blank projects
06.05 - 18.06.2023
While blank’s 10 year anniversary show has no explicit uniting theme beyond this temporal marker, the allusion to time as a container becomes a thematic principle: the work featured, much of it process-based, or ostensibly secondary to other work, in many ways reflects the gallery’s genesis as a project space. The show is less of a survey and more a collection of studio debris and peripheral objects that orbit the more established work of each artist. The material and chromatic coincidences between works do a lot of the heavy lifting of thematic coherence: grayscale, scratchy mark-making, unvarnished wood, visible hardware, cardboard, unprimed canvas and natural clay are characteristic of blank’s shows, each its own sort of visual shorthand for process-based work.
The first artworks visible upon entry to blank – Kyle Morland’s Various Line Profiles made with Ruler (2013) and donna Kukama’s (a page from ‘Chapter C: The Genealogy of Pain’) (2016-2019) – both approach metalwork as a supplementary practice to the more ephemeral drawing, in Morland’s case, and performance, in Kukama’s, whose plasma cut steel numbers function as sculptural documentation of her 2016 performance in São Paulo, during which she counted the years of Brazil’s colonial occupation. Through this explicit concretisation of colonialism’s slow violence, in the form of speech and sculpture, she presents it as a kind of ‘hyperobject’. Kukama’s overhead projector, placed on the other side of the room, displays a drawing made during this same performance, but in its use of schoolroom technology refers to institutional spaces of colonial discipline. This is echoed by Kemang Wa Lehulere’s Library 13 (2021), a sculpture fashioned from repurposed school desks which draws visually and conceptually from Dogon cosmology and architectural aesthetics, indicating an investment in dismantling colonial education systems through African visual and spiritual practices.
donna Kukama, remnant from Chapter C: The Genealogy of Pain, 2016 (left) and Kemang Wa Lehulere, Library 13, 2021 (right). Courtesy of blank projects.
While works like Jared Ginsburg’s cardboard Air Vent (2023) and James Webb’s Untitled (2006) – an unassuming light fixture only activated at night after the gallery has closed – speak to the architecture of the building itself, ideas of interiority conceptually underpin several works. Zoë Paul’s iii (2016), which is displayed furthest from the entrance, is constructed using wool and an abandoned fridge grate. It references not only the interior of the home, but the specificity of food storage and its relation to the communal act of eating. Lerato Shadi’s video Matsogo (2013) is shown opposite iii, extending the motif of food. The video depicts Shadi’s hands tearing apart and reconstituting a piece of cake, referring both to internal bodily processes of digestion, and the ways in which ideas are metabolised through de- and reconstruction – reflecting the show’s focus on processes of production.
Igshaan Adams’ works engage ideas of home, faith, gender, class and personal history through their materiality. A white lacework fez pinned to the inside of a woven hijab shaper explores notions of gender duality in Islam, while Carry (2018) evokes a body of tangled cotton twine, its skeletal structure of garden and household objects a reference to Adams’ own childhood. Listen (2013), a delicate self-portrait made by burning a roll of found wallpaper with a heat gun, engages a tension between public and private space both in its repurposing of someone else’s home waste, and in the odd vulnerability of turning oneself outwards through self-portraiture.
Sabelo Mlangeni, Inkunzi emdwayidwa, 2016. Courtesy of blank projects.
While bodies and bodily inferences are present in a number of works, there is no place in which these images do not feel somewhat incomplete, including Sabelo Mlangeni’s candid black and white photographs of strange, spectral group scenes. In Inkunzi emdwayidwa (2016), the central figure’s head is obscured by an object partially blocking the lens. A group of people sit at this figure’s feet and gaze up, the reflection of the camera’s flash glowing in their eyes. Both of Mlangeni’s photographs are from the end of the roll of film, and On a Saturday Night with Lil B, Ola,Tonnex and Sodiq (2019) bears the ragged edge of the film’s light sensitive surface, again restricting what is visible to the viewer. In the next room, Ginsberg’s monoprints, A series of personal encounters in plaster and cardboard 1-4 (2023) parallel Mlangeni thematically with their insinuated, ghostly bodies, partially concealed by DIY cardboard frames.
In Gregory Olympio’s painting Petit portrait, femme avec foulard (2020), it is the background information that is missing. Olympio’s titular femme hovers in flat blue space, while opposite the painting her seat is alluded to by Gerda Scheepers’ Sitting White (2016), a spindly blonde wood chair frame over which the suggestion of a garment – and by extension a body – is stretched in white cotton knit. Both works imply architectures of bodily support and comfort, or a lack thereof, and both speak to the interior space of the artist’s studio – the site of private thought, experimentation, and ideas both realised and curtailed or abandoned.
The studio as an active, alive space is reflected in Ginsburg’s kinetic Ladder and white line (2012), Morland’s various maquettes on shelf (2009-2018) and Wa Lehulere’s various handmade ceramics (2022-2023). The latter two are installed in a fittingly unassuming way, Morland’s maquettes evoking a workshop toolbox or shelf of kitchen implements, and Wa Lehulere’s ceramics a collection of household vessels, loosely grouped on the gallery floor.
Kemang Wa Lehulere, Various handmade ceramics, 2022– 2023. Courtesy of blank projects.
The typographic choices made in the title of the exhibition are intentionally odd, foregoing conventional numbering for an upright slash and the letter ‘O’. It reads as the name Io – the wandering goddess from Greek mythology, after whom the fifth moon of Jupiter is named – or in some symbolic registers, the signs for open and closed electrical currents. In Lacanian psychoanalytic shorthand, the vertical line is the ‘I’ and the circle the ‘Other’: the realisation of this dichotomy constitutes the subject’s first experience of loss, while the yearning for reunion with the Other is what undergirds desire. What these multiple readings demonstrate is that a lack of context can sometimes be capacious, if one is willing to play. Indulging this impulse means practising a kind of looking that is proprioceptive, allowing for visual footnotes to emerge as narrative guides.
This shift of focus from finished product to the shakier, less conclusive margins of process and accident emphasises the often unseen labour of art which is ultimately the foundation of any project space or gallery – that work that is imperfect, unfinished, sometimes obscure; that work that takes time.
Installation view: IO, 2023. Courtesy of blank projects.
