Archive: Issue No. 132, August 2008

13.08.08 Connor Cullinan at Obert Contemporary, Melrose Arch
9.08.08 Absa l'Atelier award show at the Absa Gallery
9.08.08 Cecil Skotnes at the Standard Bank Gallery
9.08.08 Pat Mautloa at the Goodman Gallery
9.08.08 Athi-Patra Ruga at Art Extra
9.08.08 'Come Again' at The Substation
9.08.08 Santu Mofokeng at Warren Siebrits
9.08.08 'Construct: Beyond the documentary photograph' at the UNISA Art Gallery
9.08.08 Dylan Culhane at the Premises Gallery
9.08.08 Dinkies Sithole at the Johannesburg Art Gallery
9.08.08 'RENDEZVOUS 2008 - focus wearable art' at the FADA Art Gallery
9.08.08 Wilma Cruise at David Krut Projects
9.08.08 'Goodbye Little Miss Perfume' at gordart
9.08.08 'The Winter Show' at Afronova
9.08.08 Shepherd Ndudzo at Gallery Momo

6.07.08 Kay Hassan at the Johannesburg Art Gallery
6.07.08 Hentie van der Merwe at the Goodman Gallery
6.07.08 MTN New Contemporaries at the University of Johannesburg Art Gallery
6.07.08 Michael McGarry at Art Extra

Connor Cullinan's second solo show at this venue, entitled 'Carne Vale' (which translates as 'farewell to flesh') comments on humans' predatory behaviour in their pursuit of carnal pleasure. The title refers to the pre-lenten celebration, 'carnival', characterised by self-indulgence. The exhibition explores humans' current excessive behaviour ≠ from sexual perversion to voracious consumption - and suggests it is fuelled by a sense of future limits. This exhibition features ten variously scaled acrylic on canvas works and follows Cullinan's acclaimed 'River of January' at the same venue in 2007.

Cullinan's works are typically realised in thin acrylic washes, and in their fine, complex detail and graphic appearance, make reference to old engravings, illustrations and philately. He grew up and studied in KwaZulu-Natal, and has been living and practising in Cape Town for a number of years.

Opens: August 14
Closes: August 30

The top 100 works for the 2008 Absa l'Atelier competition is currently on show at the Absa Art Gallery, including James Webb's winning 'Auto Hagiography' and Gerard Sekoto prizewinner Retha Ferguson's work.

Cecile Loedolff, Absa art curator, commented on the submissions: 'This year's works are immensely labour-intensive, meticulous and definitely time-consuming. The repetitive, almost compulsive nature of so many of the pieces interested the judges.'

Cecil Skotnes is an icon of the South African art world, revered for both his art production, as well as his pioneering role in art education in South Africa.

This exhibition, curated by Pippa Skotnes and Thomas Cartwright of the University of Cape Town's Centre for Curating the Archive, moves beyond the public face of Skotnes. It focuses on his more intimate work - drawings, cartoons, prints and paintings on paper, some of these dating back to the late 1950s.

The show also includes letters and documents collected over five decades by the artist's wife, Thelma, photographs by Paul Weinberg, personal memorabilia, and items from Skotnes' studio.

Overall, the exhibition offers not only an overview of Skotnes' work, but also insights into the creative community of which he was part, the way in which he researched his subjects, and how he helped to shape a vibrant period in South African art history.

Opens: July 30
Closes: September 6

The Goodman Gallery opens this month with a Kagiso Pat Mautloa solo exhibition. Mautloa is a painter and installation artist who studied at Mofolo Art Centre in Soweto, where he was brought up, before completing a diploma in fine art at ERC Art Centre in Rorke's Drift, KwaZulu Natal. He has worked from his studio in Johannesburg's Bag Factory for many years.

Says artist and writer David Koloane, Mautloa 'draws inspiration from urban waste and detritus, the cryptic text of faded posters and billboards, subtle colours bleached by past storms. Working with paint, rusted metal, stained canvas, old window frames, discarded tools, Mautloa restores and reconstructs vanished memories and anecdotes in this process of renewal. The artist's process of constant reinvention takes place in tandem with the urban renewal programmes of the city. Paradoxically, while the strategy of the city is to demolish to make way for new developments, the artist's renewal is embedded in the city's decay and the detritus left behind by demolition. In his recontextualisation of collected debris, Mautloa acts as a contemporary historian seeking new truths in the miasma of ruin and decrepitude.'

Since 1982 Mautloa has held many solo exhibitions, and taken part in group shows and workshops in South Africa, Botswana, Belgium, Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland, the UK, Ireland, the United States, Cuba and India.

Opens: August 16
Closes: September 6

'... of bugchasers and watussi faghags' is Athi-Patra Ruga's first solo exhibition in Johannesburg.

In this show Ruga chronicles his character of the 'bugchaser', Beiruth, and his 'tales of counter-penetration', realised through craft-mediations and performances undertaken in various urban centres around South Africa and abroad.

Ruga says: 'This body of work is an interrogation of my interest in the history of image-making, and of displacement - both of people and images. The title of the show is double-edged: it refers to the sexual practice of 'bugchasing' (the act of contracting the H.I. virus intentionally) - with its seemingly altruistic motivation, while also referring to the history of the "Watussi", a colonial mis-pronouncement of the Tutsi people of the Burundi-Ruanda nation. The Watussi myth is further explored in the "Pixilated Arcadia" series of tapestries, referencing paintings done by Irma Stern during her 1943 and 1946 expeditions to central Africa depicting the "Watussi". Stern's works are re-narrated through irreverent subversion, with the aim of focusing attention on the implicit ethnographic and propagandistic undertones of the work. The "Watussi women" meditations find their retort in the watussi moneyshot (2008) tapestry - a parody on the historical and the contemporary hoochie-mamma... '.

This exhibition features collaborative photographic performance stills by Ruga with Swiss photographer Oliver Neubert; and Ruga with South African photographer Chris Saunders.

Opens: August 20
Closes: September 20

'Come Again' is an exhibition of new work by current Master's students at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. The work on exhibition all in some way engages with notions of articulation, desire and repetition.

Jake Aikman's Echo looks at replication and repetition in painting and print, in dark brooding seascapes, while Fabian Saptouw looks at repetition, futility, failure and the ethics of hard work in The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog. Renee Holleman shows us The Whole World, Inverted with oversized black quotation marks high on a white wall, framing everything else in the show, including Pieter Cilliers' bulky seemingly Modernist concrete sculptures that don't quite fit together. Stuart Bird relates issues of sex, power and politics in his seductively carved sculptures, while Linda Stupart describes past lovers to a police sketch artist. Justin Brett presents seemingly banal pencil drawings dealing with homosexuality and control in Correction. David Scadden shows us sexy, glowing apocalyptic landscapes in a series of digital prints, and Jennifer Altschuler deals with the gaps and similarities in articulations of the South African cultural landscape with her comparisons of photographs taken today with others taken over 20 years ago.

Opens: August 25
Closes: September 7

In Santu Mofokeng's 'Landscape' at Warren Siebrits this month, he speaks of the need to '... take psychic ownership of the land... inherited from the Apartheid ancestor'.

He continues, 'I am careful to use the word landscape in its modern meaning and sense. I would like to posit that landscape appreciation is informed by personal experience, myth and memory, amongst other things. Suffice to say, it is also informed by ideology, indoctrination, projection and prejudice.

'I am looking at the interface of the inner and outer - interior/exterior - worlds, where the objective/subjective environment informs/determines the experience of being at a given time and space. My approach to landscapes is informed by the cleaving of the word landscape into its portmanteau component parts: 'land' (the verb) and 'scape' (to view) in order to illuminate and decode how we view landscape, and that this is based on our experience, knowledge and sometimes, stories.'

The show in the main Siebrits gallery space consists of photographs from Mofokeng's exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery earlier this year, entitled 'Homeland Security'. A group of earlier landscape images will be exhibited in the space below the mezzanine with a variety of Mofokeng's photographs at the new gallery.

Opens: August 12
Closes: September 12

'Construct: Beyond the documentary photograph' focuses on the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of found or made images within South African photography, and is curated by Heidi Erdmann (Photographers Gallery ZA) and Jacob Lebeko (acting curator of the UNISA Art Gallery).

Roger Ballen, Lien Botha, Berni Searle and Dale Yudelman are profiled in this exhibition, as well as a host of younger artists including Barbara Wildenboer, Nomusa Makhuba and Zander Blom.

Opens: July 24
Closes: September 3

Dylan Culhane's kaleidoscopic images might seem like digital manipulations, but are in fact created with traditional in-camera film techniques.

As Culhane puts it, 'many of the images on display explore the human eye's response to symmetry; both from an aesthetic and a psychological point-of-view. Aside from signalling beauty, symmetry in nature is generally restricted to human and animal faces and the eye is thus programmed to seek out visages wherever perfect alignment is detected'. The works are fragmentary portraits and responses to the places in which they were made, including Cape Town, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beijing.

Opening: August 9
Closes: August 30

In Dinkies Sithole's installation 'Shrine Rituals', he brings together different beliefs both old and new, in science and in spirits, religion and animism.

Yoruba cosmology states that every object has a 'life force' or 'ase', which for Sitole connects to our own cultural beliefs: many South Africans avoid throwing away personal affects for fear that these objects might be used to bewitch them. Here Sithole uses batteries, miniature Buddha's, rosaries, bottles of 'umuthi' and the coloured string often used by ZCC adherents for protection, to build shrines, enlivening the discarded objects.

Opens: August 5
Closes: October 12

'RENDEZVOUS 2008' is a series of events held to support talented contemporary artists while offering financial opportunities to disadvantaged promising students to apply for university. Twenty percent of sales goes to a fund set up for disadvantaged student organisations identified by the Aardklop Arts Festival in partnership with the North West University and The University of Johannesburg.

'RENDEZVOUS 2008 - focus wearable art' is not a conventional fashion show but an expression of art that can be worn, coupled with an exhibition of original sketches and preparatory works. Participating artists include Diane Victor, Strangelove, Musha Neluheni and Nerupa Sing. The exhibition will travel to the Aardklop festival and the Botanical Garden Gallery at the North West University.

Opens: August 22
Closes: September

'Split / NY.LON.JHB' is an exhibition of new prints and sculpture by Wilma Cruise.

This body of work includes the collaborative screenprints and a three-plate etching made at the Lower Eastside Print Shop in New York, as well as smaller monotypes made in the David Krut Print Workshop (DKW). Diary pages for London, New York and Johannesburg will also be on show.

Opens: August 2
Closes: September 1

'Goodbye Little Miss Perfume' consists of bodies of work by two young Pretoria-based artists and concerns the loss of childhood. Nathani Lüneburg's 'Miss Perfume' and Marili de Weerdt's 'Losing Things' reflect on things discarded or shattered in our journey through time, exploring fantasies and fears and the trauma children face as they grow up.

Opens: August 3
Closes: August 23

'The Winter Show' features a selection of works by African artists, including Dominique Zinkpe (Benin), Samson Mnisi (South Africa), Mouna Karray (Tunisia) and Mohamadou Ndoye Douts (Senegal).

A selection of books and catalogues on African contemporary art will also be available.

Opens: July 18
Closes: September 6

'Thapong' features of Shepherd Ndudzo's latest carved wooden sculptures.

Ndudzo was born in Rusape, Zimbabwe in 1978, and currently lives and works in Botswana. He learned sculpting from his father and attended a one year course in Fine Arts at Unisa. Presently he practices from his studio at the Thapong Visual Arts Centre. Ndudzo's work is to be found in many corporate and private collections. He sculpts in wood and stone, sometimes incorporating both in one piece. His work generally focuses on everyday people and their daily rituals.

Opens: July 24
Closes: August 18

Kay Hassan needs no introduction: his work has been widely exhibited both in South Africa and abroad. Amongst other awards, he received the 2000 DaimlerChrysler Award for Contemporary Art. 'Urbanisation' is a major mid-career solo exhibition hosted by the JAG and composed of aproximately 12 installations of new and recent works. While including Hassan's characteristic collage and installation works, 'Urbanisation' also features paintings, photographs and video.

In the installation The Boxers, old army carry bags are transformed into punching-bags and complemented by a video projection of boxers sparring at a gym in Hillbrow. While 'Urbanisation' deals with the rapid pace of urban life with a particular focus on the disenfrancised, it also includes work that deals with a more interior lanscape, such as Morning Ritual and My Father's Music Room.

Opens: June 29
Closes: September 30

2008 Sasol Wax Art Award finalist Hentie Van der Merwe's 'figuring-' opens at the Goodman Gallery this month. The exhibition considers the archive of Nama folktales the artist recently discovered while travelling in Germany. The stories were collected by Sigrid Schmidt during the second half of the last century around the part of Namibia where van der Merwe grew up. Consequently many of the tales were familiar to him. 'figuring-', however, focuses particularly on the stories that were unknown to him, the ones excluded from Afrikaner oral culture, probably because they were complex, violent and could be perceived as posing a threat to a Christian worldview.

Another narrative running concurrent with the Nama tales is the colonisation of Namibia (then German South West Africa) towards the end of the 19th century, and in particular the figure of the German emperor Wilhelm II. Wilhelm II's body was deformed due to a complicated birth and his complex psychological and sexual make-up is another leitmotif of 'figuring-'.

These complementary sets of stories become a vehicle for the artist's investigations of ideas already familiar in his work, such as the body, violence, power and history.

Opens: July 19
Closes: August 9

The MTN New Contemporaries Award seeks to promote the artists that will define visual arts in South Africa in years to come. The finalists for this year are Dineo Bopape, Daniel Halter, Michael MacGarry and Themba Shibase. These four emerging artists were selected by curator Melissa Mboweni and commissioned by MTN to each produce a body of work which will be on show at this exhibition.

The winner of the 2008 MTN New Contemporaries Award will be chosen by an independent judging committee and announced at the opening.

Opens: July 10
Closes: August 13

Michael McGarry's 'When enough people start saying the same thing' furthers his concern with '... the ongoing ramifications of imperialism on the African continent'. The title refers to the shift of power that occurs the moment a large number people are unhappy with the status quo - irrespective of whether the leadership is democratic or despotic.

MacGarry has in the past produced purely conceptual work, usually taking the form of web-based projects: writing about artworks, or more often than not, unrealised films, on his website www.alltheorynopractice.com. With this exhibition he departs from this working method. It was a pragmatic choice, says MacGarry: '... over time this dogma presented serious challenges to my ability to function as an artist, and ultimately to produce anything at all (ideas included)'. In 'When enough people start saying the same thing', MacGarry translates the ideas for his unrealised films into large-scale photographs (stills) and sculpture pieces (props).

'I use temporal compression, fictional narratives, satire and the grotesque to explore current political concerns, notions of veracity, representational paradigms and the mechanics of political power both at a domestic level as well as across the continent', adds MacGarry.

Opens: July 16
Closes: August 16