Archive: Issue No. 81, May 2004

01.05.04 'Democracy X' at The Castle of Good Hope
01.05.04 Guy Tillim and Churchill Madikida at Michael Stevenson Contemporary
01.05.04 'The Milk Can Art Project' at AVA
01.05.04 Lien Botha's 'Groot Inkleurboek' at Photographers Gallery ZA
01.05.04 Drawings by Michael Croesser and Brendon Bell-Roberts at the Bell-Roberts Gallery
01.05.04 'There is so much to say' by Tom Cullberg at João Ferreira
01.05.04 Nicola Grobler and 'The Enigma Machine' at Erdmann Contemporary
01.05.04 'Straight to Video 2' at Studio One
01.05.04 'Figures of Speech' at the Gold of Africa Museum
01.05.04 'Urban Habits' at 3rd i Gallery
01.05.04 Theo Kleynhans at Rust-en-Vrede Gallery
01.05.04 'The Art of Drawing' at Rust-en-Vrede Gallery
01.04.04 'Staged Realities' at Michael Stevenson Contemporary
01.04.04 'Old Masters, New Perceptions' at SANG
01.04.04 'Kalligraphos' at Sanlam Art Gallery
01.04.04 Lizze Littlewort, Lien Botha and other artists at AVA
01.04.04 Tracy Payne and 'Post Tokyo'at the Irma Stern Museum
01.04.04 Hanneke Benade and 'Passage' at Chelsea on 34
03.03.04 A Decade Of Democracy at the SANG
15.02.04 'Koeksisterhood' at 3rd i Gallery

This exhibition, in South Africa's oldest colonial building, brings together over 300 artefacts, contemporary artworks, documents, photographs, sound and film. Most of these are from Iziko's own collections but the exhibition also includes items on loan from public and private collections throughout South Africa.

The exhibition spans seven rooms, beginning with the early traces of the human past, the first farmers and early southern African states, and leading to colonial dispossession and African resistance. Mining, urbanisation and apartheid precede the turning points of the 1970s until democracy in 1994. A special room is dedicated to the Truth Commission.

Interviews with and self-portraits of 28 year-old South Africans conclude the exhibition. Sue Williamson's Messages from the Moat, a permanent installation piece on slavery at the Cape, looks right at home in the basement of the Castle's Block B.

Opens: April 21
Closes: September 30

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Guy Tillim, recent winner of the DaimlerChrysler Prize for photography, exhibits his new series of works entitled 'Leopold and Mobutu'. Tillim has visited the Congo region repeatedly over the past three years. Last year he photographed traces of the colonial occupation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium as well as the vestiges of plunder by Mobutu Sese Seko.

This exhibition comprises a series of diptychs and triptychs juxtaposing historical sites in the Congo and Belgium with contemporary views of daily life in the DRC. Tillim's work will be widely exhibited internationally this year, notably in solo shows in Stuttgart in May and Berlin in June.

Churchill Madikida holds his first solo show, entitled 'Interminable Limbo'. For the past three years, Madikida has been working in a range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking and performance. He explores, in an autobiographical idiom, his Xhosa heritage.

The exhibition's title refers to the ongoing debate about identity and culture in the New South Africa. It also reflects the constant conflict between modern technologies and traditional values, expressed through works about Xhosa initiation rituals.

Opens: May 12
Closes: June 19

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An exhibition of 16 milk cans transformed by leading South African artists into works of art will take up all three gallery spaces during the month of May. All the cans will be auctioned on May 26 to generate funds for the Peninsula School Feeding Association. The cans have been transformed into various forms, from ethnic to whimsical to utilitarian. Some are intricately beaded, one is motorised and another is perforated and lit from inside to form a mood-lighting accessory.

Artists involved include Arlene Amaler-Raviv, Tyrone Appollis, Willie Bester, Kevin Brand, Paul du Toit, Louis Jansen van Vuuren, Mark O'Donovan, Selwin Pekeur, Jill Trappler and Khoni Ndludli.

Opens: May 10
Closes: May 29

Lien Botha, the featured artist at this year's Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees, brings her exhibition to Cape Town's Photographers Gallery ZA. In this show, 16 images of the South African landscape are superimposed with line drawings. The works are autobiographical and work with a sense of the generic, complemented by colour codes and cryptic clues.

Opens: April 30
Closes: May 15

Michael Croesser, a Durban-based artist who specializes in photography and drawing, exhibits large-scale charcoal drawings at the Bell-Roberts. The show follows a recent exhibition at the NSA in Durban.

Alongside this are the works of gallery co-owner Brendon Bell-Roberts, who studied Fine Art at the Cape Technikon and lives and works in the Mother City. His exhibition, 'APPROPRIATE adj/ APPROPRIATE v.t.' is an installation of two-dimensional sculpture works and pastel drawings - with a wicked twist.

In this exhibition, 'There is so much to say', Tom Cullberg's new series of paintings run continuously to create a narrative for the viewer. His works contain a mixture of familiar and fictional characters and places. The show is about going somewhere and stems from his migrations between homes in Sweden and South Africa.

Cullberg says the places and people depicted carry notions of longing, questions about belonging and movement - both physical, through travel, and in time, through memory. This is the artist's third show at the João Ferreira gallery.

This exhibition comprises household items, sewn fabric parts, cables, connectors and controller units in seven interlinked but separate works. They all describe a domestic environment that becomes a living and breathing entity through the animated movement of appliances and accompanying noise.

The idea is to address a domestic experience of boredom and routine, which becomes activated by human relations, emotions and mental states. The artist says of her work: "I am intrigued by the immediacy of spaces and the psychological response to domestic spaces in particular. The home is the exterior to the fiction of appearance. On the inside, the home does not show 'the real' as opposed to 'the act'; rather, it becomes another performance."

Opens: May 17
Closes: May 31

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Video is still attracting a large and dedicated following among contemporary artists. The same collective that generated last year's successful 'Straight to Video' evening will once again convene for one night's viewing of their work. The event will showcase video art, documentary, short film and animation.

The artists include Candice Borzechowski, Jane Cheadle, Robert Hofmeyr, Jean Meeran, Francesco Nassimbeni, Colin Payne, Tamsyn Reynolds, Jacqui Stecher and Melissa Weigel. The organisers aim to explore the complexity of emerging local talent that includes a computer specialist, a designer, an editor, a dancer, a sculptor, an art director and friends.

Screening: 7pm, May 20

An exhibition of traditional African sculptures of the female form, on loan from the Barbier-Mueller Museum collection in Geneva, is currently running at the Gold of Africa Museum.

The exhibition title is a play on words. It provides a counterpoint to German anthropologist Leo Frobenius' contentious early 20th century study, Voice of Africa, about sacred African art. The show comprises 26 works, many of them sourced from the Ivory Coast, which show a varied representation of women in a diversity of custom, aesthetic and belief.

Opens: 19 February
Closes: 20 May

Painter Norman O'Flynn and sculptor Ngmanya Banda have recently returned from an international residency at the Insaka International Artists' Workshop in Zambia. Their show is an expansion on the concept of urban habits. It celebrates the uniqueness and similarities of their respective cultures.

Opens: May 19
Closes: July 3

When an organism is forced into a corner, it has to choose whether it will fight or flee. The reason behind this choice is the focus of Kleynhans' exhibition where he looks at significant moments in recent South African history and juxtaposes these with his personal memories, resulting in a show with a dual identity. Part reportage, part rumination, it "peeps into a personal life stamped with recognisable imagery of a volatile past".

Opens: April 20
Closes: May 6

This group show, curated by Susan Kruger-Grundlingh, includes the work of Christo Basson, Judith Mason, Liza Grobler, Elizabeth Günther, Lyn Smuts, Strijdom van der Merwe, Diane Victor, Carl Jeppe, Mark Hipper, Wilna Coetzer, Marianne Botha, Marlise Keith, Howard Minne, Tamlin Blake, Marthie Kaden and Cobus van Bosch.

Opens: May 11
Closes: June 10

This exhibition aims to expose 'the soul in African photography' by comparing early portraits taken in sub-Saharan Africa from the 1860s by European photographers with more contemporary images. The juxtaposition traces the transition of an ethnographic and stereotypical view of African people entrenched by colonialism and supported by early photographic images to a more vibrant, life-affirming and individuated view generated by African photographers themselves through repositioning the photographic portrait.

The line-up is diverse and includes interesting portraits by David Goldblatt of amongst others, Robert Mugabe. A definite highlight is the inclusion of Samuel Fosso, the Cameroonian photographer who for three decades has practiced the art of self-portraiture. Dave Southwood is represented by two photographs from his studio series, and audiences interested in Sue Williamson's Dak'Art work will get an opportunity to see it here.

Opens: March 24
Closes: May 8

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This exhibition brings a fresh lens to restored and newly acquired pre-20th century European paintings, sculptures and art works on paper. The major highlight is a new arrival, Antonin Mercié's Gloria Victis (Glory to the Vanquished) of 1875, described as a tour de force in bronze casting. Pietro Calvi's marble and bronze bust Othello (1868), now retitled Portrait of Ira Aldridge as Othello, is unveiled as an actual portrait of the internationally famous black American Shakespearian actor.

Opens: March 2004
Closes: December 2004

An exhibition of calligraphic art entitled 'Kalligraphos: Beautiful Writing' is being held at the Sanlam Art Gallery. The show has been put together in collaboration with the Cape Friends of Calligraphy to celebrate the organisation's 20th anniversary.

Opens: April 5
Closes: May 21

In the main gallery Lizza Littlewort shows a series of painted portraits of figures from the young Cape Town art scene, mostly connected in some way to UCT's Michaelis School of Fine Art where she has been completing her Master's degree. A collaboration between Lien Botha and Italian artist and photographer Mariella Poli claims the long gallery, while upstairs Timothy Zantsi shows new works in mixed media on board.

Opens: April 19
Closes: May 8

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Inspired by 'Kinbaku', the erotic art of rope bondage, and 'Sakura', the cherry blossom, Payne's sensual canvasses paint the story of a girl in bondage and her desire for liberation. Payne uses the bound nude to symbolize the Buddhist idea of samsara, a conditioned existence of superficial habits and compulsions and negative addictive patterns. The cherry blossoms remind us of the cyclical nature of life, death and rebirth and offer redemption.

Opens: May 4
Closes: May 25

An exhibition of pastel paintings titled 'Passage' by Hanneke Benade opens this month at Chelsea on 34 in Darling. Benade last year won top honours in the painting category at the inaugural Brett Kebble Art Awards.

Opens: April 17
Closes: May 15

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the first democratic elections Iziko: South African National Gallery is showcasing a comprehensive exhibition featuring works of art made and acquired between 1994 and 2004. This exhibition presents an astonishing visual record of the hopes and aspirations, the fears and concerns of ordinary South Africans in this extraordinary decade of transformation.

Works of art produced during the decade by over 150 South African artists will be on view in nine rooms throughout the Gallery. In addition, a contemporary site-specific work on slavery at the Cape by Sue Williamson will be installed at the Castle of Good Hope. Works by major artists such as Jane Alexander, Willie Bester, Marlene Dumas, Kendell Geers, David Goldblatt, William Kentridge, Moshekwa Langa, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Malcolm Payne, Johannes Phokela, Berni Searle and Tracey Rose will be shown alongside the work of emerging artists including Thembinkosi Goniwe, Thando Mama, Colbert Mashile, Robin Rhode, Usha Seejarim, Mgcineni Pro Sobopha and Doreen Southwood.

The accompanying book, co-published by Double Storey Books and Iziko, is lavishly illustrated, includes a comprehensive listing of all works and features discursive essays by authors, curators and critics including Emma Bedford, Rory Bester, Joe Dolby, Ashraf Jamal, Andrew Lamprecht, Moleleki Frank Ledimo, Marilyn Martin, Zayd Minty, Andries Oliphant and Liese van der Watt.

Exhibition enquiries should be directed to Emma Bedford on email: ebedford@iziko.org.za.

Opens: April 3
Closes: August 31

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Advance Notice: Barbara l'Ange pays homage to women in the form of stitched and found objects, sculptures and paintings. They all come together in a rich tapestry of images and colours. Her work is both dark and light-hearted, serious and humorous, connected by the central theme of womanhood.

Opens: April 8
Closes: May 15