Current Review(s)
Morning after Dark
David Lurie at Commune.1Although David Lurie’s 'Morning after Dark' is in a many ways a more political and less poetic enterprise than Olivié Keck’s exhibition False Priest (running simultaneously upstairs at Commune 1), Lurie shares with Keck an interest in articulating the absent body. This series of urban landscapes documents Cape Town and surrounds in the early hours of the morning, maintaining a primary focus on deserted architectural spaces as seen through Lurie’s signature aloof, restrained lens. Together these works belong to an ongoing project intended for a book, ‘The Right to the City’, with a provisional date of publication in 2015.
23 September 2014 - 23 October 2014
Listings(s)
'Morning After Dark’
David Lurie at Commune.1''Morning After Dark’ is a series of urban landscapes of the formal and informal parts of Cape Town, all of which have been photographed in early-morning light… This journey was an intensely personal experience, making observations about what I saw, a photographic diary of sorts, where non-linear and disparate images and symbols of startling modernity are linked to other stories and experiences of increasing chaos, dislocation and displacement in an ever-evolving, bewildering co-existence.” -Artist Statement-
The exhibition presents a photographic series from photographer David Lurie. The early-morning light captured in ‘Morning After Dark’ is charged with an uncanny energy despite the perceived stillness of the landscapes. Here the ‘ghosts’ of people absent haunt the scenes in a potent reminder of how deeply intertwined structures and the people they contain (or exclude) are. The moments of stillness before the city awakes expose the constructs and constraints of the surroundings: the boundaries, the intersections, the dead ends, the places where inner city bleeds into fringes. What we are left with is a view of a city whose population is at once fractured and deeply enmeshed.
The images form part of an ongoing book project about urbanization and the marginalized of Cape Town, provisionally entitled ‘The Right to the City’, to be published in 2015.
23 September 2014 - 23 October 2014
Solo Exhibitions
Hugh Upsher, Carol-Anne Gainer, David Lurie and Christiaan Diedericks at AVATHE LONG STREET SHOW: David Lurie
Long Street exhibits many of the dichotomies plainly visible in urban South Africa. The Long Street Show by David Lurie employs the Main and Artstrip galleries of the AVA with a photographic exploration of one of South Africa's most famous streets. Lurie likens himself to "a kind of party-crasher disguised as a photographer", who over a period of months would visit, mingle with the diverse crowd, have a drink, chat and photograph the passing show. In The Long Street Show, so-called unmediated documentary photographs capturing the social and political character of this iconic street are juxtaposed with images that are collaboratively staged, in which the characters "impersonate themselves being themselves" for the photographer. This series is both an original look at Long Street as well as an enquiry into different ways of seeing and representing the urban experience.
BEAUTIFUL WORLD: Christiaan Diedericks
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AND EVERYTHING'S DONE UNDER THE SUN: Carol-Anne Gainer
In the Long Gallery, Christiaan Diedericks and Carol-Anne Gainer present new works on paper. Beautiful World by Christiaan Diedericks is an edition of seven, original hand-made artist's books, and a special extension of a larger edition of fine art prints by the same title. Each unique book contains seven original dry point engravings and seven Afrikaans poems (with English translations) by contemporary South African author Johann de Lange, as well as text by Hayden Proud, curator at The Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, and Dr. Eugene Vorster, a well-known Cape Town psychiatrist.
In And Everything's Done Under the Sun, Carol-Anne Gainer presents a series of monotypes prompted by her experience traveling, and living in rural France. Gainer's appreciation of the natural world is mediated through a curious combination of 18th century farm implements and the domestic bric-a-brac of the last century, including a heron in a bell-jar, tulip containers and farming implements juxtaposed with images or text about animals. The eclectic mix speaks to a concern with our custodianship/relationship with a nature that is increasingly fragile.
TEN MILLION POUNDS OF SLUDGE: Hugh Upsher
Ten Million Pounds of Sludge, a video work by Hugh Upsher, employs the New Media room. Taximonkey.jpg is trying to claim fabulous prizes as it has been declared the 10 000th visitor. It quickly finds this to be no easy task as it attempts to navigate through a maze of obscure and sometimes obscene content. These found images are collected from a large variety internet sources in an almost random fashion. The animation plays out as a mindless hyper paced consumption of content that demonstrates the impending democracy of images. After pushing through ten million pounds of sludge taximonkey.jpg finds his efforts fruitless and returns to the digital graveyard he came from.
22 March 2011 - 15 April 2011
'Encounters at the Edge'
David Lurie at The Photographers GalleryDavid Lurie presents 'Encounters at the Edge', an exhibition focussing on urbanisation and its effects on the disenfranchised. He writes:
'According to the United Nations, the majority of the world’s population today lives in cities. Out of a world population of 7 billion, 1 billion people live in slums and more than 1 billion are informal workers, struggling to survive. These figures are staggering if you consider that 95% of the future growth of humanity will occur in cities, overwhelmingly in poor cities, and most of it in slums, creating a crisis for this global urban, informal working class, or mass unemployed people – especially, but not only, in the developing world – who have no formal connection to the world economy, and no chance of ever having such a connection.
Cape Town mirrors many of the problems facing other African cities and cities in the developing world. How does this surplus humanity improvise survival in the city? The photographs included in this exhibition are an attempt to distill my experience of these fragments of life – of unfinished stories – on the precipice beyond the edge of Cape Town. It is a study in informal survival, in a world of unstable, sprawling squatter camps, informal settlements, garbage hills, and the sand dunes of the Cape Flats (and more recently, in Hout Bay where I now live), where urbanisation has been disconnected from industrialisation and even from economic growth.
My photographs focus on the excluded, warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy, a habitat largely constructed out of crude brick, recycled plastic, metal sheets, cardboard, cement blocks, and scrap wood, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay. This is my attempt to capture the variety of responses to this environment.'
To be opened by Prof. Jo Noero (Architecture, University of Cape Town)
11 July 2012 - 25 September 2012
Individual Exhibitions
David Lurie, Creative Block and Mzimkhulu Manyisane at AVADavid Lurie: Offside: Cape Town 2010
David Lurie shows 'Offside: Cape Town 2010' in the main gallery, a photographic exhibition that focusses on the periphery of the Soccer World Cup in CapeTown, and aims to deconstruct and explore some of the inherent ironies and contradictions of an event that has dome little to address or alleviate the countries burden of poverty, inequality and the threat of xenophobic violence.
The Creative Block
The Creative Block is an initiative aimed at creating a forum for innovation and experimentation within a specified format, and exhibits the work of a variety of artists using standard wooden blocks (18 x 18 x 2.2 cm). The project has run for some six years, and will this year be adjudicated by Gabriel Clarke-Brown, Kirsty Cockeril and Melvin Minnaar, who will award the winning artist with a creative block of their choice. Creative Block shows in the Long Gallery. 150 Participating artists including Ricky Ayanda Dyaloyi, Liza Grobler, Marlise Keith, Nomthunzi Mashalaba and Xolile Mtakatya.
Mzimkhulu Manyisane: Ordinary People
In Mzimkhulu Manyisane's first exhibition at the AVA he presents a collection of paintings in the Artstrip. Manyisane's interest in capturing the extraordinary in the ordinary, his keen colour sense and obsessive mark making bring a dynamic expressionistic stance to the social realism of his subject matter. Urbanization, migration and community are negotiated with rhythm and sensitivity.
28 June 2010 - 23 July 2010
