Donderdag 19 Januari 2012
Dogon
Het verhaal van de Dogon cultuur uit Mali gaat terug naar de 10e eeuw. De bezoeker krijgt een introductie op de geschiedenis van de cultuur en maakt kennis met deze invloedrijke cultuur aan de hand van de diversiteit en kwaliteit van de objecten, het onderzoek door antropologen in de 19e eeuw en de toenemende interesse in de mooie objecten bij het grote publiek.
Appropriated Landscapes - 14 artists
Mainly artists from Southern Africa. Explores landscape typologies in South Africa, Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique. The concept of landscape here is not linked to historical notions of the picturesque and the sublime. Instead, the exhibition considers landscape as a prism of experience, a reflection of ideology, and a stage for the performance and perception of identity.
El Anatsui - When I Last Wrote to You about Africa
Brings together the full range of the artist’s work, from wood trays referring to traditional symbols of the Akan people of Ghana; to early ceramics from the artist’s Broken Pots series, driftwood assemblages that refer to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and wooden sculptures carved with a chainsaw; to the luminous metal wall-hangings of recent years.
Mbongeni Buthelezi - maNyauza: Silent messages to my Mother
Mid-career retrospective. Mbongeni Buthelezi's chosen medium is the humble plastic shopping bag, which he melts and collages to build his pictures. The hype machine argues that this allows Buthelezi's work to participate in debates about conservation, although in reality he contributes but a superficial commentary on consumer society. Expect instead conservative imagery (sentimental portraits, township scenes) rendered in an essentially gimmicky style.
Uncensored
In juli 2012 sluit het museum voor een grondige renovatie. Deze tentoonstelling biedt de bezoeker een uniek kijkje achter de schermen. In een parcours met 30 stops wordt antwoord gegeven op uiteenlopende vragen, zoals wat doet een indiaan nu in een museum over Afrika? De stops presenteren markante feiten uit de geschiedenis van het museum en werpt tevens een licht op de toekomstplannen.
The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989
Exhibition aims to demonstrate how globalization, with its dominant market mechanisms on the one hand, and its utopias of connectivity and liberalness on the other, influences the different spheres of art production and reception. Apart from the large number of African participants, there are also noteworthy projects on Africa by artists from other continents.
Photography: New Documentary Forms - Guy Tillim
Explores the ways in which five contemporary artists have used the camera to explore, extend and question the power of photography as a documentary medium. Includes work by Luc Delahaye, Mitch Epstein, Guy Tillim (South Africa) and Akram Zaatari, as well as two important earlier works by Boris Mikhailov.
Wrecking at Private Siding 661 - Bridget Baker
Site-specific installation sees Bridget Baker working with personal and historical elements relating to the immigration of British settlers to East London, South Africa. The work acknowledges the silent evidence of the many ships that were wrecked along its coast, as well as evidence of the demise of her father and grandfather's work in the wool and hide industry in that town.
Eternal Life after Death in Ancient Egypt
Focuses on Egyptian burial ritual, its place with ancient Egyptian cosmology, and the insights that mummies, burial ritual, and cosmology provide about life in ancient Egypt. Understand how burial practices and associated religious beliefs serve as windows into world cultures. Explore the ways in which mummies, tombs, and Egyptian mythology open new windows into the lives of ancient Egyptians.
The Beautiful Time: Photography by Sammy Baloji
Images by Congolese photographer and video artist Sammy Baloji feature the industrial landscapes around Lumbumbasi, the capital city of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The images serve as a visual indictment of the failed postcolonial leadership that mismanaged and squandered Katanga’s industrial resources, its modernity, and the economic prosperity of the region.
No fashion, please! - Photography between Gender and Lifestyle
Rejection of traditional ideas of fashion and beauty. Nineteen solo presentations outline the contemporary international photography scene that explores the fundamental relationship between bodies and clothes, the dialectics between the form of the body and its appearance. With two South African participants: Steven Cohen and Viviane Sassen.
Ghana, An Organic Experience; architectural exhibition
In the exhibition Ghana; An Organic Experience the focus is on Ghana, and the way traditional organic materials and methods have been reintroduced in modern urban planning. The architect Joe Addo was invited to select several of his projects in Accra and the new towns of Teema and Takoradi, which make use of these materials and methods.
Hand Held: Personal Arts from Africa
Spanning 21 countries across the African continent, this exhibition brings together objects used in daily life that blend beauty and utility—several on view for the first time. This display is of more than 80 objects from the late 19th- and early 20th-century. A selection of videos and photographs will also be on display to show how the objects were created and used.
Karoo Highveld Exhibition
Karoo Highveld is the first showing of the work by British artist Richard Long in South Africa, and, indeed, the first on the African continent. Since his early work, the internationally renowned artist has maintained an affinity for Africa’s diverse landscapes and has returned to the continent several times over the years to create his unique sculptural works directly in the landscape. Twice, in 2004 and 2009, Long visited South Africa and produced works in the Karoo and in the Highveld.
Fucking Hell - Cameron Platter
Exploring a reality stranger than fiction, through fantasy, satire and subculture, Cameron Platter fills the ordinary and the marginal, with incendiary new meaning. Working from everyday experience with subjects overlooked or considered delinquent, sordid and lowbrow, he reconnoiters notions and concepts on the outside fringes of South Africa’s popular culture.
Central Nigeria Unmasked
Unfolding as a spectacular journey up the Benue River, Central Nigeria Unmasked introduces major artistic genres and styles associated with more than twenty-five ethnic groups living along the river's Lower, Middle, and Upper reaches. These diverse and remarkable artworks include sculptural forms in wood, ceramic, and metal.
Skyndood en Niemandswoord van Susan Opperman (ZA)
Voor de derde editie van Kunsthal Light maakt de Zuid-Afrikaanse kunstenaar Susan Opperman de wandschildering Skyndood & Niemandswoord, geïnspireerd op haar graphic novel Gifpit - die koms van die Vreemdeling. Tevens zijn enkele van haar meest iconische karakters uit Gifpit in rauwe zwart-wit tekeningen en met onverbloemde teksten in de etalage langs de hellingbaan van de Kunsthal te zien. Vanaf 16 november werkt Opperman in de Kunsthal aan haar wandschildering.
Fragments
De werken in Fragments laten veel te raden over. Het zijn flarden van herinneringen, onderdelen van een geheel, elementen van een groter verhaal, fragmenten van botsende culturen, uitgebeeld in schilderijen, collages en foto's. Werk van Hasan & Husain Essop uit de serie Haalal Art (foto's; Zuid-Afrika), LucFosther Diop (collages en schilderijen; Kameroen) en Edwin Jans (schilderijen; Nederland).
Drawings
More than three dozen works on paper made in a wide variety of media, including ink, graphite, watercolor, and collage that offer unique insights into the thought and work processes of the exhibiting artist. Despite their varied experiences, personal cultural backgrounds and styles their approach to drawing is through a contemporary experience, their metaphysics is distinctly new and refreshing. Work by African artists Victor Ekpuk, Osaretin Ighile, Uche Okeke (all Nigeria) and Ibrahim El Salahi (Sudan) and eight others.
Selected Works
Kehinde Wiley is an artist who mixes the culture of the urban fabric he grew up in with the traditional portrait style in which he paints. His strikingly large paintings depict young African Americans and portrays them within the visual codes of power, wealth, masculinity and prestige. His paintings represent a juxtaposition of art history and modernity with the aim of making paintings that matter in the 21st century.
Untitled - Summer Exhibition
Brings together a collection of prints that celebrate the diversity of associated and DKW artists, pooling together a variety of themes and techniques employed in printmaking. Artworks by Deborah Bell, Willem Boshoff, Wilma Cruise, Christopher Cozier (Trinidad), Ann Gollifer (Botswana), Trasi Henen, David Hockney (UK), William Kentridge, Laurence Lemaoana, Maja Maljević, Colbert Mashile, John Meyer, Richard Penn, Robyn Penn, Diane Victor, Jeremy Wafer and Mary Wafer.
AVANTCARGUARD, Jaco + Z-dog and Friends
We were offered this show at Blank Projects, and since we’ll all be in Cape Town over the Holiday season and we don’t have a central meeting point, we figured that Blank Projects could be just that. We’ll be at Blank from time to time, where we’ll be working on new AVANTCARGUARD shit, recording a new Jaco+Z-dog album, playing some shows, maybe we’ll even make a short film or two. We’ll also be inviting some collaborators and friends over. So come round to Blank if the weather is crap. Maybe we’ll be around making some new stuff.
Implemented Environments - Various Artists
An insightful and relevant investigation into South African artists’ meditations on notions of environment; whether addressing ecological, economic or sociopolitical conditions or simply reflecting on the earth-human connection. The exhibition incorporates a diverse array of responses to the theme although consistent throughout is a frank honesty in the artists’ reflections. Work by Jessie Hammond, Mohau Modisakeng, Daniella Mooney, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Sean Slemon, Jan van der Merwe and Barbara Wildenboer.
Thrown Together - Simon Stone
New series of paintings portrays a personal exploration of elusive memories, dreams and recollections - the silhouette of a receding landscape, framed cityscapes, lone figures or female forms, distinctly recurring motifs, lines, holes, slices and brief stops. Compositionally the paintings are split and fragmented, divided into a series of singular conversations and moments caught in their own time. Simple and complex, the paintings are other-worldly and magical, while remaining quietly every-day.
Call and Response - Cedric Nunn Retrospective 1981 - 2011
An important retrospective by the oft-neglected South African photographer Cedric Nunn, this exhibition has a wealth of images, showing the country at its most tumultuous, explores a deep compassion for people who are struggling to survive amid the social change of a post-apartheid South Africa.
Pinky Promise - Pierre Crocquet
An exhibition that presents the stories of five victims and three perpetrators of childhood sexual abuse and subsequent healing. Pierre Crocquet approaches the subject with sensitivity, nonetheless adopting a robust stance on this destructive and increasingly prevalent phenomenon.
Malete - John Phalane
John Phalane is a cartographic artist. He draws maps with coloured pencils of his native Limpopo province and of the streets and suburbs of Johannesburg, where he worked for a brief period of his life. His maps are artful, providing routes into and out of the ‘unknown’. But he also uses maps as shorthand for such ready metaphors as seeking location and experiencing dislocation, bringing order to chaos, exploring rations of scale, and charting new terrain.
It's A Wrap - Various artists
artSPACE durban's Annual Affordable Art Show continues at it’s initiative called the COLLECTIVE with a maximum sale price for works at R1 500. The exhibition includes paintings,street art, jewellery and used art books. The COLLECTIVE is an art gallery that has been created for, but not limited to, the promotion of young artists under the age of 35 within the Durban area. Not only does the gallery promote the visual art spectrum, but music and poetry as well.
Spectres - Sven Augustijnen (België)
Documentaire thriller over één van de donkerste bladzijden uit de geschiedenis van de dekolonisatie van Belgisch Congo rond 1960. Augustijnen volgt Jacques Brassinne de La Buissière, in 1961, toen Patrice Lumumba werd vermoord, een hoge Belgische ambtenaar in Congo op zijn zoektocht naar de waarheid. Onderdeel van totaalproject met verder installatie Les Demoiselles de Bruxelles en krantenbijlage Panorama, fotoseries en meer.
Victims and Martyrs - with Conrad Botes (South Africa)
Examines the complexity and internal contradictions of the conceptual framework of victims and martyrs. The exhibiting artists interpret, activate and stage the landscape where victimisation and martyrdom takes place. Boundaries between victims and perpetrators dissolve and the premises that maintain and reproduce these roles are scrutinized.
Solo-expositie Heidi Sincuba (ZA)
Ukukhohlakala Komqondo is te vertalen als ‘Corruption of the Mind’. Als Zuid-Afrikaanse voelt Heidi Sincuba (1982) zich gevormd door tegenstrijdigheden. In haar werk analyseert zij hoe persoonlijke en gemeenschappelijke waarden zich tot elkaar verhouden en richt zij zich op thema’s als theologie, groepsdenken, kolonialisme, rassenpolitiek en de invloed van het collectieve geheugen. In wezen onderzoekt Heidi de veranderlijkheid van culturen. Puttende uit populaire beeldspraak en persoonlijke ervaring, is het werk confronterend en soms grotesk.
ExpositieL Colours of Namibia and sculptures of Zambia
De serie “Beelden van Zambia”van Wim Reimert toont een aantal houten beeldjes, afkomstig uit Senanga, Western Province, groot geschilderd in Fries tegenlicht en geplaatst in een verzonnen natuur. De titels van de schilderijen zijn namen van bevriende Zambianen. Zijn serie “Kleuren van Namibië” vormt een geabstraheerde weergave van het ongelooflijk weidse en lege Namibische landschap. De titels verwijzen naar de plaats of streek waarop het werk is geïnspireerd.
Stuart Bird - Promise Land
First solo show by artist/sculptor Stuart Bird. In a series of meticulously and often obsessively hand-crafted sculptures and installations, Bird explores the position of the artist and the individual in contemporary South Africa. The presence of the artist is central to the exhibition: the careful, painstaking carving of each letter and shape from a block of raw wood, and the slow and repetitive sanding and polishing of each layer and surface can be read as a kind of ritual, or perhaps an atonement.
Tjorts/Cheers - various artists
Visual conversation between poet Danie Marais and visual artists Marna Hattingh, Tina Jensen, Marlise Keith, John Murray and Liza Grobler. Inspired by a single unpublished poem, Tjorts! by Danie Marais. It summarises living and working in Cape Town in the twenty first century. The direct and personal nature of drawing finds a resonance with the personal nature of Marais’ work. In this text Marais – whose work often conjures up strong visual associations- maps a space overtly familiar to all the participants (and also to most of the viewers).
Given to Fly - Vivien Kohler
Vivien Kohler’s much anticipated first solo exhibition at The AVA Gallery. This body of work negotiates the human urge to excel, the ability to control the trajectory of one’s life, and the social dynamics that hinder the realisation of childhood dreams. Kohler’s mixed media works create tensions through the illusionist approach to painting and the tactile application of sculptural components.
New Work - Sandile Mhlongo
Sandile Mhlongo’s paintings capture a sense of his environment. A sense articulated and expressed through colour, a strain of lilac highlighted by a tiredness of blue weaves through the paintings as they negotiate the colour of poverty.
