Archive: Issue No. 129, May 2008

EUROPE

11.05.08 Pieter Hugo at Galerie bertrand & gruner, Switzerland
11.05.08 Guy Tillim at Haunch of Venison, Zürich
11.05.08 'Neighbourhood Secrets - 8 Projects / 8 Artists / 8 Sites', Kendell Geers in Norway
11.05.08 '2MOVE: Ireland' featuring William Kentridge and Zen Marie in Northern Ireland
11.05.08 William Kentridge, Kay Hassan and Norman Catherine in Brussels
11.05.08 Roger Ballen Lecture at PICA, Portland
11.05.08 Steven Gregory at Opus Gallery, London
11.05.08 Isolde Krams in Berlin

6.04.08 'Noise: a Hole in the Silence' at Spazio Oberdan, Milan

13.01.08 '.ZA, young art from South Africa' in Siena

THE AMERICAS

6.04.08 'Esther Mahlangu: Reacquiring' at KyleKauffman Gallery, New York
6.04.08 'Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body' at the Hood Museum
6.04.08 'Flow' at the Studio Museum Harlem
6.04.08 Sean Slemon at Magan Projects, New York
6.04.08 Anton Kannemeyer at the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

2.03.08 Ed Young Second Installment at Locust Projects, Miami

10.02.08 'Far From Home' at North Carolina Museum of Art
10.02.08 'Make Art/Stop Aids' at Fowler Museum, UCLA

Pieter Hugo at Galerie bertrand & gruner, Switzerland

Pieter Hugo, Standard Bank Young Artist for 2007, presents his second solo show in Switzerland at Galerie bertrand & gruner, Geneva. In the past year, Hugo has held solo shows at Yossi Milo in New York, at Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles and at Extraspazio in Rome.

Hugo's solo at Galerie bertrand & gruner, simply entitled 'Works 2002-2007', is an overview of his work during these years and includes images from his Looking Aside, 2006, Messina/Musina, 2007 and The Hyena and Other Men, 2007 series.

Opens: April 17
Closes: May 31

 

Guy Tillim at Haunch of Venison, Zürich

During April and May, Guy Tillim presents his first solo exhibition in Zürich at Haunch of Venison.

Renowned for his images taken in the fractured territories of Sierra Leone, Eritrea, the DRC and Angola, as well as the urban centres of Johannesburg and Kinshasa, Tillim exhibits a selection of recent series including his iconic images of child soldiers being trained by the Mai Mai militia in the DRC and Petros Village, 2006. This series of intimate colour photographs looks closely at the people and the daily life of a rural village in central Malawi.

Opens: April 18
Closes: May 24

 

'Neighbourhood Secrets - 8 Projects / 8 Artists / 8 Sites', Kendell Geers in Norway

'Neighbourhood Secrets' is a major international art project and symposium taking place in Stavanger, Norway. The artworks by eight international artists occupy eight specific public spaces and each examines trends in the contemporary art field today, concerning what one might call relational or social art practices, community building arts, narrative monuments, collective portraits, artistic interventions or participatory processes - in short, the artistic activity taking place outside the institution.

The project features Raising Silent Tongues by Paul Kos, USA at Stavanger Cathedral; It runs in the Neighbourhood by Jeanne van Heeswijk, Netherlands at Stavanger University Hospital; Requiem by Alfredo Jaar, Chile at the Norwegian Oil Museum; JuJU (White Magic) by Gitte Villesen, Denmark at Café Sting (and Stavanger Museum); Behind every great fortune there is a crime by Jörgen Svensson, Sweden at Solvberget Culture Centre; Manifest (Neighbourhood Secrets) by Kendell Geers, South Africa at Kvadrat Supermall; Unusually adrift from the shoreline by Raqs Media Collective, India at the Old Cinema in Sandnes, and Troy by Lars Ramberg, Norway at Ruten in central Sandnes.

Opens: May 1
Closes: May 31

 

'2MOVE: Ireland' in Northern Ireland

Curated by Mieke Bal and Miguel Hernández-Navarro, '2MOVE' is now to be exhibited in Northern Ireland as '2MOVE:Ireland' after its presentation in Spain, the Netherlands and Norway. This exhibition of video work by international artists, explores the connections between video, mobility, migratory culture and our contemporary world.

Twenty-nine video works capture the contemporary multiple sense of movement - in the media and the art it makes, and in the social movement and the cultural 'look' it brings with it. Taking video to be inherently connected to the migratory, the exhibition brings together a number of significant international video works. Connections between video and the culture of migration are explored - the sense of accessibility, experiment, novelty, and community.

Exhibiting artists include, amongst others, Ursula Biemann, Keren Cytter, Wojtek Doroszuk, Mona Hatoum, Anthony Haughey, William Kentridge, Daniel Lupión, Zen Marie, Pedro Ortuño, Javier Pividal, Jesús Segura, Thomas Sykora And Roos Theuws.

Opens: May 3
Closes: June 2

 

William Kentridge, Kay Hassan and Norman Catherine in Brussels

MoBa Gallery in Brussels launches its new space called NOMAD with an exhibition by William Kentridge, Kay Hassan and Norman Catherine, entitled 'Multiple Choice'.

The show will feature editions by each artist with Kentridge presenting etchings and sculpture. Hassan, who is better known for his collage work, shows multiples relating to a sense of time - Fixing Time,Reversing Time and Reflecting Time. He also presents a series of photographs entitled Morning Rituals. Catherine exhibits a series of bronze sculptures inspired by legends, masks, tales and allegories from South Africa.

'Multiple Choice' is Kentridge's first gallery exhibition in Brussels since his solo show ten years ago at Bozar.

Opens: May 7
Closes: June 22

 

Roger Ballen Lecture at PICA, Portland

Roger Ballen will be presenting a lecture on his work at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) in Porland, Oregon. Ballen, who is originally from New York, has been living in Johannesburg, South Africa since 1974.

Trained as a geologist, he has been photographing for over 25 years, mostly in remote areas outside of Johannesburg. The subjects of Ballen's photographs, populations on the periphery, confront his camera with both the freshness of children and the faces of hard experience.

Opens: May 7

 

'Steven Gregory at Opus Gallery, London

Opus Gallery in association with Trudie Stephenson present Steven Gregory's 'Down To The Bone'

Gregory, who was born in South Africa but currently lives and works in Britain, takes the vanitas tradition of 16th and 17th Century Dutch masters as a starting point in his work. He attempts to immortalize what we leave behind. With irony and humour the artist resurrects the dead by covering human skulls with precious and semi-precious stones. Tissue and skin are replaced by jet, pearls, malachite and glass beads, where beauty spots once sat, diamonds and rubies now nestle. Also included in the exhibition are precise skull drawings and works in bronze.

Collected internationally, Gregory's most recent exhibitions include his sell out show 'Bone Stone Bronze' at Nicholas Robinson Gallery in New York, and his inclusion in the 2007 Serpentine Gallery exhibition, 'In the darkest hour there may be light: Works from Damien Hirst's murderme collection'. There, he showed alongside Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, the Chapman Brothers, Tracy Emin, Sarah Lucas and others.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Opens: May 8
Closes: June 19

 

Isolde Krams in Berlin

Isolde Krams presents 'Erden', a solo exhibition at artSPACE, Berlin. The exhibition includes a sculptural installation which explores the artist's struggle to come to terms with problems of the environment and social politics.

The installation makes use of found objects, and is comprised in part of hundreds of earth-coloured plastic balls, which were originally part of an industrial cooling system, and were found abandoned in an open field. Krams also incorporates bronze, gold, lead and brass, making reference to mining and its impact on the environment.

The exhibition will consist of Krams' latex sculptures along with found objects. Her Miss World and Schweinehund objects are ever-present and always evolving.

Opens: May 9
Closes: June 7

 

'Noise: a Hole in the Silence' at Spazio Oberdan, Milan

Curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Gwy Mandelinck, 'Noise: a Hole in the Silence' brings together works by 21 artists whose work explores silence and noise and every possible variation and gradation in between.

Each work presented helps to outline a particular fragment within the complex panorama of sounds, noises, hums and silences that make up the exhibition, which takes its inspiration from 'Een Lek in het Zwijgen: Noise', an event conceived and organised by Mandelinck (poetry) and Di Pietrantonio (visual arts) at Watou (Belgium) during the summer of 2007.

Artists exhibiting are Joseph Beuys (Germany), Marcel Broodthaers (Belgium), John Cage (USA), Mircea Cantor (Romania), Giuseppe Chiari (Italy), Jimmie Durham (USA), Jan Fabre (Belgium), Lara Favaretto (Italy), William Kentridge (South Africa), La Monte Young (USA), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Italy), Kris Martin (Belgium), Shirin Neshat (Iran), Melik Ohanian (France), Yoko Ono (Japan), Adrian Paci (Albania), Diego Perrone (Italy), Miguel Angel Rios (Argentina), Luigi Russolo (Italia), Mungo Thomson (USA), Bill Viola (USA) and Jordan Wolfson (USA).

Opens: February 27
Closes: May 25

 

'.ZA, young art from South Africa' in Siena

This exhibition, conceived by Lorenzo Fusi, is co-curated by five established South African artists: Marlene Dumas, Kendell Geers, Bernie Searle, Minnette Vári and Sue Williamson. Each was asked to put forward the work of artists not older than 35, still residing or mainly operating in South Africa. More than 20 works were thus gathered from as many artists, mostly little known or completely unknown to the Italian and European public.

The show represents a sort of passing on of the torch, as well as a tribute on the part of the better known artists to their younger colleagues, who are often penalised by their geographical isolation at the farthermost point of the African continent.

Selected artists include: Bridget Baker, Ismail Farouk, Simon Gush, Nicholas Hlobo, Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi, Ruth Sacks, Sean Slemon, Pippa Stalker, Doreen Southwood, Johan Thom, Nontsikelelo Veleko and James Webb.

The Italian/English catalogue, published by Silvana Editoriale, will include essays by all the curators.

Opens: February 2
Closes: May 4

 

'Esther Mahlangu: Reacquiring' at KyleKauffman Gallery, New York

'Esther Mahlangu: Reacquiring' is the first US solo exhibition by South African artist Esther Mahlangu. Widely regarded as the most important Ndebele artist working today, Mahlangu was the first to transfer Ndebele designs onto canvas. Traditionally Ndebele painting is executed in large scale, colorful, geometric murals exclusively reserved for the exterior of domestic buildings.

The show is a survey of the artist's most recent body of work and includes a wide range of media: paintings, beadwork and sculptural objects. Chronologically, it begins with the finest examples of Mahlangu's flat paintings - boards and canvases elaborately decorated in either bright commercial acrylic or muted natural pigments of cow dung and mud, utilising only feathers and bundled-twigs as brushes. However, the focus of the exhibition is her most recent series of sculptures: contemporary objects such as trucks and signs, meticulously embellished in traditional Ndebele fashion.

These objects - juxtaposing the old and the new, the abstract and the representational, the traditional and the contemporary - are the paradigmatic examples of the way in which her oeuvre is constantly evolving, breaking from convention and challenging the strictures of a customary art form.

In conjunction with the show, the Gallery will be releasing the first in a series of full-colour exhibition catalogues with an accompanying essay by Dr. Kauffman. The book will run in a limited edition of 500 copies, the first 100 to be signed and numbered by Mahlangu. Proceeds from the sale of the catalogues and her work will go to her School for Ndebele Art for local girls, which she founded and funds herself directly.

Opens: March 27
Closes: May 10

 

'Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body' at the Hood Museum of Art

The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College presents 'Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body', a major travelling exhibition, curated by Barbara Thompson, that explores the historical roots of a charged icon in contemporary art - the black female body.

The exhibition will explore the complex perpetuation of icons and stereotypes of black womanhood through the display of over 100 sculptures, prints, postcards, photographs, paintings, textiles and video installations by artists from Africa, Europe, America and the Caribbean.

Presented in separate but intersecting sections, 'Black Womanhood' reveals three different perspectives - the traditional African, Western colonial, and contemporary global - that have contributed to current ideas about black womanhood. These three sections explore themes such as ideals of beauty, fertility and sexuality, maternity and motherhood, and women's identities and social roles, and examine collectively how these overlapping perspectives penetrate the complex and interwoven relationships between Africa and the West, male and female, and past and present, all of which have contributed to the inscription of meaning onto the black female body.

Zanele Muholi, Senzeni Marasela, Nandipha Mntambo, Penny Siopis and Berni Searle exhibit contemporary representations of black womanhood which, in contrast to the historic representations of the African female body on display, dissect the layers of social, cultural, and political realities that have influenced the creation of stereotypes about black women.

Also expected to feature in the exhibition are well-established contemporary artists living in Africa and Europe such as Hassan Musa, Ingrid Mwangi, Robert Hutter, Sokari Douglas Camp, Emile Guebehi, Magdalene Odundo, Fazal Sheikh and Maud Sulter.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 370-page illustrated catalogue published by the Hood Museum of Art in association with the University of Washington Press in April 2008.

Opens: April 1
Closes: August 10

 

'Flow' at the Studio Museum Harlem

Nicholas Hlobo and Mustafa Maluka are included on 'Flow', which opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem at the beginning of April. 'Flow' is an exhibition focusing on work made by a new generation of international artists from Africa.

The approximately 20 emerging international artists, who hail from 11 African nations, reside mainly in Europe and North America and travel to and from Africa regularly. They are uniquely conscious of, and responsive to, recent African history, global economics and the idiosyncratic culture of the new millennium which they represent on this exhibition through a diversity of media including digital photography, video, paintings and site-specific installation.

The majority of the featured artists have never been included in major US museum exhibitions. 'Flow' is modelled after 'Freestyle', the Studio Museum's landmark 2001 exhibition, which was followed in 2005 by 'Frequency'.

Opens: April 2
Closes: June 29

 

Sean Slemon at Magan Projects, New York

Sean Slemon's inaugural solo exhibition, and second exhibition in New York, 'BLOCK 700' references an actual city block in the Chelsea area of New York City.

Bordered by 10th and 11th Avenues on the east and west, and by 28th and 29th Street on the north and south, 'Block 700' has, in reality, limited natural infrastructure for an area which is fast becoming residential.

Slemon explores the ephemeral and the transient by creating physical solid renditions of light and in so doing questions these areas of natural infrastructure which cannot be physically owned within the structure of the city, yet have inadvertently become one of the most sought after commodities in terms of real estate and quality of life, with people hijacking its benefits for the purpose of profit.

The exhibition leads from an ongoing investigation and interrogation into the natural infrastructure of New York, looking at policy in and around public access to what have become private, exclusive parts of the city life, and how man and nature are interacting together as a unit.

Opens: April 3
Closes: May 6

 

Anton Kannemeyer at the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Anton Kannemeyer's exhibition, 'The Haunt of Fears' at Jack Shainman Gallery, makes reference to the EC Comics title of the 1950s, like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, which revelled in a gruesome joie de vivre, with grimly ironic fates apportioned to many of the stories' protagonists.

Kannemeyer applies the stylistic and narrative traits of this 50s pulp fiction to his satirical view of contemporary South African life and politics. By poking fun at the secret bigotry masked by political correctness, he exposes the insecurities and fears of a society struggling to come to terms with its past and its present.

The show will incorporate two series of work, Cursed Paradise and Alphabet of Democracy.

Opens: April 17
Closes: May 17

 

Ed Young Second Installment at Locust Projects, Miami

Black in Five Minutes will be the second installment of the site-specific Locust Projects mural project of by Ed Young. He utilizes forms of conceptualism, performance, and minimalism, underscored by his persona, to call attention to major themes of boredom, insolence and laziness. Young investigates the idea that the structure of the art world has superseded the art object itself. For this project, Young will create a new site-specific mural every four months for one year. The final mural will coincide with Art Basel Miami 2008.

Opens: March 2008
Closes: June 2008

 

'Far From Home' at North Carolina Museum of Art

Starting in mid-February, North Carolina Museum of Art will host 'Far from Home', an exhibition which includes art that addresses the global displacement of people and populations as they relocate for economic, political, or other reasons. The exhibition features photography, paintings and sculpture by artists of diverse national and cultural origins.

'Far From Home' explores the various ways that displacement is manifested in creative expression, suggesting very personal transformations alongside the wider group dynamics of belonging and exclusion.Whether focused on the individual or larger community, works here stand in dialogue with the expansion of global networks as people relocate and circumscribe their experiences in new places while maintaining connections to homelands and heritage, however tenuous.

Featured artists include Ghada Amer, José Bedia, Lalla Essaydi, Maria Elena González, Seydou Keïta, Vik Muniz, Youssef Nabil and Lorna Simpson among others.

Opens: February 17
Closes: July 13

 

'Make Art/Stop Aids' at Fowler Museum, UCLA

'Make Art/Stop Aids', a travelling international exhibition debuting at the Fowler Museum at UCLA on February 23, shows how artists around the world have responded to HIV/Aids and how their work can raise awareness and inspire activism.

The exhibition, which includes artists from the Brazil, India, South Africa and the United States, presents more than 60 contemporary works, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, performance videos, posters, animated shorts, digital media and installations that engage these questions: What is Aids? Who lives, who dies? Why are condoms controversial? Are you afraid to touch? When was the last time you cried? Why a red ribbon? and, Are you ready to act?

South African artists featured on the show include David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, William Kentridge, Fiona Kirkwood, Brenton Maart, Churchill Madikida, Gideon Mendel, Zanele Muholi, Pennny Siopis and Clive Van den Berg.

Opens: February 23
Closes: June 15