Archive: Issue No. 58, June 2002

01.06.02 Guy-Andre Lagesse - 'Mari-Mira' on Durban beachfront
01.06.02 Red Eye @rt at Durban Art Gallery
01.06.02 'Foundation Installations' and DDE at the BAT
01.06.02 Fritha Langerman and Marianne Meijer at the NSA
15.05.02 Brigitte Maingard and Gail Iris Neke at the NSA
15.05.02 Marlino Kuko remembered at the BAT Centre

15.05.02 Robert Hodgins - '50 Years a Painter' at the Tatham

'Mari-Mira' is Creole slang that can be loosely translated as "enormously fantastic" or "terribly eccentric". It is the word Guy-Andre Lagesse has chosen to describe his transportable village that has already had incarnations in Mauritius, Marseilles and Paris before landing in Durban.

Lagesse, a Mauritian artist born in South Africa, travels the world looking for ordinary people, who may not even consider themselves artists, who re-fashion their worlds from the detritus around them. Setting up collaborative projects, he builds houses and parks from commonplace objects - swings and lookout towers from rubbish bins, table football games from driftwood, and flowers from plastic rubbish. Visitors are encouraged to walk around his "fancy shack lands" and physically experience the strange and inventive structures. These include an ingenious house in which everything is made from recycled materials. Often with more than one function, every object is detachable - the sink, the bar, the cupboard that becomes a bed and the bed which becomes a table.

Lagesse's vision is poetic - he seeks the unexpected in the banal; he embraces play, the unexpected and the kitsch. He wants to unearth the whimsical and the lyrical in the prosaic - above all, to tap into and celebrate the extraordinary creativity that exists in ordinary human beings.

In Durban he is working with a number of local artists: Jabulani Mhlabini, a ceramicist whose skills were inherited from his father and grandfather and whose production is linked to ancestral beliefs; Sbusiso Mbele, better known as the "aeroplane man" because he has built his own aeroplane house from corrugated iron, old taxis and busses; and Pat Khanye, who makes tapestries out of plastic bags. Helping Lagesse on the environmental front is Michael How Long, famous for his creation of a free garden in Umlazi where people come to celebrate marriages and birthdays.

'Mari-Mira, The Fancy Shack Spirit' will be open to the public for guided tours or free self-discovery from June 8. It can be found on the Pavilion Site on North Beach in front of the Military Museum.

Opening: June 8
Closing: July 31

Durban's Red Eye @rt begins a new phase for its fourth birthday with guest curators directing the event on a bi-monthly basis. This month designer and trend guru Neville Trickett runs the ship with his ND-ID (New Durban Identity) project. With its witty reference to Durban number plates the project is already making its presence felt in a flood of red, black and white flyers à la Barbara Kruger with ND embracing everything from "No Disco" to "Native Declaration". Trickett has asked artists to examine and present their take on Durban in whatever form they wish. The DDE sneak Red Eye @rt preview (see below) gives some idea of the diversity of approaches and looks promising - Red Eye needed a shot in the arm and this may well be it. Pull in for the show.

June 7 from 6pm

Durban Art Gallery, 2nd floor, City Hall, Smith Street
Tel: 031 311 2262
Fax: 031 311 2273
Website: www.durban.gov.za/museums/artgallery
Hours: Mon - Sat 8.30am - 4pm, Sun 11am - 4pm

The Seventh Annual Winter Collections of the Durban Designers Emporium (better known as the DDE) is featured at the BAT Centre this weekend with all Durban's favourite designers out in full force. Colleen Eitzen, Amanda Laird Cherry, Theunis Nel, Colette Palin and Marianna Patino will show their creations. Neil Roake brainstormed the idea to have the event supported by a variety of artistic endeavours. Amazingly he managed to get all the major art organisations in Durban to pool their resources and come up with a variety of contributions.

In the Democratic Gallery the Durban Art Gallery presents 'Red Eye - the Sneak Preview' - a taste of next week's offering under the creative directorship of Durban's trend and design guru Neville Trickett. Dean Elliot exhibits his photographs of family life from an insider's perspective while Brigitte Maingard, currently showing at the NSA, presents a video of a ritual encounter with a sangoma. Vulindlela Nyoni, a recent Masters graduate from the University of Natal, examines black masculine identity utilising prints and painting while photographers Angela Shaw and Steven Kotze focus on traditional Izishweshwe cloth and Richard Stretton's new design shop 'Koop' shows a furniture installation constructed from discarded objects.

In the Dance Studio the NSA is represented in a collaborative installation engaging fashion presented by Technikon Natal student Milijana Babic, who makes a witty and ironic play around the fashion industry's notion of "one size fits all", and Jan Henri Booyens subverts the cultural dominance of fashion with his motion triggered sound and light "interference" installation.

Upstairs in the Menzi Mchunu Gallery Deanne Donaldson, well known as a painter, enters into collaboration with a computer.

Tickets for the DDE show on Friday May 31 at 9pm cost R50 - the art, however, is free.

BAT Centre, 45 Maritime Place, Small Craft Harbour
Tel: 031 332 0451
Fax: 031 332 2213
Email: info@batcentre.co.za
Website: www.batcentre.co.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat - Sun 9am - 4.30pm

Next up at the NSA is Fritha Langerman's 'Black Boxes' - previously shown at the AVA in Cape Town - and 'Face to Face' - paintings and drawings by Marianne Meijer at the NSA

In the main gallery Langerman's mixed media work deals with issues around modes of cultural representation, specifically those of ethnographic display and the material manifestations of the tourist industry in South Africa. Cultural commodification and curio production reinforce a "freezing" of culture through the creation of artificial boundaries. Langerman makes visual reference to this both in the display of the exhibit and in the production of the individual units.

Misclassification, inaccurate translation and misunderstanding are inevitable consequences of cultural ordering and are inherent within the project. The definition of "black boxes", a technical term, provides the most apposite synopsis for the apparatus of cultural representation - a generic device with known characteristics but unspecified means of operation, with internal mechanisms mysterious to the user.

Langerman lives and works in Cape Town, and graduated from Michaelis (University of Cape Town) in 1991. She currently lectures there in the Print Media/New Media Department. She has taken part in many group and curated shows including several ABSA Atelier shows (she won a merit award in 1999), and 'Bloedlyn' at the KKNK in 1998. Her work is in several public collections.

In a less theoretical vein Meijer shows a series of "faces" in the Park Gallery. Since the beginning of time artists have attempted to capture and understand the nature of the human face to comprehend a person's character. Personality, individuality, self, soul, the other, the unexplained as well as the familiar - it's all found in, on and beneath the human face.

Meijer grapples with these notions and titles her work 'Faces' to differentiate her work from the conventional portrait. Often repeating themes and "types", inventing variations and exploring expressive effects, Meijer attempts to engage the demonstrative possibilities of the human face. She reinforces this with a manipulation of media that adds energy to the work. The mottling, achieved through mixing with solvents, blurs details, often taking the face to the point of abstraction but also allowing for a subtlety of expression to emerge.

Meijer states: "In some instances I use a pictorial type of 'shorthand' that is crude, but serves a specific purpose. It breaks the mental boundaries with which I observe a face - it also allows me to abandon the photographic image of a person and opens up many new ways of seeing - the inward eye."

Opening: June 11 at 6pm
Closing: June 30

NSA Gallery, 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood
Tel: 031 202 3686
Fax: 031 202 3744
Email: iartnsa@mweb.co.za
Website: www.nsagallery.co.za
Hours: Tues - Fri 10am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 4pm, Sun 11am - 3pm

Brigitte Maingard's 'Non Redeemable Expenses' is part of an intense, ongoing, informal research project by the artist into the position of children in society. Her concerns stem from her role as mother and community worker in a world where children are often regarded as "non-persons".

Steering away from the didactic, Maingard's exhibition is a minimal installation comprising nine images presented on trampolines on the floor of the gallery, a blackboard inviting visitors to engage in a game of noughts and crosses, and a separate room housing a sound installation. The exhibition will provide a meditative space for viewers to contemplate a radical rethinking of the treatment and imaging of children.

Gail Iris Neke is based in Johannesburg, and her exhibition 'Killing the (M)other' was shown at the Bell-Roberts Gallery in Cape Town last year and the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg earlier this year (see Kathryn Smith's review). After conducting research at rape clinics and referencing contemporary psychoanalytical texts, Neke has interpreted this research in a mixed media installation. She interrogates why men rape, rather than examining the effects of rape on the survivor, thereby examining the processes through which male vulnerability is represented by and projected onto women who are objects of both desire and fear.

Neke has exhibited widely and her work is represented in numerous public collections. She will conduct a public walkabout on Wednesday May 22 at 12.30pm. All welcome.

Opening: Tuesday May 21 at 6pm
Closing: June 9

NSA Gallery, 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood
Tel: 031 202 3686
Fax: 031 202 3744
Email: iartnsa@mweb.co.za
Website: www.nsagallery.co.za
Hours: Tues - Fri 10am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 4pm, Sun 11am - 3pm

The BAT Centre is hosting a memorial exhibition of works by the late Marlino Kuko at the Menzi Mcunu Gallery. Kuko died early this year after a short illness. At the time of his death he was working at the BAT Centre where he had been artist-in-residence since 1997.

Born in Maputo, Mozambique, Kuko was taught woodcarving by his older brothers. He left school at an early age in order to pursue a career in carving, and worked in Swaziland and Mozambique. His work is in the permanent collection of major galleries in South Africa such as the Durban Art Gallery.

The exhibition will culminate in a memorial service after which some of the artist's works will be auctioned.

Opening: May 15 at 5.30pm

BAT Centre, 45 Maritime Place, Small Craft Harbour
Tel: 031 332 0451
Fax: 031 332 2213
Email: info@batcentre.co.za
Website: www.batcentre.co.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat - Sun 9am - 4.30pm

Robert Hodgins, one of South Africa's most renowned painters, has finally come to KZN in full force. His retrospective, organised by the Aardklop Festival last year, pays homage to his diverse production in both paint and printmaking.

Hodgins was born and trained in England. He served in the armed forces in Egypt during the second world war and has lived in South Africa since 1953. A well-respected lecturer at Wits University until 1983, he has continued to produce contemporary commentary on the South African socio-political context. See review by Hazel Friedman.

Opening: May 14
Closing: June 23

Tatham Art Gallery, corner Longmarket Street and Commercial Road
Tel: 033 342 1804/1
Hours: Tues - Sun 10am - 6pm
Email: bell@tatham.org.za