'Experimentation: All Hell Breaks Loose'
Mawande Ka Zenzile at STEVENSON in Cape Town
STEVENSON presents Mawande Ka Zenzile's first solo show with the gallery.
Central to Ka Zenzile's practice is the idea of the found object. The 'object', however, can be anything from a pile of firewood to a supremacist ideology or the image of Batgirl. The show is conceived as a laboratory of ideas, where iconography from low and high culture, historical and contemporary political constellations is forced into dialogue. Mowgli from Disney's Jungle Book crosses paths with Osama Bin Laden and Saint Sebastian, in an attempt to trace the violence that lies at the core of all these narratives. Recurring motifs are the scarecrow, with its associations of both power and vulnerability, and the boat, which suggests an interest in exploration and travel, as well as its darker counterparts of conquest and slavery.
Ka Zenzile writes:
My work draws attention to history, politics, colonialism, slavery and migration/immigration. I explore how culture, commerce and institutionalised power determine (or dictate) our lived experience. I'm interested in the rise and fall of ideological, political and cultural systems - those that dictate or those that succumb. In my time I have witnessed the falling of the 'twin towers', the lynching of Sudam Hussein, the assassination/execution of Osama Bin Ladin, conflict in the Arabic nations (Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Pakistan, and so on), and the current tension between Russia and Ukraine, the US and other European nations/superpowers.
The exhibition will include sculpture, painting and photography. On the opening night, the artist will execute a new performance.
29 May - 12 July
'Celebration'
Barthelemy Toguo
STEVENSON is pleased to present Barthelemy Toguo's first solo show with the gallery, featuring the artist's iconic drawings and installations.
The exhibition takes its title from an immersive installation in which small drawings are displayed atop 38 music stands. Toguo writes:
[I]t is a concert of 'Celebrations' of life with all its feelings: beauty stands alongside ugliness, pleasure amidst war, sexuality with violence, joy and death. The artist's 'theatre of the world' embraces everything that makes up human existence; life and death live side by side and give meaning to one another.
A Cameroonian who studied in Ivory Coast, Germany and France and lives between Paris and Bandjoun, Toguo's many experiences with border control have led him to interrogate ideas of inclusion and exclusion in his work. After being subjected to baggage checks a number of times, he devised the performance ‘Transit’, in which he checks in luggage made out of wood from Cameroon.
Similarly, for ‘The New World Climax’, first presented at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2001 and included on ‘A Sculptural Premise’ at Stevenson in 2013, Toguo made large wooden stamps resembling those used to stamp his passport. He then used the wooden stamps to make prints on paper, a series of which will be included on this exhibition. The literal weight of the sculptures exemplifies the heavy burden for immigrants of being in a constant state of transition. The work highlights the difficulty of travelling for people forced into exile as well as those who long for change and the experience of something beyond their own borders. Transgression of borders both physical and mental is a persistent theme in his drawings and installations.
