Archive: Issue No. 78, February 2004

15.02.04 'Africa Comics' in Brussels
15.02.04 Two country video exhibition in Toulouse, France
03.02.04 Western 4.33 at FORUM screening, at Berlin International Film Festival
16.01.04 Aryan Kaganof's 'SMS' at the Illuseum in Amsterdam
16.01.04 Santu Mofokeng's 'Rethiking Landscape' in France
16.01.04 David Goldblatt at the Photographers gallery in London

AMERICAS

15.02.04 Candice Breitz in New York
03.02.04 South African photographers explore city and country, in New York
03.02.04 Daddy Buy Me a Pony in Canada
16.01.04 Sipho Hlati, Velile Soha and Ernestine White in Chicago
16.01.04 'A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa', in Boston
20.12.03 'Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary Diaspora' in New York
01.11.03 Geers and Langa at Museum for African Art

AFRICA

03.02.04 In a furnished flat in Cairo...

Curated by Africa e Mediterraneo, 'Africa Comics' is an exhibition of drawings, paintings and comic books from all over Africa. Over recent years comic book genre has become increasingly popular in Europe as an art form, and the show, with includes such artists as Conrad Botes and Lorcan White, comes to Brussles from Italy.

Opens: February 11
Closes: March 20

'Exchange view on.../ Échange vues sur...' is the title of a video exhibition curated by Cape Town-based Ed Young, and France's Sophie Solnychkine. The exhibition will be held and opened simultaneously in Cape Town and Toulouse, France. The format is based on an exchange of short video pieces by young South African and French artists.

The artists include Sandra Vanbremeersch (France), Daniel Halter (South Africa), Cameron Platter (South Africa), Michaël Fournier (France), Ashleigh Mclean (South Africa), Andrew Lamprecht (South Africa), Frédéric Nakache (France), Mark Antonello (South Africa), Zen Marie (South Africa), Sylvain Fogato (France), Jean Meeran (South Africa), Laetitia Bourget (France), Alex Learmont (South Africa), Matt Hindley (South Africa), Sophie Solnychkine (France), Teboho Edkins (South Africa), Emma Coleman (South Africa), Ed Young (South Africa) and pleix (France).

'Exchange view on.../ Échange vues sur...' acknowledge the co-operation of Malcolm Payne (South Africa), Arlette Malié (France) and EDV (France).

For further information, contact Ed Young at babyhasselhof@yahoo.com.

Opens: March 3, at 6pm
Closes: March 8

The South African-Dutch co-production, Western 4.33 (2002, 32min, 35mm), directed by Aryan Kaganof and produced by Wiro Felix, has been selected for participation in the prestigious FORUM of the Berlin International Film Festival. It the first time a South African production has been screened in the Forum since 1994, when Brian Tilley's In A Time Of Violence was presented.

Western 4.33 centres around a truck driver, BT, on his way from Johannesburg to Luderitz in Namibia. When he gets there he watches the sunset. He thinks about his great grandfather who perished in the German concentration camp on Shark Island opposite Luderitz, as well as his girlfriend who broke up with him. The film is said to be "a meditation on the impossible colonial dream: the attempt to 'civilize' Africa."

Western 4.33 has previously been awarded the prize for Best Video made in Africa, at the 12th African Film Festival of Milan, and the Prize for Best Documentary at the 1st African and Islands Festival of Reunion.

Date: February 8, at 8:30pm

Aryan Kaganof's collaborative exhibition with Dick Tuinder SMS (Sanctuary Mental Space) gets an extended Amsterdam run after having opened at the end of December 2003.

Kaganof forms his own identity in a composition consisting of work by the artists Nicola Deane (South Africa), Alexandra Kallos (Greece), Philipp Virus (Germany), Catherine Henegan (South Africa), Milijana Babic (Croatia/South Africa) and the Illuseum (Netherlands). Dick Tuinder meanwhile composes himself using six alter egos' he has invented for himself, including the mascot of the show, the irrepressible Sally De Winter.

Henk Oosterling, Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam has this to say: "Kaganof weaves as a common theme throughout 'SMS', the political issue of the moment. What role do identities play in a world, which in spite of its self-confessed humanism, is still bursting with violence? Can the irrepressible need for identity regulate excessive violence? How much identity can we tolerate in a globalised world? He [Kaganof] recognises that� identity has become merely a surface effect� that the secret of identity does not lie in the inner self of individuals, nor even in the shared territory of History, but in the mediatisation (sic) itself. If we try through the media to catch a glimpse of the inner Self lurking underneath, we miss this superficial insight: Identity is as flat as a digital code on an interface".

Kaganof's multi-part identities are further fragmented when Catherine Henegan chooses in her representation to also co-opt other artists to collaborate with her in her 5x7 meter space. She herself will show a video projection of The Island, shot on an island between two lanes of traffic on Jan Smuts Ave in Rosebank, and depicting a child playing on the sand in a sea of traffic. In addition Henegan has invited Jimmy Wordsworth Rage (a visual artist/poet/ performer), Sagi Groner (video and sound artist), Valentijn Kortekaas (sound artist), Frederico Bonelli and TeZ (of Sub Multimedia Re_Search Laboratory) and Aryan Kaganof (himself) to collaborate with her over the duration of the 'SMS' exhibition.

For Henegan this work will no longer be a search for identity but rather the manifestation of one through a collective photosynthesis of the energies combined. These artists have all been previous collaborators whose artistic practice and diversity have all made a large impact and had an influence on the form and content of her own work.

If you want to get a further glimpse of the exhibition you can check out the photos on the web catalogue of the exhibition at www.illuseum.com/ill17/SMS.htm and www.illuseum.com/ill17/agenda.htm

Opens: December 19, 2003
Closes: March 15

Santu Mofokeng's work is largely unconcerned with expectations as to what 'black' art ought to be. Rather, the Johannesburg-based photographer has set about interrogating the politics of identity and the representation of history in his own highly idiomatic style.

Mofokeng's photographs gain their impetus from animating the ordinary drama of black life. At times sparse and austere, yet again vibrant with an understated energy, his works are clearly absorbed in their own quietude. Whether it is a lyrical snapshot taken from a moving car, as with one of his Documenta XI pieces, or a documentary study of black churchgoers travelling to Johannesburg by train, Mofokeng's photographs often manage to capture the nothingness of time in between - the ordinary moments that shape black identities.

For some time now he has been taking peculiar photographs that are notionally concerned with the landscape. As with his other work, there is a distinctive poetic at play in his beautiful images of (often) arid environments.

Opens: January 16
Closes: March 21

David Goldblatt, along with fellow photographers Robert Adams (USA), Peter Fraser (UK) and Joel Sternfeld (USA), has been shortlisted for the prestigious 2004 Citigroup Photography Prize.

From a list of over 80 nominations, the Jury has selected four finalists whose work, they say, has made a significant contribution to the medium of photography in the past year. One can only wonder at this wording given that in Goldblatt's case, the juror's elected to highlight his late 1980s study of the transported of KwaNdebele. To their credit, the jurors did acknowledge that, "over the last 30 years Robert Adams, Peter Fraser, David Goldblatt and Joel Sternfeld have made important bodies of work that have been a major influence on generations of photographers who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s.

Now in its eighth year, the Prize has become one of the most prestigious international arts awards. Past winners of this �20,000 Prize include Richard Billingham, Andreas Gursky, Boris Mikhailov and Rineke Dijkstra. Roger Ballen, another South African-based photographer, was shortlisted two years ago.

This exhibition profiles the work of all four finalists and presages the announcement of the overall winner in late March.

Opens: January 29
Closes: March 28

Former Wits graduate, Candice Breitz is rapidly making a name for herself internationally, so much so that when Francesca von Habsburg unveiled her formative contemporary art collection last year, in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik, she included Breitz amongst her hand-picked list.

An artist who utilises video with fluent ease, and sometimes to achingly beautiful effect, Breitz has been singled out as an important talent in a recent book listing the world's 100 most important artistic talents. Her show at Sonnabend, New York, consist of a 14-channel video installation entitled 'Becoming'. In this new work, Breitz continues her investigation into the messages conveyed by the body language of actors. Dressed in a simple white shirt, eliminating colour and thus stripping the scene to its essence, the artist mimics the actions of female stars in key scenes from their movies.

Opens: February 14
Closes: March 20

Drawing together proponents of competing photographic genres, 'City & Country' explores the natural landscape and the metropolis as sites of memory, mutation, signification, and projection.

Stephen Hobbs's captures skyscrapers as mirages that are as transient and unstable as the nature of the inner city, and of Being itself. Jo Ractliffe's Vlakplaas is a bland landscape that belies its function as an execution ground and testifies to the silence of sites. Minnette V�ri's videographs present the "radiant city" as a precipice in which she performs as an exile in utopia.

Among the documentary photographers included, Brent Stirton captures performances in diametrically opposed cultural and physical settings. J�rgen Schadeberg and Brenton Maart examine black urban areas in South Africa, where both commerce and community contrast with Western environments. Graeme Williams and Paul Weinberg evoke social tensions implicit in relatively empty spaces. Similarly, the landscape photography of Kevin James, Thinus Matthee, and Alain Proust continues the tradition of landscape as metaphor and as site of projection.

Opens: February 3
Closes: March 27

'Game Over' presents media art projects by five international artists exploring the childhood game and its relationship to adult life. Featuring the work of Karma Clarke-Davis (Toronto), Daddy Buy Me a Pony (Cape Town), David Hoffos (Lethbridge), Tim Lee (Vancouver) and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (Berlin).

The Cape Town-based collective Daddy Buy Me a Pony (DBMAP) joins four other international artists in the Canadian exhibition 'Game Over'. The infamous computer virus project by the artists of DBMAP (Peet Pienaar, Dror Eyal, Stacy Hardy and Heidi Chisholm) transgresses many notions we may have about the art of advertising.

The exhibition is curated and designed by Jason St-Laurent for SAW Video in association with Galerie SAW Gallery.

Opens: January 15
Closes: February 29

'Memorias de un Mexicano: Homage to Francisco Mora' is an exhibition that unifies the contemporary print works of African-American, Chicano, Mexican and South African print makers. The exhibition serves as a tribute to the late Mexican printmaker and painter, Francisco Mora (1922-2002) who was a member of the famed Taller Grafica Popular, a printmakers collaborative based in Mexico City.

The exhibit title, 'Memorias de un Mexicano' (which means memories of the Mexican), was the title of a series of prints produced by Francisco Mora. This series of prints pays homage to the Mexican labourer. South Africa is represented by Sipho Hlati, Velile Soha and Ernestine White. The latter artist has a BFA degree from State University of New York (Albany New York) and is attending Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town for her MFA degree in printmaking. White concentrates on aluminium plate lithography and participated in Tamarind's Master Printer program where White was certified as a Tamarind Master Printer.

Hlati meanwhile is a visual arts practitioner living and working in Cape Town. His training is diverse: in 2000-01, he studied at Michaelis, in 1998 he served a residency at Robben Island, and between 1987-89, he trained at the Community Arts Project, in Cape Town. He has exhibited in a number of group exhibitions in South Africa and abroad.

Soha studied visual art at the Rorke's Drift Art School, from 1981-83, and has also worked and lectured at the Nyanga Art Centre, in Cape Town. Of his work Soha states: "I am a realistic artist, mixing colours in order to use them as naturally as possible. I express myself mostly through township and rural scenes, like homelands. My aim is to show how my people live their lives".

Jesus Macarena-Avila, who served a residency with the Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop in New York City, was recently a resident at Cape Town's Greatmore Studios. This fact explains the large number of local artists on this subterranean exhibition, and underlines the importance of grass roots exchange.

Opens: February 20
Closes: March 26

Taking their cue as the tenth year of our fledgling democracy, curators Sophia Ainslie, Thembinkosi Goniwe and Tumelo Mosaka present a show that bravely showcases the work of a diverse cluster of emerging contemporary South African artists. According to the curators, "the 20 young artists featured critically reflect on how identity used to be defined by the binary black and white opposition under apartheid. They also explore the new multidimensional identities that are possible today, and probe their limits and contradictions".

Reading through the list of participants there are a number of surprises, but whatever ones personal reservations the choice is welcome given the almost hegemonic power young(ish) artists like Candice Breitz, Kendell Geers, Moshekwa Langa and Zwelethu Mthethwa seem have abroad. Taking that favoured theme for unearthing truths about South African art practice, the show examines ways how identity has been defined through the use of more personal modes of expression.

Artists Thando Mama and Rudzani Nemasetoni, for instance, reflect differently on how the state defined identity. In Nemasetoni case, the artist uses images from his family's Pass Books, while Mama uses his own body as a site for the recovery of meaning and power associated with the black subject. On the other hand, artists such as Nkosinathi Khanyile, Mthunzi Ndimande, and Nirupa Sing explore influences of African heritage in modern culture. Through their use of natural materials and implementation of traditional skills such as grass weaving, they recover and celebrate an African heritage that is marginalized and threatened by modern society.

'A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa' articulates the variety of strategies that South African artists use to connect their living history with its past. The framework is to allow for the works to create a conversation that explores the impact of apartheid witnessing the complexities and multitude of issues that South Africa is confronting today. The exhibition will act as a catalyst to generate discussion around the progress and change that has occurred over the last decade transforming a society struggling to reconcile its past legacy. It presents a transient moment in South African history portraying how emerging artists negotiate between what was, what is, and what is to come.

The full list of participating artists is: Bongi Bengu, Pitso Chinzima, Matthew Hindley, Nicholas Hlobo, Fanie Jason, Alison Kearney, Nkosinathi Khanyile, Jeanott M. M. Laderia, Fritha Langerman, Brenton Maart, Thando Mama, Colbert Mashile, Pauline Mazibuko, Mthunzi Ndimande, Rudzani Nemasetoni, Christian Nerf, Charles Nkosi, Roderick Kevin Sauls, Nirupa Sing and Nontsikele Lolo Veleko.

Sipho Mdanda is assistant curator on the project.

Opens: April 2, at 6:30pm

Kendell Geers and Moshekwa Langa, who recently appeared together on 'Black President' at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, show together again on 'Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora'. Opening two months after 'A Fiction of Authenticity', 'Looking Both Ways', curated by Laurie Ann Farrell, seems to have much in common with the curatorial impulse which brought the first into being. Here again is a line-up of artists (four of them are on both shows) originating from the African continent and now working mainly in the west. The title 'Looking Both Ways' refers to the artists' practice of looking at the psychic terrain between Africa and the West, a terrain of shifting physical contexts, aesthetic ambitions and expressions.

"Many artists from Africa are in the forefront of discussions of globalism and cultural hybridity, terms currently circulating in the international art world", writes Farrell in an online statement, (and) "are making statements that transcend politics".

The exhibition catalogue is a remarkably handsome publication, and Farrell has already lined up an impressive array of institutions to which the exhibition will travel when it closes at the Museum for African Art, including a European foray. The schedule so far reads Peabody Essex Museum. Salem, MA, March 27 - July 18 2004; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, September 12 - November 28; Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, January - March 2005; and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA, January - March 2006.

The full list of participating artists is: Fernando Alvim, Ghada Amer, Oladélé A. Bamgboyé, Allan deSouza, Kendell Geers, Moshekwa Langa, Hassan Musa, N'Dilo Mutima, Wangechi Mutu, Ingrid Mwangi, Zineb Sedira and Yinka Shonibare.

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Opens: November 13
Closes: March 1, 2004

Kendell Geers and Moshekwa Langa, who recently appeared together on 'Black President' at New York's new Museum of Contemporary Art, are set to show together again. 'Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora' is a group show presenting works by twelve artists from all four extremities of the African continent.

The common link shared by these disparate artists is that they all live and work in Western countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The title Looking Both Ways refers to the artists' practice of looking at the psychic terrain between Africa and the West, a terrain of shifting physical contexts, aesthetic ambitions and expressions.

The full list of participating artists is: Fernando Alvim, Ghada Amer, Olad�l� A. Bamgboy�, Allan deSouza, Kendell Geers, Moshekwa Langa, Hassan Musa, N'Dilo Mutima, Wangechi Mutu, Ingrid Mwangi, Zineb Sedira and Yinka Shonibare.

Opens: November 13
Closes: March 1, 2004

The domestic dwelling is the ultimate private space. In Egypt, social norms stress on the notion of the home as the sanctuary of its inhabitants. Furthermore, religious doctrine regulates access to private spaces and discourages people from discussing their private affairs with others. In such a context one can see why reality TV has not taken off and why the use of the private space as the substance for artistic work is limited.

Despite this, Egyptian television provides its viewers with varied depictions of homes in the form of rigid constructed sets which tend not to alter greatly from one production to the next, leaving the viewer with a class-based categorization of domestic dwellings. It is also not uncommon in popular areas of the city and in the countryside to be invited into someone's home with very little prior acquaintance.

The search for a furnished flat in Cairo involves peering into what on the surface appear to be private domestic spaces. Constructed from a mishmash of furniture and appliances, they do not have the unity one finds in domestic spaces of a permanent nature. The variety of the styles within one space carries a multitude of oft-conflicting meanings that are partially deprived of their significance as indicators of tastes and preferences, financial considerations and practicalities being the primary shapers of decisions in such situations.

'In a furnished flat in Cairo�' brings together seven artists (four Egyptians and three Swiss) to share a furnished flat for one month. The transient nature of the artists' interventions in the space serves to question the preconceived ideas of the 'home' as a provider of security and a definer of identity. The space becomes a platform for the deconstruction of familial structures, domestic behaviours and the mechanisms through which one's surroundings work to reinforce identity and social status.

'In a furnished flat in Cairo...' started on January 1, and is curated by Hala Elkoussy.

The flat will be open to the public from February 5 -25.