Archive: Issue No. 133, September 2008

7.09.08 'Production Marks: Geometry, Psychology and the Electronic Age' at the Goethe-Institut
7.09.08 Tom Mulcaire at the Goodman Gallery
7.09.08 Lawrence Lemaoana at Art Extra
7.09.08 'Modern Fabrics' at the Bag Factory
7.09.08 'Drawing Show' at David Krut Projects
7.09.08 Sharlene Khan at Gallery Momo
7.09.08 Chris Diedericks at Fried Contemporary
7.09.08 Lee-At Meyerov 'Traces of Memory' at Artspace Gallery

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 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 'The Winter Show' at Afronova

6.07.08 Kay Hassan at the Johannesburg Art Gallery

Commissioned by and first presented at the National Arts Festival (Grahamstown, 2008) and then travelling to the KZNSA Gallery in Durban, 'Production Marks: Geometry, Psychology and the Electronic Age' is now being shown at the Goëthe Institute in Johannesburg.

'Production Marks' examines how artists use the exactitude of mathematics to create chaos and, from that chaos, create new forms. Curator Brenton Maart (KZNSA Gallery, Durban) has selected the work of Zander Blom, Marco Cianfanelli, Paul Edmunds, Retha Erasmus, Stephen Hobbs, Doung Anwar Jahangeer and Andrew Verster to demonstrate that we need not lament the systematic collapse of structure. Instead, the exhibition illustrates that entropy - the physical principle of constant collapse - provides the building blocks for assembly into new forms. It is this celebration of the unstable that ultimately allows for continual and creative construction. In essence, the exhibition is an acknowledgement of inevitable anarchy, and a celebration of the new forms that grow from the rubble.

Opens: September 1
Closes: September 25

Thomas Mulcaire was involved with the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale and since settling in Brazil, has co-curated the Bienal de São Paulo. This exhibition is his first at the Goodman, and also his first one-person exhibition in South Africa.

Opens: September 13
Closes: October 4

In 'Fortune Telling in Black, Red and White' Lawrence Lemaoana looks at the role of the mass media and its relationship to the broad populous in a series of textile constructions. Lemaoana reinterprets and adjusts news headlines, and liberation cries such as 'Power to the people', which now carries the threat of violence as the masses grow tired of inadequate and corrupt leadership.

Lemaoana explains his particular use of fabric as follows: 'Kanga fabrics (made infamous during the Zuma rape trial) are used extensively in my work. Designed in the Netherlands, manufactured in the East, and brought to South Africa to be sold in markets and bazaars, the journey of the fabrics speaks of the idiosyncrasies and trade imbalances of globalisation. The textiles themselves though have a wholly different life in South Africa - they are regarded as significant markers of spiritual healing, imbued with great religious and spiritual power, used by divinators and fortune-tellers.'

Opens: September 25
Closes: October 29

'Modern fabrics: Urban culture and artists connected to the city landscape' considers the idea of urban fabric, using the metaphor of cloth to stand for the ever evolving visual language that is the city. For the curator Nontobeko Ntombela, the term 'modern fabrics' also refers particularly to young artists.

'Modern fabrics' consists of work by Zama Dunywa, Bongi Bengu, Yvette Dunn, Lawrence Lamoana, Nothando Mkhize, Rike Sitas, Bronwen Vaughan-Evans, Mlu Zondi, Mary Sibande, Sharlene Khan, Dineo Bopape, Thando Mama and Mfundo Xaba.

Opens: September 22
Closes: October 8

'Drawing Show' is curated by Michael MacGarry and features new artwork by 12 graphic designers and illustrators.

MacGarry takes the act of drawing as a 'common nexus point for all creative visual output' and focuses this show on graphic designers and illustrators who blur the line between contemporary visual art, graphic design and illustration. The curator asked each designer, design company or illustrator to produce a series of two limited-edition A1 artworks either according to several prescribed themes, or relating to ongoing concerns in their personal projects.

Scott Robertson (AKA Dirty Sanchez), disturbance, Garth Walker, Joh Del, Jason Bronkhorst, Carina Comrie, Peet Pienaar, Olivier Schildt, Johnny Kotze, Givan Lütz and the am i collective contribute to the show.

Opens: September 10
Closes: October 11

'[Small]Poison' is an exhibition of approximately 100 miniatures. Diedericks notes that small works are often overlooked, but refers to Lucian Freud's tiny painting of the Queen of England, as an example of a small work that packs a punch, and he hopes to achieve the same exactitude with this show.

Diedericks explains his methodology as follows: 'I am trying to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable driving forces of postmodern consciousness - the desire for Otherness and the fear of losing autonomy. Herein lies the connection between my seemingly random imagery - homoeroticism, the male body under a microscope, borrowed images from contemporary culture, digital images and autobiographical imagery. I am always aiming to juggle these disparate images to make them correspond without collapsing into one particular style, mode of thought, emotion, or art-historical reference. Through the juxtaposition of self and nature I am attempting to create a new language of images appropriate to the psychological realities of our age'.

Opens: September 7
Closes: September 27

In 'What I look like, What I feel like' Sharlene Khan moves away from her from her usual modus operandi, working in photography and imaging herself in various guises. The series of twin format photographs features seemingly paradoxical images of self.

According to Khan, 'What I look like, What I feel like' is an understanding of self, within, and in contrast to, what a particular race, class, gender, level of education, religion and sexuality implies within our society.

Opens: September 4
Closes: September 29

Young Johannesburg-based artist Lee-At Meyerov presents her first solo exhibition, ‘Traces of Memory’, at Artspace gallery in from September 10.

Meyerov’s work is installation-based, which considers the interplay between the ephemerality and fragility of memory and the physicality of material. Created solely from masking tape, each work functions as an imaginary structure, whose properties and meaning are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, inherently recognizable yet somehow foreign.

The show’s central installation is made up of several masking tape works enclosed in Perspex, suspended from the ceiling one behind the other, creating a sense of depth and texture.

Here, through a cumulative labour intensive process, the material itself physically metamorphizes from a utilitarian object into an ambiguous substance suggestive of an organic, ‘live’ structure, mimicking some sort of organic, bodily process. These hybrid-like forms evoke familiar associations of fossilized remains, fragmented corporeal relics, imaginary topologies or tiny organisms, seemingly transient and fluid while trapped within themselves and the confines of their own display.

Meyerov graduated with a B.A. Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2003 and a M.A Fine Art from the same University in 2007. She is a part time lecturer at the University of Johannesburg’s Fine Art Department, teaching Visual Studies, and works at the university’s Research Centre.

Opens: September 10
Closes: September 27

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

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

'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

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