The Standard Bank Art Lab, newly opened at Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton, is set to reimagine how art can intersect with everyday life. In conversation with Dr. Same Mdluli, the curator overseeing the new project, several key themes emerge. These illuminate the challenges and opportunities facing institutional art patronage and access today, which the Lab aims to address, at least partially.
The Lab’s inaugural exhibition, ‘It’s Woven Into Who We Are,’ features works from the Standard Bank African Art Collection as well as tapestries loaned from the William Kentridge and Stephens Tapestry Studios, and includes artists such as Penny Siopis, Gladys Xaba, and the Katlehong Community Centre. The title of the exhibition draws on textiles as a medium, while also gesturing to the Lab’s mission of threading connections between art and life and its attempts to bring together artistic disciplines, diverse audiences, historical legacies and contemporary innovations. What I appreciate most is the possibility to experience historical works, framed within their art historical context, in a shopping centre.
‘It’s Woven Into Who We Are‘ exhibition at The Standard Bank Art Lab in Johannesburg.
Textiles, ofcourse, are enjoying a lot of airplay and engagement in the art world at the moment, but Mdluli points me to the fact that tapestries in particular connect to Standard Bank’s founding in the mid-19th century. The bank was established in the Cape Colony when wool became the region’s most important export commodity. Standard Bank facilitated the financing of sheep farming operations, provided credit for wool purchases, and handled international transactions in exporting wool to British textile mills. This past, for me, points to the many ways in which it is impossible to detangle intricate histories of industry and coloniality from changes in culture.
Dr. Mdluli explains that the decision to locate the Art Lab within a shopping centre serves a dual purpose. The pragmatic element is Standard Bank’s relationship with Liberty Two Degrees, which manages Nelson Mandela Square, which created synergies between different arms of the financial institution. More significantly, the location represents a deliberate attempt to address the persistent challenge of a limited culture of visiting galleries. The hope is that the Lab will intercept audiences who might otherwise not encounter contemporary art in their day-to-day. Mdluli sees this as one of many ways to address the cultural proximity problem, how traditional art spaces often feel distant, exclusionary and removed from many people’s lived experiences. But ofcourse, one would need to consider whether the average shopper at Nelson Mandela Square intersects or diverges from audiences who are already well-versed and comfortable with gallery-going culture.
‘It’s Woven Into Who We Are‘ exhibition at The Standard Bank Art Lab in Johannesburg.
I wondered about the designation of the space as a “Lab”, thinking of a lab as a space where experiments or research take place, rather than simply an extension of the Standard Bank Gallery in downtown Johannesburg. Dr. Mdluli emphasises that the name captures the intention to create a much more layered experience, reflecting the reality that often contemporary artists do not work linearly, with increasing collaboration across disciplines becoming the norm. She tells me that this interdisciplinary approach will manifest itself in the Lab’s programming, which actively encourages collaborations between visual artists, poets, musicians, and dancers. She sees rigid disciplinary boundaries as artificial constraints to making and engaging work. The Lab then becomes a site for these experimental approaches, suggesting that the space itself might generate new forms of artistic expression. Yet the emphasis on experimentation and fluidity might raise questions about curatorial coherence.
My conversation with Dr Mdluli brought to mind the complex economic realities facing corporate art collections more broadly – how they are built, developed and engaged with to keep them from being static and irrelevant, particularly at a time when art is increasingly seen as a luxury. I couldn’t help but wonder about the role and impact of corporate collections today. It seems clear that our ecosystem needs them. It seems clear, too, that they are not growing at a fast enough rate to hold the ever-expanding artistic production (if they are growing at all). What isn’t clear is what the model of a committed sustainable institutional patronage would look like today.
