Archive: Issue No. 110, October 2006

6.10.06 Ed Young in Italy
6.10.06 Mandy Lee Jandrell at the London Zoo
6.10.06 George Tobias in London
6.10.06 Ed Young in Caracas
6.10.06 Mandy Lee Jandrell in London
6.10.06 Ed Young in Cologne
6.10.06 Mandy Lee Jandrell in Brighton

1.09.06 Cape Town Artists in Vienna

THE AMERICAS

6.10.06 Ledelle Moe in New York

1.09.06 Sipho Hlati, Velile Soha and Ernestine White in Chicago
1.09.06 Khwezi Ghule gives a keynote speech in Santiago

4.08.06 William Kentridge in Texas

7.07.06 'Body of Evidence' at the National Museum of African Art in the USA
7.07.06 Four SA artists selected for Sao Paulo Bienal

FAR EAST

5.05.06 'Off the Record' in Tokyo
 

Ed Young will be taking part in 'Unimovie 2006', an international video and short film festival. This comprises three competitions for video and short films: one reserved for Italian productions, open to all video/filmmakers; one open to students of cinema and art from all over the world and the last competition specifically for art and experimental video. Opens: October 3
Closes: October 24

'Zoo Art Fair' returns to London Zoo for its third year as one of the most significant international platforms for emerging contemporary art talent. This year the fair moves into a 1200 square metre marquee and will house a total of 46 under-5 year old commercial and non-commercial arts organisations, including galleries, project spaces, artists' collectives, curatorial groups and publications.

Mandy Lee Jandrell is exhibiting with Bearspace gallery at the fair in an exhibition entitled 'Parklife'. This title, from a famous Blur song, references the site-specific setting of the art fair, the content of the work on display and also alludes to a new wave of talent emerging from the UK. Many emerging artists are now coming to practice in the UK, bringing their cultures, influence and style to bear on an international market place and art scene.

Artists are no longer shaped by being 'British' but are beginning to question their cultural heritage through fantasy and irony whilst positioning themselves politically and culturally within history. The confines of the London Zoo provide these artists with the ideal situation to explore notions of place and cultural heritage, globalised through tourism and, in this case, art. Bearspace will be showing artists originating from Japan, Slovenia, the USA, South Africa, South America and the UK.

Opens: October 13
Closes: October 15

The Horse Hospital in London presents 'Bedrock', a retrospective installation by South African artist George Tobias this month.

The sculptures in 'Bedrock' have been made using a technique developed by Tobias where the rough, clumsy monumentality of fired clay is overlaid by a delicate narrative of imagery drawn from his personal archives. Images are either transferred onto rubber stamps then pressed into wet clay or are the result of photocopier toner being applied to the wet clay before firing.

Through these techniques Tobias creates unique, labour-intensive, rarefied objects whose appearance belies their sophistication. Tobias renounces a slick, polished look for a deliberately naïve aesthetic which is often contradicted by its harsh imagery, culled from the artist's history as a South African man whose family now lives in the Middle East.

Opens: September 9
Closes: October 30

Ed Young will be taking part in 'PULSAR', an international event in Caracas this month. Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin were invited by the French Embassy in Caracas to present programming for the event which takes place in the main cultural venues in Caracas, notably: The Caracas Contemporary Art Museum, Alejandro Otero Museum, and the National Cinématheque as well as 15 other spaces, galleries, art foundations and art centres of the Venezuelan National Museums' Coordination.

Opens: October 1
Closes: October 31

Mandy Lee Jandrell takes part in 'Hearing Voices, Seeing Things', the culmination of a project initiated by Bob and Roberta Smith and Jessica Voorsanger working in collaboration with service users from the North East London Mental Health trust. The exhibition is made up of seven individual artists' projects that range from photography to ceramics and performance.

The exhibition will be housed in a recontructed Leytonstone Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) at the Serpentine Gallery in London (The LCCA is a custom-built shed in Bob and Roberta Smith's garden).

Opens: September 17
Closes: October 15

Ed Young will be taking part in an exhibition at Figge von Rosen Galerie, Cologne, in the Raum für Video (Space for Video). Other artists include Tami Ben Tor, John Pilson, Christian Jankowski, Sarah Morris, Susi Jirkuff, Alex McQuilkin and Timothy Shearer.

Opens: October 18
Closes: November 16

As part of the Brighton Photo Fringe running alongside the Brighton Photo Biennial, the Permanent Gallery presents three emerging artists, including Mandy Lee Jandrell. Jandrell shows new and previously unseen photographs that explore notions of landscape and the building of meaning around it. Playing with illusion, nature and fantasy in constructed leisure environments, Jandrell exposes their fallacy.

Opens: October 6
Closes: October 25

South African-born curator and newly appointed Director of Locust Projects Miami, Claire Breukel, joins Galerie Hilger to curate an exhibition for their Contemporary gallery in Vienna. The result is 'Tour', an exhibition that combines the works of three Miami artists with three from Cape Town and addresses issues pertaining to life in a transitory city

'This exhibition has stemmed from the opportunity of living in, and working with artists in both continents, and being able to identify common phenomena in both cities', says Breukel. 'Tour' focuses on the commonality of the two tourism-centered cities in flux and the participating artists address notions of alienation, integration, acceptance, dual identity and how to find a sense of 'home' and in their respective regions.

Cape Town artists participating are Cameron Platter, Bridget Baker and Pieter Hugo.

Opens: October 5
Closes: October 29

SA-born, US-based Ledelle Moe's 'Collapse IV' is showing at the Axis Gallery in New York this month. Moe's sculptures range in scale from monumental to miniature. Enormous concrete-and-steel heads and body fragments recall colossi toppled during histories both recent and distant. Like fallen monuments, they mark the fragility of power and the yielding of strength to vulnerability through conflict or calamity. What appeared immortalised suffers erasure, what seemed permanent surrenders to the forces of nature and decay.

Moe's looming fragments are paradoxical portraits: though free of the fixed personae and narratives of public statuary, they read as everyman or -woman. Victims perhaps, they offer the poignancy of finding gentleness and peace even on the faces of the dead, and in that finding mirror our own humanity.

Opens: September 26
Closes: October 21

Sipho Hlati, Velile Soha and Ernestine White exhibit in the POLVO's small gallery alongside Tracey Rose's solo show in the main hall. These artists represent three generations of Cape Town-based printmakers with work that explores history, identity politics and artistic experimentation.

White will show her newest series of prints, Banal Illusions which the artist proclaims 'explore(s) the relationship between the camera, myself and my immediate environment in an effort to begin to understand the power one has in altering one's perceptions of reality.'

Opens: September 15
Closes: October 7

Khwezi Ghule will be delivering the keynote address in his capacity as Transcape curator on the first day of the South Project's 'gathering' in Santiago, Chile, entitled 'Crossing Horizons: Context and Community in the South'.

This is the South Project's third annual event of this kind (it will be travelling to Johannesburg next year) and for the first time the gathering will also feature a significant artistic programme with artists from Australia, New Zealand and Latin America. The Symposia programme will be updated regularly online and registrations to attend to gathering are now being accepted. Go to www.southproject.org/Santiago/Santiago_programme1.htm for more information and to register online.

Opens: October 3
Closes: October 7

William Kentridge's well known 1997 piece, Weighing and Wanting is showing at the Austin Museum of Art in Texas. The film, and the drawings which accompany it on this exhibition, centre around Soho Eckstein, a broad-shouldered, white South African industrialist whose self-assured place in the world has been dismantled by the ascendancy of the African National Congress and the condemnation of apartheid. Eckstein's story is related through his personal meditations on a failed love affair, the Johannesburg landscape which stands as silent witness to the atrocities of the apartheid era, and his own internal psychic landscape, represented by images of MRI brain scans. The title of the exhibition refers to a biblical episode in which a disembodied hand appears before King Belshazzar of Babylon and writes a message on the wall, reading, 'You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, for you have not humbled your heart before God, so your kingdom has come to an end.'

Opens: August 19
Closes: November 5

'Body of Evidence' is a new show at the Smithsonian Institute's Museum of African Art. The long running show is an exhibition of works by contemporary African artists from the museum's collection who deal with ideas of 'The Body' with varying levels of explicitness.

The artists use the human body, and its absence, as a site for issues of race, identity, gender and geography - all issues that are often integral to artists from this continent. South African artists Kay Hassan, Gavin Jantjes, Rudzani Nemasetoni, Georgie Papageorge, Johannes Phokela, Berni Searle, Sue Williamson and Jeremy Wafer are included.

Opens: June 14
Closes: April 6, 2007

Following a visit to South Africa some months ago, Lisette Lagnado, chief curator of the 27th Sao Paulo Bienal, has selected Jane Alexander, Guy Tillim, Mustafa Maluka and Pieter Hugo to participate. For the first time, national representation has been discarded, and the 119 chosen artists have been selected purely on the merits of their work. Well known artists from other countries include Cildo Mereiles, Tacita Dean, Loulou Cherinet and Thomas Hirschhorn.

This year's theme is 'How to Live Together' and the Bienal will run from October 7 to December 17, 2006.

Timed to coincide with the opening of 'Africa Remix' at the Mori, is a project much lighter in weight and more ephemeral in concept: 'Off the Record', devised by Belgian artist Eric van Hove, now based in Tokyo, will hi-jack X-Cube storage lockers found in subway stations in the city.

These lockers are opened not by a key but by utilising a cell phone number designated by the storer. Invited artists will make an artwork to fit into one of these lockers, which measures 30 x 30 x 60 cm. An SMS to a friend inviting him/her to come and view the artwork will set the process in motion. The invitee will then invite someone else in turn, setting the new cell phone number as the new code. 'Think of Chinese whispers', says Van Hove.

Participating artists include Lara Baladi (Egypt), Federico Herrero (Costa Rica), John di Stefano (New Zealand) and Sue Williamson (South Africa).

Will the artwork be stolen by a viewer? Will the next invited viewer take the trouble to pay a visit? Will an earthquake destroy Tokyo and all the artworks? The agenda is open.

More information? http://www.transcri.be/projects/offtherecord/downloads.html

May 2006 - until such time as the project ends itself.