Archive: Issue No. 130, June 2008

EUROPE

8.06.08 Pieter Hugo at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool
8.06.08 Lolo Veleko in 'AFRICALLS?', Spain
8.06.08 Petros Ghebrehiwot at artSPACE, Berlin

11.05.08 William Kentridge, Kay Hassan and Norman Catherine in Brussels
11.05.08 Steven Gregory at Opus Gallery, London
11.05.08 Isolde Krams in Berlin

THE AMERICAS

8.06.08 World Histories, Mustafa Maluka at the Des Moines Art Center
8.06.08 'The New Spell' at David Krut, New York

6.04.08 'Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body' at the Hood Museum
6.04.08 'Flow' at the Studio Museum Harlem

2.03.08 Ed Young Second Installment at Locust Projects, Miami

10.02.08 'Far From Home' at North Carolina Museum of Art
10.02.08 'Make Art/Stop Aids' at Fowler Museum, UCLA

Pieter Hugo at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool

Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool and Autograph ABP present 'Pieter Hugo: Portraits'. This exhibition focuses on three bodies of work, all of which use portraiture to call into question our understanding of how we see others.

On show are a selection of portraits of people afflicted by albinism from the project Looking Aside, Hugo's Judges series (2005) which was made during the final months of the longest-running court case in Botswana's history, and Gadawan Kura - The Hyena Men (2007), which is a study of an extended family of minstrels and healers from Abuja, Nigeria.

'Pieter Hugo: Portraits' was produced with the support of Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.

Opens: May 30
Closes: July 5

 

Lolo Veleko in 'AFRICALLS?', Spain

'AFRICALLS?' presents the work of five artists and two contemporary art production centres of seven African cities. This creative project, comprising a documentary film, a publication and an exhibition, is an audiovisual collage that presents the artists' interests and the urban context in which they create their works.

'AFRICALLS?' takes a direct and intimate perspective to explore the key aspects of the artists' personalities and creative processes beyond the art objects they make in cities such as Dakar, Douala, Cape Town, Rabat, Luanda, Nairobi and Maputo.

The seven featured artists are Lolo Veleko (Cape Town), Mamadou Gomis (Dakar), Nástio Mosquito (Luanda), Jorge Dias (Maputo), Myriam Mihindou (Rabat), and the collectives Doual'art (Douala) and Kwani (Nairobi).

Opens: June 3

 

Petros Ghebrehiwot at artSPACE, Berlin

Eritrean artist Petros Ghebrehiwot, who is currently based in Johannesburg, exhibits his collective-consciouscness inspired work Crowd/ed at artSPACE Berlin. Ghebrehiwot's muse for his expressive oil paintings is the hybrid mind of the crowd - groups of people who, as a collective, work together for change, progress and a better life.

Opens: June 13
Closes: July 1

 

William Kentridge, Kay Hassan and Norman Catherine in Brussels

MoBa Gallery in Brussels launches its new space called NOMAD with an exhibition by William Kentridge, Kay Hassan and Norman Catherine, entitled 'Multiple Choice'.

The show will feature editions by each artist with Kentridge presenting etchings and sculpture. Hassan, who is better known for his collage work, shows multiples relating to a sense of time - Fixing Time,Reversing Time and Reflecting Time. He also presents a series of photographs entitled Morning Rituals. Catherine exhibits a series of bronze sculptures inspired by legends, masks, tales and allegories from South Africa.

'Multiple Choice' is Kentridge's first gallery exhibition in Brussels since his solo show ten years ago at Bozar.

Opens: May 7
Closes: June 22

 

'Steven Gregory at Opus Gallery, London

Opus Gallery in association with Trudie Stephenson present Steven Gregory's 'Down To The Bone'

Gregory, who was born in South Africa but currently lives and works in Britain, takes the vanitas tradition of 16th and 17th Century Dutch masters as a starting point in his work. He attempts to immortalize what we leave behind. With irony and humour the artist resurrects the dead by covering human skulls with precious and semi-precious stones. Tissue and skin are replaced by jet, pearls, malachite and glass beads, where beauty spots once sat, diamonds and rubies now nestle. Also included in the exhibition are precise skull drawings and works in bronze.

Collected internationally, Gregory's most recent exhibitions include his sell out show 'Bone Stone Bronze' at Nicholas Robinson Gallery in New York, and his inclusion in the 2007 Serpentine Gallery exhibition, 'In the darkest hour there may be light: Works from Damien Hirst's murderme collection'. There, he showed alongside Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, the Chapman Brothers, Tracy Emin, Sarah Lucas and others.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Opens: May 8
Closes: June 19

 

Isolde Krams in Berlin

Isolde Krams presents 'Erden', a solo exhibition at artSPACE, Berlin. The exhibition includes a sculptural installation which explores the artist's struggle to come to terms with problems of the environment and social politics.

The installation makes use of found objects, and is comprised in part of hundreds of earth-coloured plastic balls, which were originally part of an industrial cooling system, and were found abandoned in an open field. Krams also incorporates bronze, gold, lead and brass, making reference to mining and its impact on the environment.

The exhibition will consist of Krams' latex sculptures along with found objects. Her Miss World and Schweinehund objects are ever-present and always evolving.

Opens: May 9
Closes: June 7

 

'World Histories', Mustafa Maluka at the Des Moines Art Center

Artists working today exemplify the term 'global citizen', often growing up in one region, being educated or working in another, and exhibiting at galleries, fairs, museums and exhibitions in every country possible.

'World Histories' presents 12 artists whose work, while participating in this globe-spanning conversation, also presents a unique expression of their respective identities as individuals, defined by the specific place, time, and culture from which he or she has emerged.

Included in the 'World Histories' line-up are: El Anatsui (Ghana), Sonny Assu (Canada), Heri Dono (Indonesia), Dario Escobar (Guatemala), Yoko Inoue (Japan), Shi Jinsong (China), Mustafa Maluka (South Africa), Rachael Rakena (New Zealand), Katrin Sigurdardottir (Iceland), Jesse Small (USA), and Angela Strassheim (USA).

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Opens: May 16
Closes: August 31

 

'The New Spell' at David Krut, New York

In the months of June and July, David Krut Projects, New York presents 'The New Spell', an exhibition of young, up-and-coming, contemporary South African art curated by Lucy Rayner. This exhibition of self-reflexively satirical and subversive new work features artists Themba Shibase, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Maja Maljevic, Nina Barnett and Robyn Nesbitt.

Bringing together the work of six artists who share an affinity for a particularly vulgar, grotesque or fetishist aesthetic, 'The New Spell' aims to consider one of the many enlivening tendencies within this socially aware and outspoken approach.

Opens: June 5
Closes: July 30

 

'Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body' at the Hood Museum of Art

The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College presents 'Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body', a major travelling exhibition, curated by Barbara Thompson, that explores the historical roots of a charged icon in contemporary art - the black female body.

The exhibition will explore the complex perpetuation of icons and stereotypes of black womanhood through the display of over 100 sculptures, prints, postcards, photographs, paintings, textiles and video installations by artists from Africa, Europe, America and the Caribbean.

Presented in separate but intersecting sections, 'Black Womanhood' reveals three different perspectives - the traditional African, Western colonial, and contemporary global - that have contributed to current ideas about black womanhood. These three sections explore themes such as ideals of beauty, fertility and sexuality, maternity and motherhood, and women's identities and social roles, and examine collectively how these overlapping perspectives penetrate the complex and interwoven relationships between Africa and the West, male and female, and past and present, all of which have contributed to the inscription of meaning onto the black female body.

Zanele Muholi, Senzeni Marasela, Nandipha Mntambo, Penny Siopis and Berni Searle exhibit contemporary representations of black womanhood which, in contrast to the historic representations of the African female body on display, dissect the layers of social, cultural, and political realities that have influenced the creation of stereotypes about black women.

Also expected to feature in the exhibition are well-established contemporary artists living in Africa and Europe such as Hassan Musa, Ingrid Mwangi, Robert Hutter, Sokari Douglas Camp, Emile Guebehi, Magdalene Odundo, Fazal Sheikh and Maud Sulter.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 370-page illustrated catalogue published by the Hood Museum of Art in association with the University of Washington Press in April 2008.

Opens: April 1
Closes: August 10

 

'Flow' at the Studio Museum Harlem

Nicholas Hlobo and Mustafa Maluka are included on 'Flow', which opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem at the beginning of April. 'Flow' is an exhibition focusing on work made by a new generation of international artists from Africa.

The approximately 20 emerging international artists, who hail from 11 African nations, reside mainly in Europe and North America and travel to and from Africa regularly. They are uniquely conscious of, and responsive to, recent African history, global economics and the idiosyncratic culture of the new millennium which they represent on this exhibition through a diversity of media including digital photography, video, paintings and site-specific installation.

The majority of the featured artists have never been included in major US museum exhibitions. 'Flow' is modelled after 'Freestyle', the Studio Museum's landmark 2001 exhibition, which was followed in 2005 by 'Frequency'.

Opens: April 2
Closes: June 29

 

Ed Young Second Installment at Locust Projects, Miami

Black in Five Minutes will be the second installment of the site-specific Locust Projects mural project of by Ed Young. He utilizes forms of conceptualism, performance, and minimalism, underscored by his persona, to call attention to major themes of boredom, insolence and laziness. Young investigates the idea that the structure of the art world has superseded the art object itself. For this project, Young will create a new site-specific mural every four months for one year. The final mural will coincide with Art Basel Miami 2008.

Opens: March 2008
Closes: June 2008

 

'Far From Home' at North Carolina Museum of Art

Starting in mid-February, North Carolina Museum of Art will host 'Far from Home', an exhibition which includes art that addresses the global displacement of people and populations as they relocate for economic, political, or other reasons. The exhibition features photography, paintings and sculpture by artists of diverse national and cultural origins.

'Far From Home' explores the various ways that displacement is manifested in creative expression, suggesting very personal transformations alongside the wider group dynamics of belonging and exclusion.Whether focused on the individual or larger community, works here stand in dialogue with the expansion of global networks as people relocate and circumscribe their experiences in new places while maintaining connections to homelands and heritage, however tenuous.

Featured artists include Ghada Amer, José Bedia, Lalla Essaydi, Maria Elena González, Seydou Keïta, Vik Muniz, Youssef Nabil and Lorna Simpson among others.

Opens: February 17
Closes: July 13

 

'Make Art/Stop Aids' at Fowler Museum, UCLA

'Make Art/Stop Aids', a travelling international exhibition debuting at the Fowler Museum at UCLA on February 23, shows how artists around the world have responded to HIV/Aids and how their work can raise awareness and inspire activism.

The exhibition, which includes artists from the Brazil, India, South Africa and the United States, presents more than 60 contemporary works, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, performance videos, posters, animated shorts, digital media and installations that engage these questions: What is Aids? Who lives, who dies? Why are condoms controversial? Are you afraid to touch? When was the last time you cried? Why a red ribbon? and, Are you ready to act?

South African artists featured on the show include David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, William Kentridge, Fiona Kirkwood, Brenton Maart, Churchill Madikida, Gideon Mendel, Zanele Muholi, Pennny Siopis and Clive Van den Berg.

Opens: February 23
Closes: June 15