Listings(s)
Hema (or Six hours of out-breath captured in 792 balloons)
Lerato Shadi at KZNSALerato Shadi, a young multi-media performance artist based in Johannesburg, takes over the Electric Gallery at the KNZSA for the next few weeks with a video piece titled Hema (or Six hours of out-breath captured in 792 balloons). Hema is based on a performance staged by Shadi at the offices of the advertising agency Ogilvy in Cape Town. In this performance, she blew six hours worth of breath into 792 balloons, allowing the balloons to fall down a stairwell as she filled each one with her exhalation.
21 July 2009 - 08 August 2009
III Moscow International Biennial of Young Art 2012
Athi Patra-Ruga, Lerato Shadi, Pieter Hugo, Mikhael Subotzky and Nandipha Mntambo at Various venuesThe 'III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art 2012' focuses on a young generation of artists aged up to 35 years. Titled 'Under A Tinsel Sun' and laid out as a multimedia project, it portrays the heterogeneity of subjects, languages and styles which are so urgent in this generation, and at the same time looks into the content-related positioning of these artists born between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, as well as into the conditions for their development.
'Under A Tinsel Sun' assumes that, despite the cultural, economic and social differences that may exist between the participants from different countries, there is a common factor in the impossibility of locating oneself by belonging to certain peer groups (whether in the ideological or in the artistic sense).
Cultural science often refers to this as an "almost desperate isolation" (Wolfgang Kaschuba), as the final state of a development in the field of art that had already begun in the mid-1970s, manifesting itself in the end of the historical avant-gardes and in their reassessment as part of a dominant canon. The collapse of ideologies at the end of the 1980s and the dawning of the post-ideological age both play a role within this mesh.
In this state of infinite possibilities, free decision and development and in the absence of a communal "we", the self-positioning of the (artistic) individual becomes the pressing imperative of the present. With the increasing medialization of the world the long established polarity between reality and virtuality gives way to the consciousness that "reality" as such is constructed, subjective and fragmented.
This realization becomes the drive for the artists' self-positioning and for their production of works that no longer describe the phenomena surrounding them as "objective", but that aspire to catalyze a multidimensional and alternative perception of the world. Poetic shifts, emotionality and subjective appropriation are the tools which the artists of this generation operate with so as to faciliate new ways of seeing.
Kathrin Becker
01 July 2012 - 31 August 2012
'Ampersand' - A Dialogue of Contemporary Art from South Africa and the Daimler Art Collection
Athi Patra-Ruga, Dineo Bopape, Lerato Shadi, Willem Boshoff, Zander Blom and Michael MacGarry at Daimler ContemporaryIn the year of the Soccer World Cup in our country, the Daimler Art Collection aims to continue its lengthy history of addressing and promoting South Africa’s cultural development with an international contemporary art exhibition in Berlin. This presentation is arranged in dialogue form, juxtaposing current performative, conceptual and abstract tendencies in contemporary South African art with selected works from the Daimler Art Collection. At this event in Berlin, the Daimler Art Collection (which concentrates on abstract, avant-garde movements and reduced conceptual tendencies from Bauhaus to current contemporary art) presents mainly new acquisitions in the field of international contemporary art for the first time.
The presentation of the ‘Ampersand’ exhibition includes site-specific installations and video art as well as paintings, drawings and photography. About 60 works are shown. While the
exhibition does feature selected predecessors, its main thrust is directed at current works from recent years by younger artists (most of whom are between 30 and 40 years old). Works by fourteen international artists from the Daimler Art Collection are shown in a dialogue with sixteen South African artists.
Artists on show include Zander Blom, Dineo Bopape, Willem Boshoff, Kay Hassan, Nicholas Hlobo, Abrie Fourie, Lawrence Lemaoana, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Athi-Patra Ruga, Lerato Shadie, Rowan Smith, Nontsikelelo Veleko, Mikhael Subotzky, Sue Williamson and James Webb.
10 June 2010 - 10 October 2010