Zwelethu Mthethwa

Listings(s)

Editions for ArtThrob Print Exhibition

Guy Tillim, Jane Alexander, Lisa Brice, Peet Pienaar, David Goldblatt, Penny Siopis, Hentie van der Merwe, Robert Hodgins, Tracey Rose, Mikhael Subotzky, William Kentridge, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at South African Print Gallery

Editions for ArtThrob is pleased to announce an exhibition of all artist prints in our collection at the South African Print Gallery in Woodstock, Cape Town. You are cordially invited to attend the opening finger lunch at 11:30am on Saturday the 29th of August, where all available prints will be for sale.

Editions for ArtThrob, in collaboration with South Africa’s leading artists, has developed a series of specially-commissioned prints; these are sold to cover the running costs of the ArtThrob website. ArtThrob is South Africa’s leading website on contemporary art, and is an important point of reference worldwide for curators, dealers and those interested in South African art.

Artists who have participated in the in the print program include William Kentridge, Penny Siopis, Robert Hodgins, Jane Alexander, Willem Boshoff, Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko, David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim, Lisa Brice, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Mikhael Subotzky, Peet Pienaar, Hentie van der Merwe and Tracey Rose.

In addition, we will be launching a brand new print by Robert Hodgins. Hot off the presses at Mark Attwood’s studio, the image will be available for preview the at exhibition opening. 

Please contact Natasha Norman from ArtThrob for online orders or Gabriel Clark-Brown at the SA Print Gallery for more information.

29 August 2009 - 28 September 2009

'Inner Views'

Zwelethu Mthethwa at Studio Museum Harlem

The first extensive exhibition of Zwelethu Mthethwa's work in New York, 'Inner Views' brings together three distinct series. 'Interiors' and 'Empty Beds' document the domestic lives of migrant workers around Johannesburg, while 'Common Ground' focuses on the shared experience of natural disasters in urban areas, featuring houses in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and on the outskirts of Cape Town after wildfires.

15 July 2010 - 24 October 2010

'Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa since 1950'

Sue Williamson, David Goldblatt, Roger Ballen, Santu Mofokeng, Jurgen Schadeberg, Tracey Rose, William Kentridge, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

An exhibition that considers photography’s role in South Africa’s composite transformation, Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa since 1950 includes 18 artists who span four generations, including Jürgen Schadeberg, Santu Mofokeng, Andrew Tshabangu, David Goldblatt, Sue Williamson, Thando Mama, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Nontsikelelo Veleko and William Kentridge.

The exhibition's eight sections highlight the ways that these artists have addressed South African culture from various perspectives, and their increased presence in the global art world since 1994. 'The social and political transformation of South Africa is one of the most remarkable stories of the second half of the twentieth century,' says Alex Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. 'To engage with it directly through the eyes of those who experienced and documented the anguish, turmoil and elation of the period is both uplifting and thought-provoking.'

21 August 2010 - 24 October 2010

'Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity'

Jo Ractliffe, Guy Tillim, Kay Hassan, Berni Searle, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Hentie van der Merwe, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Candice Breitz, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at The Walther Collection

The Walther Collection opens to the public on June 17, 2010 with 'Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity', introducing works from its African collection. Under the curatorial direction of Okwui Enwezor, the exhibition comprises a series of four projects filling all nine galleries in the three buildings of the new exhibition space in Burlafingen near Ulm, Southern Germany. The exhibition integrates the work of three generations of African artists and photographers with that of modern and contemporary German photography. This combination of African and German works will serve as a model for the kind of curatorial process that animates the character of the collecting program.

Works in the collection include those by Berni Searle, Candice Brietz, Nontsikelelo Veleko, Zanele Muholi, Hentie van der Merwe, David Goldblatt, Kay Hassan, Pieter Hugo, Guy Tillim, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Santu Mofokeng and Jo Ractliffe.

17 June 2010 - 17 October 2010

Paris Photo

Jodi Bieber, Joel Andrianomearisoa, Billy Monk, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Andrew Tshabangu, Cedric Nunn, Pieter Hugo, Mikhael Subotzky, Viviane Sassen, Moshekwa Langa, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at Grand Palais

The annual Paris Photo will celebrate its 15th anniversary at the Grand Palais, featuring 117 galleries from some 23 countries presenting the best of 19th century, modern and contemporary photography in the heart of the French capital. This year's special focus is on African photography from Bamako to Cape Town, with several South African artists in the spotlight in the main venue as well as on other shows around the city (such as the skyroof of the Gare du Nord station). South African galleries  STEVENSON, Goodman Gallery, Bailey Seippel, and Gallery MOMO will be exhibiting.

10 November 2011 - 13 November 2011

'Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive'

Santu Mofokeng, Andrew Putter, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zanele Muholi, Candice Breitz and Zwelethu Mthethwa at The Walther Collection Project Space

Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive

A three-part exhibition series on photography from Southern Africa, Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive presents rarely before seen portraits, albums, cartes de visite, and books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The exhibitions stage a dialogue between ethnographic visions and contemporary engagements with archival imagery and feature recent work African and African American artists. Distance and Desire offers new perspectives on the archive, reimagining its poetic and political dimensions, its diverse histories, and its changing meanings. The series is curated by Tamar Garb.

Exhibitions

The Walther Collection Project Space, New York Part I: Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-Cronin September 13 - November 17, 2012

The opening exhibition juxtaposes A.M. Duggan-Cronin's 'The Bantu Tribes of South Africa' with Santu Mofokeng's 'The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950.' Duggan-Cronin's eleven-volume study, published between 1928-1954, is renowned and contested for preserving an ethnographic vision of African heritage. In contrast, 'The Black Photo Album,' created in 1997 by contemporary South African artist Santu Mofokeng, is an archive of pictures - commissioned by black South Africans in the early twentieth century - and stories about the subjects, challenging fixed ideas of the "native type" most often associated with photographic representations of Africans.

Gallery Talks:

Jennifer Bajorek on Santu Mofokeng September 25, 2012 at 7pm

Jennifer Bajorek is a lecturer in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University.??John Peffer on Portraiture in South Africa ?October 23, 2012 at 7pm ?John Peffer is Associate Professor of Contemporary and Nonwestern Art History at Ramapo College.

Part II: Contemporary Reconfigurations

November 30, 2012 - March 9, 2013

This exhibition centers on photography and video art by contemporary African and African American artists who engage critically with the ethnographic archive by parodying, replaying, exposing, and dialoguing with its pictorial tropes and traditions. A stereotype or ethnographic vision in one era may provide material for an irreverent reworking, satirical performance, or elegiac reenactment in another. Addressing how the archive - broadly understood as an accumulation of representations, images and objects - figures in the practices of contemporary artists in Africa, the exhibition features recent work by Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, Samuel Fosso, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Andrew Putter, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Gallery Talk:

Awam Amkpa on Contemporary African Photography February 12, 2013 at 7pm

Awam Amkpa is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

Part III: Poetics and Politics March

22 - May 18, 2013

A presentation of vintage portraits, books, albums, postcards, and cartes de visite, this exhibition reveals the complexity of the African archive, showing works produced in the 1870s to the early twentieth century. Focusing on the pictorial languages deployed by photographers and the contexts in which images are made to circulate, both historically and today, these portraits and figure studies depict Africans predominantly through the filters of European cameras and mentalities. The images make visible both the ideological frameworks that prevailed during the colonial period in South Africa as well as the extraordinary skill of photographers working in the studio and the landscape.

Gallery Talks:

Tamar Garb on 'Distance and Desire' March 23, 2013 at 3pm

Tamar Garb is the Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London.

Hlonipha Mokoena and Cheryl Finley in conversation on The South African Photo Album April 9, 2013 at 7pm

Hlonipha Mokoena is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Cheryl Finley is Associate Professor of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University.

Symposium Encounters with the African Archive

November 10, 2012, 10am - 5pm

New York University, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East

Coinciding with the exhibition series, The Walther Collection, in collaboration with New York University and University College London, will present a symposium to explore issues raised by the collection's archive of African photography. This one-day event brings together leading international scholars to exchange, debate and open up the categories often used to describe historic photographs of Africans: colonial, ethnographic, anthropological, artistic. The symposium will provide a space for rethinking the African archive in relation to the concerns of contemporary critics and artists. Participants include Elizabeth Edwards (Durham University), Tamar Garb (University College London), Christraud Geary (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Michael Godby (University of Cape Town), Erin Haney (George Washington University), Salah Hassan (Cornell University), Hlonipha Mokoena (Columbia University), Riason Naidoo (South African National Gallery), Gabi Ncobo (University of the Witswatersrand), Chika Okeke-Agulu (Princeton University), John Peffer (Ramapo College), and Deborah Willis (New York University).

Free and open to the public. To register, email invitation@walthercollection.com.

Catalogue

The exhibition program will be accompanied by the publication of a major scholarly catalogue, 'Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive', edited by Tamar Garb and Artur Walther. Released in March 2013 to coincide with the opening of "Poetics and Politics," the catalogue, co-published with Steidl, will include all exhibited visual material as well as new research generated by the symposium's debate and discussion.

Exhibition

The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany

Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive June 8, 2013 - May 18, 2014

The culmination of the exhibition series will be an expanded presentation of Parts I, II, and III of 'Distance and Desire' at The Walther Collection's museum campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany. For the first time the exhibition will be shown in its entirety, complete with additional contemporary works that will broaden the dialogues and juxtapositions staged in New York.

13 September 2012 - 17 May 2015

'The Progress of Love'

Zanele Muholi, Kendell Geers and Zwelethu Mthethwa at The Menil Collection

Numerous scholars have addressed the ways media, technology, and capitalism have affected Western notions of love over the last few centuries. Little attention, however, has been paid to the impact of these forces on the conception of love in Africa, or even to the subject itself. 'The Progress of Love' explores romantic love, self-love, friendship, familial affect, love of one’s country, and other bonds in and around the continent. Though the exhibition is weighted towards art produced specifically about love in Africa, works that might otherwise be considered more “Western” in orientation are included as well, calling attention to the global exchange through which such concepts develop, and to both the shared and distinct aspects of the experience of love.

Bringing together the work of over twenty artists, and ranging in media from painting and photography to installation, video, and performance, 'The Progress of Love' considers how technology, economic systems, and other forces have shaped–and continue to shape–ideas about love and their expression. In doing so, the exhibition seeks to ask what part of love is universal? What part is timeless and what is a cultural construct?

Yinka Shonibare’s The Swing, 2001, calls attention to the way Western notions of romantic heterosexual, monogamous love were brought into being through an increasingly globalized economy and reproductive technologies such as the printing press. Mounir Fatmi’s Connections (Conspiracy), 2008, an installation of seminal Western and Arabic books wired together, speaks to the international circuits through which love travels, and of the transformative, sometimes even explosive, effects of the dissemination of religious and philosophical texts on ideas of the self and other. Artists such as Zoulikha Bouabdellah and Kendell Geers consider the effects of language, how one’s primary or secondary tongue affects the way one conceives of this dyad, and raise questions about the ability to be understood across a linguistic or cultural gap.

While many works in the show explicitly address the subject of love, others can be understood more indirectly as acts of love in their creation or in the experience they provide. Created specifically for this exhibition, in Romuald Hazoumé’s new project the artist has founded a nongovernmental organization based in Cotonou, Benin, and is inviting his fellow Beninois to express love for self and others by making contributions to Westerners in hopes of helping them live better lives. In so doing, he offers a critical reevaluation of charity and the intersections between love and money.

Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and a rich program of related events, The Progress of Love examines the varied and ever-changing conceptions of love, pointing to the intercultural currents that inform them and in which they, in turn, inform. The project is co-organized by Kristina Van Dyke, former curator for collections and research at the Menil Collection, and Bisi Silva, director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos. 'The Progress of Love' exhibition will be mounted simultaneously at both venues and also at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis. A series of web-format exchanges further links the two incarnations.

'The Progress of Love' is a collaborative project between The Menil Collection, Houston, Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA, Lagos), and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis.

02 December 2012 - 17 March 2013