'Propaganda by Monuments'
Dan Halter, Hasan and Husain Essop and Angela Ferreira at Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo'Calling all enterprising businessmen! The import opportunity of a lifetime presents itself. The Moscow City Council has decided to dismantle the hundreds of monuments to Vladimir Illyich Lenin which grace its crowded public buildings and empty market-places. Cities throughout the crumbling Soviet Union will follow suit. We ask you: where else in the world is there a ready market for statues of Lenin but in South Africa? Jump right in before the local comrades snap them up for nothing.' From Propaganda by Monuments by Ivan Vladislavic, 1996
As the structures of modern regimes are gutted and one society’s implication with another is reassessed, the idea of renaissance carries with it more than its weight in bronze. The exhibition 'Propaganda by Monuments' seeks to reassess nostalgia as a globalised process; less as a helplessly melancholic reconstruction of an idealised moment, and more of a recasting and importation of desired ideologies and material residue. Invoking a ceaseless economy of change and reconstruction, the work of eight artists presented together with a programme of screenings and discussions, use a variety of reflective, dynamic tools to collect and refashion ideals – confronting us with the shifting sands beneath monumental pedestals.
Curated by Clare Butcher and Mia Jankowicz, with catalogue texts by Amy Halliday and Ivan Vladislavic, in English and Arabic.
30 January - 26 February
