea that was once thought a great idea is in fact - in time and realization - a rather average, even boring idea, but being happy with that fact. The joy of taking average and mixing it with more average and getting averagely good in the end.

* 'Take an object, Do something to it, Do something else to it' - Jasper Johns     

01 March 2012 - 31 March 2012

'UNACCAPTABLE'

Donna Kukama at blank projects

The exhibition UNACCEPTABLE combines various elements drawn from researched material and memory. The term is a label for that which is outside of the norms in society.

Drawing from a collection of various ‘love’ territories previously inhabited by the artist, a fragile and personal point of view emerges from a space that has previously been framed as ‘political’.

Because Love is Not Enough [Sound Installation, 2012] is a fictional piece set in Kenya in 1950, during the Mau-Mau war. It is a follow-up of Not Yet, and Nobody Knows Why Not [2008],  a performance piece that took place during a protest gathering of Mau-Mau war veterans against the current Kenyan leadership, where Kukama stood at the entrance of the venue where people gathered and, seductively as well as violently, applied red lipstick to her entire face.

The sound installation Because Love is not Enough narrows down to a single moment in the beginning of a fictitious love affair that is already on the verge of its end. Oblivious to its surrounding political realities, this single moment magnifies to a point reflecting that which is outside of itself.

At the opening of the exhibition there will be a performance rendition of the eleventh season of Little Britain, a popular TV comedy series.  In this season, the idea of love shifts between the "innocent" and the "vulgar", inserting at times the most unpredictable expressions of the term.

An accompanying video piece goes further to build unlikely relationships between throw-away ideas, unfinished thoughts or phrases, and borrowed terms to render them all as equally valuable elements within making a term as immaterial as "love" graspeable.

 

02 February 2012 - 25 February 2012