Archive: Issue No. 46, June 2001

'Soul of Africa' is a selection of African art from the collection of Han Coray. Coray was an extraordinary man - in 1916 and 1917, when he ran three art galleries concurrently, Coray hosted an exhibition of work by Zurich Dadaists which included African sculptures and weapons. This was the first time African objects were exhibited in Switzerland as works of art.

The majority of the 2 400 objects in his collection were purchased from the Parisian art dealer Paul Guillaume between 1916 and 1928, at a time when European attitudes towards African art were beginning to change. Coray and his friends collected objects that interested them, even though their origins and meaning remained unfamiliar. Although Europeans had been in contact with African art for centuries, the systematic study of African art was in its infancy. Coray's collecting preceded the first serious publication analysing the styles of African art by a decade and the first major exhibition of African art by nearly 20 years.

Coray showed great insight in his purchases and helped to set the standard for the collection and appreciation of African art in the early 20th century. Due to financial hardship, Coray was forced to sell his prized collection and in 1940 it went to the Volkerkundemuseum at the University of Zurich, where it fortunately continued to have an impact on the collection and appreciation of African art. The selection of work on view here has been specially made and reinterpreted for an African audience. A comprehensive catalogue is available from the museum shop at the SANG and a programme of African movies presented by the Alliance Francaise du Cap will be screened for the duration of the exhibition.

Opening: June 02
Closing: August 12

Works from a private collection of contemporary South African art are on show at the Irma Stern Museum, prior to their permanent housing in the Chancellor Oppenheimer Library on the University of Cape Town campus. The unnamed collector has permanently loaned a total of 46 works to the university so that they may be hung together and seen freely by students, staff and visitors to the university. The collection includes several works by William Kentridge and Andrew Verster and single works by Tyrone Appollis, Willie Bester, Kendell Geers and Paul Stopforth among others. Works in the collection date from the late Fifties right up to the present.

Opening: May 29
Closing: June 28

Judith Mason and her daughter, Tamar Mason, exhibit together for the first time. Judith's last show, also at this venue, dealt with the Truth Commission and received rave reviews. Her new oil paintings relate the classical myth of the Furies to street violence in Johannesburg. In other works still-life objects and landscapes are used as metaphors for longing and paradox. Tamar works principally in clay and deals with issues relating to the traditional and contemporary roles of women in Africa. Street graffiti is combined with traditional South African images of divination, typically used by people as a means of controlling their lives and environment. She will also exhibit carved cattle skulls, continuing the link between ilobola, the horns of the moon, and women as nurturer.

The artists will open each other's exhibitions at 6pm on Tuesday June 5. They will also conduct a walkabout at the gallery on Thursday June 7 from 10am to noon.

Opening: Tuesday, June 05 at 6pm
Closing: June 30

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Gail Iris Neke has produced a body of work about rape and violence against women and children in South Africa which she entitles 'Killing the (M)other'. Having conducted research at a number of rape clinics, Neke has chosen to explore the reasons why men rape, rather than the effects on the survivor. She looks at the perpetrator, the man's need to conquer his "non-masculine" vulnerability, to gain power and control over his feminine side as well as those who symbolise it. In the work, which comprises both sculptural works and paintings, she represents the threat of female sexuality as it is expressed in myths such as the "vagina dentata", the castrating vagina, or the Medusa's head. She juxtaposes psychological and psychoanalytical theories of why men rape with personal stories of rape in South Africa. She deconstruct fairy tales, and constructs a vocabulary of images and symbols, drawing on sources as diverse as children's toys and child pornography. Neke says: "My visual work is not easy to confront. However, neither is the reality of the violence against women and children."

Opening: Wednesday, May 30 at 6.30pm
Closing: June 30

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Photojournalist Jeremy Jowell presents an exhibition of awe-inspiring large format prints shot in Namibia and touted as a "must-see for anyone in need of escape from the claustrophobia of city living".

Opening: Wednesday June 27 at 6.30pm
Closing: August 10

'Egazini: The Battle of Grahamstown' is a project which claims to "recast history through printmaking". The Battle of Grahamstown in 1819 is often referred to as a critical turning point in South Africa's history. On April 22 that year, Makana, a Xhosa prophet under Chief Ndlambe, led an attack on the British garrison in Grahamstown, resulting in heavy losses for the amaXhosa. Within a few months of this battle, a combined force of Dutch colonists and British military expelled all the amaXhosa beyond the Keiskamma River. Rather than see his people decimated any further, Makana surrendered himself to Landdrost Andries Stockenstrom. The British sent Makana to Robben Island as a prisoner, where he drowned while attempting to escape on Christmas Day 1819.

Focusing on heritage and legacy, and working with the Fine Line Press and the Underpressure Agency, in collaboration with members of the History Department of Rhodes University, a selection of visual artists has produced a diverse collection of graphic works for this show. Participants were drawn from a wide arena including academic institutions, community centres, schools, research and archival deposits, museums, government departments, private enterprise, professional artists organisations and a women's craft group. Artists include Giselle Baillie, Violet Booi, Gabriel Clark-Brown, Christine Dixie, Roxandra Dardagan, Hilary Graham, Jacobus Kloppers, Vusi Khumalo, Nigel Mullins, Rosie Ngxingo, Dominic Thorburn and Zola Toyi.

Opening: Monday May 28 at 6pm
Closing: June 15

Anthony Cawood has produced a collaged interior entitled Paperwall in the Greatmore Studios gallery. Cawood has taken part in a number of Thupelo workshops and last year held a show at the AVA.

Opening: May 30 at 5.30pm
Closing: June 13

Administered by João Ferreira Fine Art, the Smallest Gallery in Cape Town is little more than a vitrine tucked between a restaurant and a clothing shop on Greenmarket Square. This month the gallery plays host to ceramic works by Martine Jackson. Ferreira aims to showcase the work of a different young artist here each month.

This exhibition highlights work produced by high school students in Cape Town's southern suburbs. The show has been curated by Rowan Smith (whose 'Boy' and 'Girl' were one of the highlights of 'Walking the Street' in Observatory) and Brian Kilbey (who has apparently achieved local renown for producing events like 'Shimmer' and 'Apocalypse').

Opening: Wednesday April 25 at 6pm
Closing: July 31

Shelly Sacks grew up in South Africa and moved to London some time ago, where she continued to produce art. She is exhibiting what she terms a "social sculpture". This term was first used in the 1970s by Joseph Beuys, to describe an expanded conception of art in which thought, speech and discussion are core "materials". Given that social sculpture arises out of the perception of all human beings as artists, it requires us to shape a democratic, sustainable and free social order in tune with our creative potential and our right to develop and express this potential. Expanding our conception of art in this way lifts the aesthetic out of its confines to a specific sphere or media, relocating it in a collective, imaginative work-space in which we can see, re-thing and reshape our lives.

In this installation, Sacks deals with the threatened banana trade of the Windward Islands. The work is made from dried banana skins and the story is told by recorded testimonies of the island growers. The problems faced by small scale producers of bananas are brought to the fore. The GATT agreement on world trade stipulates exact and limiting specifications for bananas that are to be sold internationally. This effectively cuts out smaller scale producers and reduces the varieties available. Bananas are a politically charged commodity and their trade forms part of complex networks influenced by politics and drug trafficking. Those who unite against the unfair trade restrictions are often threatened with violence.

Shelley Sacks is Head of Art at Oxford Brookes University. She worked for many years with Joseph Beuys in Germany, and lectures widely on both Beuys' and her own social sculpture activities.

Opening: April 21
Closing: August 26

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'Inferno and Paradiso' is an internationally acclaimed photographic exhibition curated by artist Alfredo Jaar. A Chilean born resident of New York, Jaar traveled to Rwanda in 1994 in the middle of the genocide, an experience which changed his life and his art and resulted in the staging of this exhibition.

The installation showcases work by 18 of the world's foremost photojournalists and addresses the emotional neutralisation that photography and other visual arts have suffered in our times. Each photographer was asked to choose two pictures of their own, the first representing the most difficult, painful picture they had taken, and the other being the one which had given them the most joy. The exhibition is extremely moving and its intention is to work against the general numbness and immunity that is built up by individuals through the constant bombardment of images expressing human suffering, by the press and other media. The exhibition deals with issues and images of human suffering and through them tries to reinstill a sense of compassion and caring that may have been lost to societies that have been exposed to high levels of violence. Its pertinence to the South African situation is easy to see, and it also includes works by prominent Southern African photographers Peter Magubane, Themba Hadebe and Ricardo Rangel.

Opening: Saturday, April 21, 11am
Closing: July 01

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Katherine Bull's first one-person exhibition was held at the AVA in 1999. This new body of work is a site-specific piece which responds to the physical features of the gallery as a church structure and also as a space for exhibiting artworks, as well as to the visitor's response to the gallery/church and its contents. Bull maintains her ongoing interest in interrogating how visual records and representations from the past mediate experience and aid/disable "orientation" in the present.

Fritha Langerman's exhibition is entitled 'Watch'. The work refers to surveillance, monitoring, recording and documenting. It is constructed of a number of objects and images in series of 48 (referring to half-hour cycles that monitor space over time). The exhibition works within the ambit of installation and is self-reflexive in that meaning is entirely contingent on and embedded in the space itself. The two gallery spaces are made distinct, one making subtle use of whiteness, shadow and absence; the other documenting the first space and presenting it for public consumption.

Opening: Wednesday May 23 at 6.30pm
Closing: June 20

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