Current Review(s)
Black: the antithesis of the fraudulent sensuality of culture's façade. An experiment in voluntary asceticism.
Liza Grobler, Mary Wafer, Hentie van der Merwe, Zander Blom, Kathryn Smith and Nomthunzi Mashalaba at blank projectsFor blank’s last show in their Buitengracht Street space, the walls have been painted black. Ditto the floors and ceiling, and what with the blistering spotlights burning down from above, it’s a rather uncomfortable space to find oneself in. Standing on the floor in one corner a doll-sized figure captures the mood: she’s wreathed in layers of black and brown tights, unable to see out, yet seems to be gazing up at a sickle moon through a little jail window, drawn on the black wall with white chalk. This playful chalk drawing effectively turns the whole gallery into a jail; a touch of magical realism not unlike that of Robin Rhode.
For the show, curators Jonathan Garnham and Pierre Fouché challenged artists to undertake a vow of ‘voluntary asceticism’, producing work in black only. Being contrary by nature however, several of the artists took this as something of a challenge and Liza Grobler's Little White Lies is not the only work which shows signs of mutiny.
05 August 2009 - 25 August 2009
Mamiya
Nomthunzi Mashalaba at blank projects
‘Mamiya’ is the clan name of Nomthunzi Mashalaba’s mother. The word begins with a Nguni feminine prefix, ‘ma’, which is fixed to its root ‘Miya’: the masculine figure of the clan. In simple, perhaps biblical terms, woman is the duplicate of the ‘original’ – the man. ‘Mamiya’ also happens to be the title of the mixed media drawings on fabric and diary sketches of Mashalaba’s current exhibition at blank projects. The works on display are not necessarily a prospectus on the artist’s mother; rather they could be read as reflections, memories and testaments which invoke and embody ‘Mamiya’. The exhibition’s apparition appears and disappears, through textual reincarnations or images – tattered, abstracted. Mashalaba depicts partial subjects whose identities are implied and presents textual narratives, the messages of which suffer brutal erasures. The artist seems caught in a dilemma between invitation and rejection. We as the viewers, are invited into her personal space replete with stories of females that make up her life. Simultaneously however, Mashalaba’s abstractions deny us that very possibility. Swinging between openness and confidentiality, the artist implicates both the viewer and the work itself in the predicament of remembrance and what the exhibition text calls ‘the predicament of motherhood’.
17 May 2012 - 09 June 2012
Listings(s)
Black: the antithesis of the fraudulent sensuality of culture's façade. An experiment in voluntary asceticism.
Liza Grobler, Mary Wafer, Hentie van der Merwe, Zander Blom, Kathryn Smith and Nomthunzi Mashalaba at blank projectsInspired by the eternal-, yet sensual darkness of Adorno's observations on aesthetics & Anaïs Nin's multiplicative expansionist core, blank has decided to invite artists to engage in an experiment of voluntary asceticism, to produce an intimate work in which, formally, colour is reduced to black. Zander Blom, Liza Grobler, Nomthunzi Mashalaba, Kathryn Smith, Michael Taylor, Hentie van der Merwe and Mary Wafer are participating in this black-cube group exhibition.
05 August 2009 - 25 August 2009
