Archive: Issue No. 117, May 2007

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Zineb Sedira

Zineb Sedira
Saphir 2006
duration 18 mins, sound

Ângela Ferreira

Ângela Ferreira
Cape Town Film Festival: A Woman like Polley 2003
single channel digital video
duration 4 mins 25 secs, colour, no sound

Samson Mudzunga

Samson Mudzunga
Vivho Venda 2007
performance, wood, hide, fabric, paint, tape, bolt,
padlock and chain, electric cable, lightbulb, photograph
160 x 325 x 130cm

James Webb

James Webb
Autohagiography 2007
installation: chaise longue, speakers, CD player, cables, audio
sound material: recordings of the artist under hypnosis
duration 72 mins
73 x 180 x 65cm

Moshekwa Langa

Moshekwa Langa
The Last Sigh 2005
indian ink, oil, acrylic and pencil on paper
88.5 x 68.5cm (framed)

Penny Siopis

Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Changeling 2007
ink, glue on paper
76.5 x 56cm


Afterlife at Michael Stevenson
by Tavish McIntosh

Traditionalists posit that art's function is as a stepping-stone to the transcendental - affording viewers a glimpse of the disembodied realm of pure spirit. Sophie Perryer's curatorial outing 'Afterlife' makes no such grandiose claim. Tempered by a post-modern sensibility, the curatorial hand subtly interrogates the point at which individuals can negotiate a realm that exceeds the restrictions of identity. Art is no longer a vehicle for enlightenment but an interrogative tool that takes as much as it gives - questioning the validity of pure aestheticism that often springs from a desire to evacuate the politics of representation. Ultimately 'Afterlife''s impressive collection of artists reveals the historical, social and intellectual confines through which the aesthetic is by necessity negotiated.

Zineb Sedira's video Saphir is an understated but mellifluous duet composed between two parallel video streams which the artist nudges in and out of confluence. This technique is deployed with sumptuous skill, exquisitely frustrating our desire for narrative closure. The two streams image different aspects of the same cityscape, that of the port of Algiers. Playing with clichés about sexed spaces, Zineb locates her separate protagonists within their respective spheres: a woman in a domestic interior and a man walking outside on the waterfront. Their disconnection from each other is emphasized by the occasional confluence of the two streams of video that show the same moment from two detached perspectives. However despite their mutual disengagement, the similarities, the strange confluences between the two versions of the city presented by the couple, become apparent. Both consistently look beyond their environments towards the horizon. Thus the woman, framed by the curtains of her majestic abode, gazes upon the exterior walkways, whilst her masculine counterpart looks towards the expanse of sea that separates Algiers from France. Their bodies exist in one space, but their minds are directed elsewhere. Sedira's video encapsulates a calm quotidian rhythm under which hovers an undercurrent of repressed longing and of thwarted desire.

Saphir is structured by the architecture of the colonial legacy. The port of Algiers is a landscape of transition, where escape to the other side (emotional, physical and spiritual) is desired but not always achieved. Sedira questions whether the ability to transcend the quotidian is only available to those already freed from the shackles of border posts. This video, which continues Michael Stevenson's mission to expose local audiences to artists from around the continent, frames the rest of the show.

Samson Mudzunga's Vivho Venda and James Webb's Autohagiography, in contrast with Saphir, both advocate an agentic escapism. Both pieces use relaxed supine positions to induce a calm, contemplative mood - the coffin-drum a space in which Mudzunga is able to enact his own death and subsequent rebirth, the confessional couch a space for the hypnotised Webb to recount memories from his past lives through small speakers. Mudzunga and Webb embrace the ability to venture into the realm of otherness, ambitiously escaping life and eschewing identity's confines. However in the midst of the lulling rhythm and soothing monotony of Webb's recital, his voice remains as an exemplar of his particularised identity; Mudzunga's emergence from the confines of his drum testifies to the persistence of personhood in the face of 're-birth'.

Ângela Ferreira's A Woman like Polley which hangs next to Webb's Autohagiography is dedicated to the memory of Polley, long-time director of the Cape Town Film Festival who espoused a brave and often defiant line-up of films. In the video, Ferreira pays her homage by donning the clothes and personality of the aging Polley. She commandeers his person without rendering the disjuncture between her own particularised body and his invisible - the audience is highly aware of the discomforting appropriation. Ferreira's performance is marvellously understated and respectful despite the temerity of her action. She is able to give form to the body of the other without losing sight of the matrix which situates us within a particular sexed position and institutes our longing for alterity.

Webb's confessional chaise-longue is also dominated by Moshekwa Langa's paintings. The calming iconography of the psychoanalytic institution is subverted by these portraits showing figures hovering on the edge of expiration or exhilaration. In The Last Sigh the breath becomes a threatening element inelegantly permeating the figure until he appears smothered by his own exhalation. The vital, everyday process of breathing becomes suffused with menacing undertones and the rhythms of survival become metaphors for existential crises. Penny Siopis' Feral Fables is concerned with the 'changeling' and the 'wild woman'. These are not the linguistically enabled subjects of contemporary culture but similarly liminal creatures. Liminality proposes the ability to be in a state of flux and permanent transition - existing between two states. The liminal is essentially subversive because it has no respect for the boundaries of states of being. Whilst the journey to the transcendental involves the inevitable loss of self/body, the liminal refuses loss.

Too small, too dense, Siopis' paintings threaten the integrity of the viewer's sense of self; they are overwhelming in their evocation of the gooey, glibbery melting of pictoral surfaces. Siopis' pieces return to rampant materialism in order to propose a route to the transcendental that is enabled by those on the interstice of language and its antithesis. Siopis disallows the bodily evacuation implied by the spiritual transcendental realm with an aesthetic firmly lodged in the body, insisting upon a different route to the otherworldly.

In the early modernist era, aesthetic contemplation carried with it a promise of the transcendental, and art theory justified its existence by cementing the connection between art and spirituality. Art was, in effect, a vast 'upliftment' programme, aiding the lower classes to achieve enlightenment. 'Afterlife', the latest offering from Michael Stevenson's astute curator Sophie Perryer, boldly reasserts the connection between art and spirituality albeit within an updated theoretical framework. This show carves out of post-modern vacuity some form of agency - whilst alerting us to complexities of aesthetic engagement. In 'Afterlife', the artworks are propositions rather than content-laden statements, questioning the viewer's position vis-à-vis the spiritual. The curator's carefully measured narrative cumulatively speaks back to the stultifying discourse of prescribed religiosity, offering instead a space that enables viewers to engage with the necessarily circumscribed and particular narratives of spirituality. The exhibition features a diverse range of productions in terms of media and conceptual underpinning. However, archetypal elements emerge from amongst this profusion - most especially the interrogation of our pitiful attempts to transcend this world.

Opened: March 22
Closed: April 28

Michael Stevenson Contemporary Gallery
Hill House, De Smidt Street, Green Point
Tel: (021) 421 2575
Fax: (021) 421 2578
Email: info@michaelstevenson.com
www.michaelstevenson.com
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 1pm


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