Archive: Issue No. 134, October 2008

7.10.08 Clive van den Berg at Goodman Gallery Cape
7.10.08 Anton Kannemeyer at Michael Stevenson
7.10.08 Odili Odita at Michael Stevenson
7.10.08 Takashi Murakami at 34 Long
7.10.08 Michael Pettit and Ian Engelbrecht at AVA
7.10.08 Michael Pettit at João Ferreira
7.10.08 Jost Kirsten and Natasja de Wet at AVA
7.10.08 Caryn Scrimgeour at Everard Read
7.10.08 Robert Slingsby at Rose Korber
17.09.08 Gabrielle Raaff and Tamsyn Lancaster at These Four Walls

Month of Photography Festival
7.10.08 'Now and Then' at the Castle of Good Hope
7.10.08 'Construct' at the Castle of Good Hope
7.10.08 David Lurie at João Ferreira
7.10.08 Barbara Wildenboer at the Photographer's Gallery
7.10.08 Damien Schumann at the Castle of Good Hope
7.10.08 Sara Gouveia at Cape Town School of Photography
7.10.08 'Beneath the surface' at 3rd I Gallery
7.10.08 'Lens Magic' at Tokara

7.09.08 Jan-Henri Booyens at Whatiftheworld / Gallery
7.09.08 Katherine Bull at blank projects
7.09.08 Virginia MacKenny at Irma Stern
7.09.08 Nigel Mullins at Bell-Roberts

9.08.08 Berni Searle at Michael Stevenson
9.08.08 Youssef Nabil at Michael Stevenson
9.08.08 'Decade' at Sanlam Art Gallery

STELLENBOSCH

7.09.08 Collection 10' at SMAC

Clive van den Berg has forged a distinguished career as an artist, curator, designer, lecturer and cultural activist. Most recently he was Curator of Spier Contemporary (2007) and is currently the Curator/Designer of The Workers' Museum, Newtown, Johannesburg and of several public projects in Sharpeville, Soweto and at Freedom Park, Pretoria. Van den Berg is represented in major public collections including Iziko South African National Gallery.

In this exhibition of new work, Van den Berg continues to explore the possibilities of being 'other' through various visual and verbal languages. His current exhibition challenges assumptions about media, expresses concerns about the state of art and of the nation, and explores anxieties about the fate of a ravaged planet.

Opens: October 11
Closes: November 1

Also known as Joe Dog, the creator of darkly satirical comics published in the Bitterkomix anthologies of which he is co-editor, Anton Kannemeyer is a prolific producer of prints and drawings, and has recently extended his practice to include paintings in acrylic on canvas. The shift in medium allows him to translate his subversive imagery onto a larger scale, heightening the awkward relationship viewers often have with his work. Kannemeyer will also exhibit large-scale drawings for the first time, in addition to smaller drawings and prints.

In April 2008 Kannemeyer held his first New York exhibition, titled 'The Haunt of Fears'. The exhibition, at Jack Shainman Gallery, was praised in the New York Times for its 'semiotic sophistication, graphic ingenuity and X-ray political vision'. Here, Kannemeyer continues his investigation of the fear and anxiety that underlie South Africa's fragile democracy. As always in his work, the thin veneer of polite white society is peeled back to expose the hypocrisy and racism that lurk beneath, but Kannemeyer is as relentless in his critique of the corruption and greed endemic amongst the country's new political elite. Socio-politics and the individual psyche are equally scrutinised in the ongoing Alphabet of Democracy series and related N is for Nightmare works.

Born in 1967 and based in Cape Town, Kannemeyer has been publishing and exhibiting his work since 1992, the year he and Conrad Botes founded Bitterkomix as students at the University of Stellenbosch. Recent group exhibitions include 'Artists at Castagnoli' in Gaiole, Italy (2007); 'From Trentino South Tyrol to the Rest of the World' and 'Back at Kunst Merano Arte' in Merano, Italy (2007); and 'Africa Comics' at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2006).

Kannemeyer will give a walkabout of his exhibition for the Friends of the National Gallery on Thursday 23 October at 11am.

Opens: October 16
Closes: November 22

Odili Odita's work was initially shown at Michael Stevenson on 'Distant Relatives/Relative Distance' (2006), an exhibition of work by contemporary African artists living elsewhere in the world, and which travelled to the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg. 'Double Edge', Odita's show at Michael Stevenson, will comprise a suite of paintings informed by the mural process.

For Odita, colour and form represent the brief moment before concepts are applied in the form of language, like the multicoloured flash that precedes the image on old television sets. The title, 'Double Edge', speaks to these twinned concerns of form and culture. Odita's interest in colour is as much an engagement with the history of colour theory as it is a reflection of his interest in global trade routes. At the time when pigments were still based on natural commodities, trade centres such as the Netherlands were at the epicentre of colour experimentation. Odita's dialogue with modernist ideas about form is similarly double-edged, also reflecting his belief in contemporaneous internationalist ideals. And now, through the extension of his practice to murals, his ideas about painting have become, equally, ideas about architecture.

Born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1966, Odita lives and works in Philadelphia and New York. He is an Associate Professor of Fine Art at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia.

Opens: October 16
Closes: November 33

Takashi Murakami's most comprehensive retrospective to date, 'Murakami', recently concluded in the Brooklyn Museum, New York, keeping the international spotlight firmly on this Japanese master. More than 90 works in various media from different periods of his career were shown. A fully operational Louis Vuitton store inside the museum formed an integral part of the exhibition. The store offered a selection of Vuitton merchandise and launched its new Monogramouflage design by Murakami in collaboration with Louis Vuitton artistic director Marc Jacobs. Printed on canvas in an edition of 100, these canvasses sold out swiftly.

The Vuitton store elicited considerable controversy, but Murakami remained nonplussed, explaining: 'The shop project is not a part of the exhibition; rather it is the heart of the exhibition itself. It holds at once the aspects that fuse, reunite, and then recombine the concept of the readymade. The Louis Vuitton project brings to life a wonderful new world.'

34 Long will show the monogramouflage design on canvas and other selected editioned works.

Opens: October 7
Closes: November 1

Michael Pettit's paintings here explore images and archetypes of theatre, opera, clown and magician. These characters are like travelling players, artists who transform the absurdity, pain and brevity of life into wit, invention and transcendence. Sacred play, surreal leaps, and poetic conjunctions abound. The Clown personage is an existential philosopher, an outsider, who with invention and inversion can cut through our veneer . The Magician, an alchemist, changes straw to gold. Pettit's paintings aim to integrate sensation, feeling and concept into resolved dynamic works of art that are both personal and universal. Broadness of range is a hallmark of Pettit's work, and the image-rich oils at the AVA are boldly contrasted with his new abstracts which are exhibited concurrently at the João Ferreira Gallery.

Ian Engelbrecht exhibits 'Seed of Memory' a body of photographic work that negotiates a journey, a passage through time from generation to generation. It follows members of Engelbrecht's family and well known characters of the day, through a visual story beginning at the turn of the century. A personal body of work which focuses on and outlines a fractured timeline of strange memories, thoughts and moments relating to private family and South African history.

Opens: October 6
Closes: October 24

Opening two days after the AVA exhibition of Pettit's work, the Jo&atild;o Ferreira Gallery will show lyrical abstracts, a contrast with the image-dense paintings at the AVA . Pettit's work has always been richly figurative, so his recent exploration of abstraction is an intriguing new departure. These large mysterious works are rich in paint and process, their shifting worlds, rhapsodic and timeless. They suggest the elemental processes of becoming and dissolving, the linked forces of life and death. This realm is both micro- and macrocosm, sublime and intimate.

Pettit is a well-established professional artist, who has exhibited widely over many years and received extensive recognition. Numerous major public, university and corporate collections include his paintings. Since his last solo exhibition in Cape Town, Pettit has exhibited at the Art London fair in the UK.

Opens: October 8
Closes: November 1

Namibian artist Jost Kirsten exhibits 'Ashes', a body of wooden sculptures that interrogates a fascination with the transition between one form and another. Kirsten uses flame conceptually and physically to scar and reveal the sculpture hidden in the wood. He consciously binds the traditional and historical properties associated with the particular wood into the form of the sculpture.

Alongside this, another existential investigation is presented: Natasja de Wet's 'Thicker Skin' uses the image of a rosebud as the metaphor for the human condition. Different materials such as fabric, latex, gauze, bandages, rubber and paper are used to refer to issues such as camouflage, hiding, insecurity and sexuality.

Opens: October 27
Closes: November 14

Painter Caryn Scrimgeour presents a series of oil paintings of intricately detailed objects displayed against densely textured, patterned fabrics. For her the genre of still life serves as the departure point for a painterly sleight of hand in the form of the ancient tradition of trompe l'oeil painting. Scrimgeour's still lives include the depiction of prosaic objects alongside more rarefied objects, for example, a Huletts Sugar sachet and a Chinese Rabbit sweet wrapper are rendered as preciously as the oriental tableware and florid fabrics on which they are displayed.

Her elevation of the mundane to the status of painterly memorabilia is also reminiscent of 17th century Dutch still life painting in which the detritus of consumption and domesticity were often immortalised as emblems of bourgeoisie prosperity, or as Vanitas symbols. The aerial perspective in the paintings propels Scrimgeour's imagery firmly into a contemporary context, imbuing it with offbeat, photo-real resonance.

Scrimgeour acknowledges that her choice of table adornments derives from 'a personal reflection of occurrences and events which have had a significant impact in my lifeÖ (They) trace a journey which could easily be applied to any woman living anywhere in the world independent of the demographics or political aspects of a situation.'

Opens: October 2
Closes: October 16

Cape Town artist Robert Slingsby's career has spanned more than three decades. Underlying this period remains his obsessive fascination with the ancient rock paintings or petroglyphs - those mysterious, non-figurative images to be found in the Richtersveld (near the Orange River, on South Africa's north-western border) and other world sites. Although Slingsby's work has evolved as he has developed his own alphabet of petroglyphs, the core of inspiration behind his works remains the story on the rocks - a sub-text that informs his extensive and dynamic oeuvre of paintings and sculpture.

In Comic Affair, a highly charged painting done in 2007, Slingsby alludes to the current climate of global insecurity - resulting from terrorist threats - that has seen the emergence of a paranoid society. On his frequent travels over the last year, he felt confronted by the constant surveillance at airports and in the streets, as well as by the feeling of being exposed and intimidated by 'big brother' threats, real or perceived. The presence of female nudes in this work expresses feelings of invasion of privacy and vulnerability, of being absorbed into a way of life that is beyond our control. The imagery includes familiar objects such as aeroplanes, suitcases and nudes in a setting in the midst of conveyor belts, satellites and surveillance equipment - all superimposed over a substructure of images inspired by petroglyphs.

Throughout Slingsby's latest body of work, produced in 2008, his signature technique dictates the quintessentially linear style of his painting: his preoccupation with line as found in the geometric shapes of the rock art of the Richtersveld.

Opens: October 1
Closes: November 15

'Periphery: Observations of urban life in paint' features work by young Capetonians Gabrielle Raaff and Tamsyn Lancaster. Raaff's work, delicate watercolours modelled on Google Earth images, was seen on last year's Spier Biennale. Here, using washes with the greatest economy and using the white ground of the paper to as much effect, Raaff's images afford snapshot-like glimpses of figures and activities familiar to denizens of the city. Raaff graduated from the University of Stellenbosch and has for many years taught at the Red and Yellow School of Logic and Magic in Cape Town.

Opens: October 17
Closes: November 7

'Now and Then' documents the transition from apartheid to democracy within the changing oeuvres of the documentary photographers of this country. Many of the photographers here originally operated as subversive storytellers, letting the country (and the world) know about stories that the government would have preferred to be hidden. With the transition to democracy, the script for these social commentators has radically shifted, with their subversive stories becoming official meta-narratives. 'Now and Then' looks at this transition through the optical memories of these photographers, dividing their oeuvres very explicitly between time periods and offering the viewers a glimpse of a changing ideological viewpoint.

The photographers include David Goldblatt, George Hallett, Cedric Nunn, Gisele Wulfsohn, Guy Tillim, Eric Miller, Graeme Williams and Paul Weinberg, who also curates the show.

Opens: October 2
Closes: October 31

'Construct' travels southwards after a showing at Unisa and one in Bloemfontein. Alongside the arid documentary narrative of 'Now and Then', 'Construct' uncovers another narrative of photography in South Africa: the turn towards the image as construct. In the show, this construction occurs in a number of ways: in the strange power-play between photographer and subject, in the post-production tampering with the image and in the time delay between the taking of the photograph and its contextualisation and display.

Photographers include Roger Ballen, Lien Botha, Abrie Fourie, Dale Yudelman, Nomusa Makhuba and Jacques Coetzer. The show is curated by Heidi Erdmann.

Opens: October 2
Closes: October 31

As part of the Month of Photography, David Lurie will be exploring the excluded and exiled from the formal world economy in his exhibition at João Ferreira. The images for this exhibition are from his book, Fragments from the Edge, to be published in 2009 by David Krut Publishing. Lurie explains:

'According to the United Nations, the majority of the world's population today lives in cities. Out of a world population of 6.6 billion, 1 billion people live in slums and more than 1 billion people are informal workers, struggling to survive. These figures are staggering if you consider that 95% of the future growth of humanity will occur in cities, overwhelmingly in poor cities, and most of it in slums, creating a crisis for this global urban, informal working class - especially in the developing world - who have no formal connection to the world economy, and no chance of ever having such a connection. Inexorable forces are expelling people from rural areas, most of whom migrate to urban slums on the peripheries of cities...

'... Cape Town mirrors many of the problems facing other African cities and cities in the developing world. My book portrays a vast humanity living on the edge of Cape Town. I focus on the excluded, warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy, a habitat largely constructed out of crude brick, recycled plastic, metal sheets, cardboard, cement blocks, and scrap wood, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay. The images attempt to capture the variety of responses to this environment, from charismatic churches, to street gangs, to drug and alcohol abuse, as well as homes and small businesses.'

Internationally acclaimed, self-taught photographer David Lurie has been widely published in magazines and has exhibited in UK, Europe, the United States, Australia, South Africa and the Middle East. Lurie has received numerous awards, including 'World Understanding Award' at the 'Pictures of the Year International' (POYi) and an Arts Council of Great Britain Grant Award.

Opens: October 1
Closes: November 1

In Barbara Wildenboer's first solo exhibition she shows still life compositions that depict a variety of collected objects. She explains: 'The photographic process and use of liquid photographic emulsion is an element in most of my work and is used to underline notions of transience and the paradoxical relationship between presence and absence. The use of photographic emulsion has enabled me to juxtapose a variety of collected images onto different surfaces such as paper, stone, wood and eggshell. I make use of silver gelatin emulsion as a means to create the appearance of a photographed image fused with a material object. I have also re-photographed these printed objects and by doing so, created different timeframes to co-exist on one surface.'

Since graduating last year Wildenboer's work has been included in the Absa L'Atelier group exhibition in Johannesburg and 'Construct: Beyond the documentary photograph' at the UNISA Art Gallery in Pretoria.

Opens: September 27
Closes: October 31

'Face it', Damien Schumann's exploration of the secrets and fears of people one passes on the streets, are friends with, with whom one works, and to whom you are related, will be exhibited at the Allamans Barracks in the Castle of Good Hope. Schumann collates an intimate collection of stories portrayed through photography, text and audio. In an attempt to motivate change and create dialogue, people from every corner of society have stepped forward and (many for the first time) have revealed the stigma attached to challenges they face in life. The project serves as an example that nothing is what is seems, and drives home a strong conclusion that the key stumbling block to positive change is the way we think, and a lack of acceptance of the unknown.

To date this exhibition has been presented at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival; KZNSA Gallery, Durban; been used as a research study by UNAids and the Open Society Institute in a symposium at the Union World TB Conference. A series of talks on the methodology of the work have been presented in the USA and Mexico.

Schumann will show along with other 'young and upcoming' photographers including Candice Chaplain, Jabulani Dhlamini, Richard Mark Dobson, Christelle Duvenagem, Husain and Hasan Essop, Odendaal Esterhyse, Andrew McIlleron, Anneke Laurie, Buyaphi Precious Mdledle, Jess Meyer, Mark Oppenheimer, Malcolm Phafane, Witney M. Rasaka, Brett Rubin, Melinda Stuurman, Zandile Tisani, Michael van Rooyen, and Sean Wilson.

Opens: October 2
Closes: November 1<

'Showtime: The Acrobats' is a collection of images of Chinese acrobats photographed over a period of two months in Liaoning and Herbei Provinces, China. The photographs deliberately reference early 20th century representations of circus performers with the intention of portraying the subjects as strong individuals, avoiding the stereotypical image we usually see of Chinese acrobats.

Sara Gouveia is a freelance documentary photographer currently based in Cape Town. She has a MA in International Photojournalism, Documentary and Travel Photography from the University of Bolton, part of an international study programme with placement in Dalian, China.

Opens: October 2
Closes: October 31

CityVarsity, as part of the Month of Photography, has put together 'Beneath the Surface' a showcase of work from past and present students of the facility. The event has been organised by Jenny Altschuler and Rima Geffen of the Department of Professional Photography at the college. According to Altschuler, 'All the pieces exhibited at the exhibition express an emotional or psychological representation of the subject, rather than a documentary one, whether it be the self or the photographer's relationship to the world outside him or her self.'

Opens: October 8
Closes: October 25

'Lens Magic' showcases diverse images from Andrew Barker, Brendan Bell, Jac de Villiers, Michael Hall, Obie Oberholzer, Inge Prins and Roger Young.

Barker and Oberholzer use traditional photographic methods, relying on technique and interpretation to create images that capture the spirit of the subject. They do not manipulate their images in any way - the ambient light is their prime tool added to their particular way of perceiving the world. Oberholzer's arresting self-portrait Visual Thug illustrates his view that, given the number of images which bombard us daily, he intends his work to 'make people stop for a moment, become inquisitive and to have a second look at the image.' In contrast, works by Bell and Prins experiment with still life - Bell digitally manipulates his own photographs to create new, fantasy environments, inhabited by objects we know, many of which refer to aspects of South African history. Prins' smoke series is like a meditative poem on the passing of time and the subtlety of light, as if the smoke is photographed as still life - a moment in a fleeting existence is captured by her lens.

De Villiers is exhibiting six images called Restaurant at the end of the world, which depict the dignity of 'arid life'. Young is fascinated by rural South Africa and wherever he finds himself on his travels, he engages with people and places. His evocative images seem to summon collective memory in people whose home this land is, while providing empathetic insight for viewers to whom the scenes are foreign. Hall is interested in narrative photographic sequences, aiming to encourage his viewers to ask questions about what humans are doing to harm our planet. His Fear evokes memories of political protest and necklacing and also symbolises pollution and the degradation of the environment.

Opens: September 26
Closes: November 23

Jan-Henri Booyens' debut solo exhibition, 'The Matt Sparkle', comes to Cape Town after showing at The Premises Gallery in Johannesburg. The exhibition works are focused primarily on the study of non-objective idiosyncratic landscapes and are distinctly rendered on medium and large scale canvases. Booyens comments: 'I rely on intuition in my working process and in the act of painting itself, with the outcome seldom being predetermined.'

Booyens is originally from Durban and has exhibited on group shows and as part of Avant Car Guard on a national and international level since 2000.

Opens: October 2
Closes: November 1

Artist and printmaking lecturer at Stellenbosch University Katherine Bull explains of her new show: 'The main focus of "data capture: a muse" will be a series of live portrait drawing performances playing on the tradition of life drawing and the artist's search for a muse. This exhibition forms part of an ongoing series in which I am creating low-resolution portraits on the verge of recognition and explore the relationship between the real-time projected image that mirrors the drawing process and its output as print.
'This for me both re-focuses the emphasis onto the act of looking and drawing itself and plays with the different perspectives of the public performance as spectacle and the private moment between the artist and sitter. Through this process I continue to attempt to bring the physical and virtual into a closer dialogue. The contextual references reflected in my interrogation of the technology of drawing and print continue to include an alchemy of the art historical, the scientific and the medical in search of finding a position for the contemporary portrait as more than the sum of its parts; an exchange of energy rather than a mechanical process of representation.'

Opens: October 1
Closes: October 24

Virginia MacKenny's exhibition of paintings and etchings, 'Foam Along the Waterline', at the Irma Stern Museum engages the world of innocence lost in a time of ecological duress. Philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term 'solastalgia' to describe the effects of global warming on the mental wellbeing of Australians. Combining solacium (comfort) and algia (pain) 'solastalgia' describes 'a pining for a lost environment'. Akin to nostalgia, it reflects not on the pain felt having left a place, but the hurt experienced when one stays in a place and it irreparably changes around one.

In MacKenny's work the constraint of nature features, but always in an understated manner. Dominated by single colour fields the paintings provide a terrain where large and small events gain equal prominence. Quotidian objects such as a glass of water, Christmas trees, flowers and ice lollies are juxtaposed with images of a less settling nature including a wreck off the West Coast, a coelacanth from the British Natural History Museum, a Red Shift Survey image of the known universe and an aerial view of the disintegration of the ice shelf of the Bering Straits. Diagrammatic and illusionistic renderings combine in the work to generate spatial discontinuities that disrupt the expected comfort of familiar objects.

Mixing reverence, nostalgia, irony and a sense of wonder, the work encourages viewers to make their own connections and reflections on a planet changing irrevocably.

MacKenny, a Volkskas award winner and Ampersand recipient, has work in a number of public collections and is Senior Lecturer in Painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art.

Opens: 23 September
Closes: 11 October

In 'Caveman Spaceman', Nigel Mullins' new show, he extends the ideas surrounding the transience of life that he began to explore in his previous show 'Earthlings' (2006). There, the predominant imagery was of bleak and endless landscapes inhabited by fleeting and rather manic beings. In 'Caveman Spaceman', however, Mullins introduces a cooler, more objective set of images. He turns his considerable painting facility to a photographic rendering of sights which, through over familiarity, we cease to see: satellite dishes on chimneys, flowers, semi-industrial landscapes. These become objects of contemplation.

In 1997 Mullins won the first prize at the Royal Overseas League 14th Annual Open Exhibition in London. This was followed by 'Continuum', his second one-man show in London. This show dealt with dislocation in a particularly South African context. He began the millennium as a nominee for the Daimler Chrysler Award for Contemporary South African Art 2000, and later in the year won a merit prize at the Absa L'Atelier 2000.

Opens: September 23
Closes: October 24

This will be Searle's fourth solo exhibition at Michael Stevenson, following 'Crush' in 2006, 'About to forget' in 2005, and 'Vapour' in 2004. As in all these previous shows, Searle's work draws on the particularities of her own cultural heritage, invoking the rituals and traditions that persist through generations and continue to bind communities together long after the circumstances of their genesis have passed or been forgotten. Yet the lyrical, abstracted nature of her visual imagery ensures that her work transcends the specific and extends to global themes such as belonging and displacement, nationalism and xenophobia.

Searle's latest video, Alibama, premiered at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London in May 2008 as part of the South African exhibition 'Home Lands - Land Marks'. It takes as its central motif the traditional and widely known Cape song, 'Daar Kom die Alibama', which is thought to refer to the sighting of the Confederate ship, the Alabama, in Table Bay in 1863. Footage of the sun setting over the harbour, accompanied by the singing of a Cape Malay choir, is disrupted as the camera pans over Robben Island and the noon gun fires its daily blast - powerful signifiers of time and place, both historical and contemporary. The film then shifts to a more intimate register, its soundtrack the artist teaching the song to her young son, who sings along until he falls asleep, while black streamers bleed colour into water surrounding a red paper boat.

Searle will also show other new work including Mute, where she responds emotively to the xenophobic violence wracking the country, and Spirit of '76, a work commissioned for an exhibition in Philadelphia in 2007 that, through its title, draws links between the signing of the US Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Soweto Uprising in 1976.

Since her solo show here in 2006, Searle has had survey exhibitions at Johannesburg Art Gallery (2006) and the Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida (2006), travelling to the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois (2007). She was one of three artists selected for the annual New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007). Her work has featured on numerous group exhibitions in the past year, including 'Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body' at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, USA; 'Apartheid: The South African Mirror' at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania, Barcelona; and 'Global Feminisms' at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Opens: September 4
Closes: October 11

This is Youssef Nabil's second showing at Michael Stevenson, following 'Sleep in My Arms' in 2007. The exhibition will bring together hand-coloured photographs of celebrities and friends, self-portraits, and scenes staged over the past 15 years. Nabil was born in 1972 in Cairo where he studied literature and began producing his photographs while still living there. In this time he took many glamorous portraits of singers and stars such as Natacha Atlas, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssra and legendary belly-dancer Fifi Abdou. He later moved to Paris and New York, where he has continued to produce haunting self-portraits that reflect his dislocated life away from Egypt, as well as portraits of fellow artists, many of them from the Arab world, including Ghada Amer, Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, Tracey Emin and Zaha Hadid.

In his photographs, his preoccupations with fame, sex, loneliness and death are immediately apparent. Many of the famous sitters are photographed asleep, in the realms of dreams and rest, far from their public personae. Or Nabil photographs them in a glamorous manner befitting their fame, often set against a pale blue background, his gentle hand-colouring removing the blemishes of reality. In his staged photographs he creates scenes that recall Arabic cinema of the 1950s where the heroes and stars act out the broken dreams of love, life and sex. Interspersed throughout the series are self-portraits in liminal spaces on the edge of consciousness where he is seemingly unaware of the presence of the camera.

Nabil's first collection of photographs was published by Autograph ABP, London, and Michael Stevenson in 2007. He was awarded the Seydou Keita Prize for portraiture at the 2003 Biennial of African Photography in Bamako, Mali. He has previous had solo exhibitions at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France, in 2003; the Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, in 2001; and the Third Line Gallery in Dubai in 2007. His work has featured on numerous curated exhibitions including, in 2008, 'Far from Home' at the North Carolina Museum of Art; and, in 2006, 'Arabiske Blikke' at the GL Strand Museum in Copenhagen; 'Word into Art' at the British Museum, London; and 'Nineteen Views: Contemporary Arab Photography' at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporõneo, Seville, Spain.

Opens: September 4
Closes: October 11

In celebrating the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Sanlam in 1918, the Sanlam Art Collection is presenting an exhibition highlighting the last ten years of acquisitions. Since 1997 Sanlam has added some 544 works by South African artists to its collection begun in 1965.

In keeping with the objective of compiling a representative collection of South African art, the exhibition of 83 works from the late 19th century to the present is a an eclectic mixture of past and present. As curator of the Collection, Stefan Hundt states: 'The exhibition attempts within in the limitations of the space available to present some of the most interesting works acquired over the last ten years. In the context of considerable demand for works by famous "Old Masters" on one hand and cutting-edge contemporary works on the other, some of the artists represented on this exhibition have almost been forgotten. I hope that to some degree this exhibition will re-introduce art lovers to the rich diversity that has made up South African art over the last century.'

Works on display range from a Frans Oerder watercolour (1899) depicting an interior to a 1970s watercolour of a view of Hout Bay by Durant Sihlali; and a beautiful almost surrealist landscape by Ricky Dyaloyi; sculptures by Johannes Maswanganyi, Edoardo Villa and Philipps Kolbe, to the gritty installations of Jan van der Merwe, Gavin Younge and Leora Faber.

Opens: August 7
Closes: January 16, 2009

'Collection 10' is a group exhibition showcasing previous and recent works by 20 contemporary artists selected by the gallery. Showcasing diverse artistic intentions and visual explorations, the exhibition presents Johann Louw, Sam Nhlengethwa, Kay Hassan, Anton Karstel, Wayne Barker, Beezy Bailey, Willie Bester, David Koloane, Peter Clarke, Arlene Amaler-Raviv, Philip Badenhorst, Ricky Burnett, Jake Aikman, Gail Catlin, Matthew Hindley, Elizabeth Gunter, André Naudé, Ndikumbule Ngqinambi and Francois van Reenen. SMAC also represents Italian artist Jonathan Guaitamacchi. The exhibition is designed to give new insights into current trends.

Opens: September 18
Closes: October 31