Donderdag 11 April 2013

Het Tropenmuseum brengt een ode aan zijn eigen verzamelingen met de tentoonstelling Onverwachte ontmoetingen. Verborgen verhalen uit eigen collectie.
Een Afrikaans krachtbeeld ontmoet een Apple computer en een kunstwerk met portretten van Marlene Dumas een Duitse staalkaart met veertig verschillende oogkleuren.

tropenmuseum

In 2011 reisde fotograaf Mario Marino (Oostenrijk, 1967) naar de Omo vallei in Zuid-Ethiopië, nabij de grens tussen Kenya en Sudan. Zijn ontmoetingen op straat en op de markt resulteerde in een indrukwekkende serie portretten van mensen die behoren tot zeven kleine bevolkingsgroepen: Surma, Karo, Hamar, Borena-Oromo, Tsimaw, Mursi en Erbore. Zelfbewust en trots op hun culturele eigenheid poseerden tientallen mensen voor hem. Uit de lichaamsbeschilderingen, littekentatoeages en sieraden blijkt dat men traditionele opvattingen over schoonheid en identiteit nog steeds belangrijk vindt.

afrikamuseum

Beeldhouwer en kunstenaar Josiah Onodome Onemu (1945) is afkomstig uit Nigeria. Hij woont en werkt al tientallen jaren in Nederland. Deze expositie toont een overzicht van zijn brede oeuvre, waarvan een deel in beheer is van het Afrika Museum en een deel bestaat uit de privé-collectie van de kunstenaar. Vruchtbaarheid, het samenspel van tegendelen, lijden en wanhoop, hoop en beloftes, verandering en afscheid – de grote thema’s van het leven worden in het werk van Josiah Onemu nu eens sober, tot de essentie gereduceerd, dan weer verhalend in beeld gebracht. Hoe verschillend de uitwerking ook kan zijn, het onderwerp heeft altijd betrekking op mens en maatschappij.

afrikamuseum

Female Power is een tentoonstelling vol vrouwelijke kracht en macht. Van keramische borstvormen en een installatie met gevlochten harnassen tot foto’s van legendarische Japanse vissersvrouwen: steeds meer hedendaagse kunstenaressen creëren nieuwe vrouwbeelden. Hun werk wordt gecombineerd met dat van kunstenaressen die in de jaren ’70 en ’80 van de vorige eeuw met hun positieve vrouwbeelden hebben bijgedragen aan de ‘empowerment’ van vrouwen. Met uit Afrika Nandipha Mntambo (1982 SZ), Tsholofelo Monare (1986 ZA)

MMKArnhem

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.

umma-umich africanart

It's not every day that a housewife looks around her kitchen and sees her utensils as objects of art. But Usha Seejarim is no ordinary housewife. The artist from Bethal, a small town in Mpumalanga, says that "as a home-maker/housewife/mother of two, and an artist", she is fascinated by her everyday chores. When she is in the kitchen, her spoons, forks, knives and plates become art objects. In her latest exhibition, Seejarim takes a closer look at the places and the objects in her immediate surrounds, and the roles she assumes when she is around these objects.

joburgculture joburgculture-jag

Siemon Allen’s Labels is a large architectural installation displayed in the museum’s Music Room. This visual memorial to South Africa’s rich musical past features 5000 photographs of record labels inserted into a suspended clear plastic curtain. The site-responsive installation has been configured to converse with part of the museum’s collection of historical artifacts and meanders through the space amongst the musical instruments and clocks, to form a number of intimate accessible enclosures. The exhibition is a historical record, a chronological discography of select labels from Allen's archive.

iziko

One day I'm Gonna make it. Dromen over hoe je leven er over een paar jaar uit ziet, dat kent iedereen wel; een mooi huis, een liefhebbende partner, een goed inkomen, een gezin, een goede baan. Of wellicht wonen in het buitenland, op avontuur door de wereld en je talenten ontwikkelen. Wie zal het zeggen? Wat heb je nodig om die dromen te verwezenlijken? Welke risico’s komen daar bij kijken? In hoeverre zijn die dromen te rijmen met de werkelijkheid?

humanityhouse

Explores the ways in which contemporary artists based in South Africa and China engage with new paths of movement, with economic and cultural shifts, and with the rise of new regimes, new leaders and new social and urban spaces. The exhibition includes works in diverse media by internationally acclaimed Chinese artists, Wu Junyong, Chen Qiulin, Maleonn and Qin Ga  and local artists Lebogang Rasethaba, Gerald Machona, Michael MacGarry and James Webb.

standardbankarts

Kendell Geers, born in 1968 in South Africa, uses various media such as installation, drawing, video, performance, and photography. His life and work can be divided into two decade-long periods whose trajectories and developments are explored in this exhibition. The first political phase runs from 1988 to 2000, during which time the artist, a white South African, explored the moral and ethical contradictions of the apartheid system through his practice. Initiated by his move to Brussels in 2000, his later European period is now characterized by a more poetic aesthetic. Here, Geers transferred his incendiary practice into a postcolonial and increasingly global context, suggesting more universal themes like terrorism, spirituality, and mortality.

hausderkunst

Musa is one of the most important contemporary artists of both Arabic and African heritage. Musa’s work approaches Western civilization as subject matter by referring to its iconography, thus questioning North/South relations and the dialogue between cultures. Always connected to the contemporary actuality, his works express at the same time his dual African and Oriental identity. This “identity” is also reflected by Musa’s role as an acclaimed calligrapher.

pascalpolar

Aimé Mpané’s recent work explores the physical and psychological complex space that exists in the fissure between trauma and the memory of trauma as a result of the brutalities instigated by colonial legacies in his homeland – DR Congo. Aimé Mpané mines the theme of power and vulnerability in society as he engages with the past and present. His emotionally charged sculptural installation is inscribed with individual and collective identity nurtured within the compass of history. His work reflects subtle understanding of context, respect for tradition and awareness of the crucial links between function and experimentation.

skoto

Tillim's latest series of photographic images, taken in Libreville, the capital of Gabon, in 2012, draws on the formal and aesthetic concerns of his Second Nature series, as well as the ongoing interest in power and ideology in Africa that informed his Avenue Patrice Lumumba and Congo Democratic series. Here, Tillim considers the construct of our perception of space in a city landscape, situated amidst the realities of an African capital and, inevitably, described through the prism of Africa's colonial past. The irony of the name of the city, with its complicated relationship to autocracy and democracy, permeates Tillim's images of this urban landscape, as do the markers of power that recur throughout his work.

stevenson

The title of the exhibition, 'Imvo Zabantsundu' / 'The Native Opinion', is the namesake of the first black South African newspaper published in King William’s Town. It provides an accurate starting point for Mabulu’s outspoken work that aims to create a dialogue around South Africa’s current political and social climate within the frame of post-colonial discourse. More specifically the work employs symbolism and political references that speak of the creation of identity through language, racism, poverty, religion, abuse and the corruption of power.

commune1

The Land Act of 1913, and associated legislation that was to follow during the apartheid period, had a devastating effect on the country and on the lives of millions of black South Africans. This photographic exhibition gives visitors the opportunity to follow a century-long journey into the history of the land, into land struggles, forced labour and child labour, removals, and last ditch stands. Historical photographic material gleaned from archives is exhibited alongside modern and contemporary work in new ways to explore the romance with and realities of the land, both in the past and the present.

iziko

In this show the artist continues his exploration both of portraiture and his passion for oil as a painterly medium. Contrary to the tradition of verisimilitude, for Hewett the portrait is not about capturing an external likeness of a subject; but rather as a portal to an inner journey of self-exploration. Hewett does not use sitters or models in an effort to produce a realistic depiction. Although photographs constitute his starting point , he relies principally on the free-flowing processes of memory and creative imagination. His portraits encapsulate the truism: that the subject matter of all art is, ultimately, the self.

barnardgallery

Through a varied series of works and actions created and documented over several years, Belinda Blignaut has been processing issues around social constraint and transformation, with the body at the centre of all; an emotional response to a political world. Adapting available materials and processing immediate surroundings, she hopes to translate the ways we cope. Her work is often body canvas, a quiet visceral investigation into violence through action and documentation. Surfacing in blown is a desire to resist the effects of institutionalized culture and the constructs of sophistication we have become - how good we are at concealing messiness, the natural body, and intuition.

blankprojects

Music as an expression of national identity is a common theme on stamps. That was also the case with the stamps of the previous Music-on-African-stamps exhibition. However, the stamps of the present exhibition show a very different picture, which has nothing to do with national identity: European composers and western “heroes of popular music”. Stamps showing European composers like Ludwig van Beethoven, Igor Strawinsky, Johann Sebastiaan Bach,  Georg Friedrich Händel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, black music heroes like Louis Armstrong, Billy Holiday, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, Lionel Hampton and Jimmy Hendrix and white music heroes like Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan.

ascleiden

The series of paintings on this exhibition derive from a reflection on the events at Marikana of 16 August 2012. A strike at a Lonmin owned platinum mine in the Marikana area close to Rustenburg lead to a series of violent confrontations between police, mine security officials, trade union leaders and miners in which around 47 miners were killed and an unknown number injured. The paintings are partially abstracted landscapes derived from media images and my own visits to the site where the massacre happened.These works are an attempt, within the possibilities of painting, to find a way of responding to, and reflecting on, these events and the place in which they occurred.

davidkrutprojects

Award-winning photographer Jodi Bieber explores the twilight that she experienced in the decade following the advent of democracy in South Africa. The show is a selection of work from 1993 to 2004, primarily revealing Bieber’s more rarely shown independent series, as well as some of her earlier work as a press photographer.

museum-goch goodman-gallery

In this new series of large scale paintings, depicting Industrial Landscapes, Interiors and Human Figures, Alessandro Papetti revisits subjects that are dear to him and through which he reveals, with his unique expressive force, his vision of the world. Facing Papetti's works the viewer is confronted poignant visions of abandoned industrial scenes where the shadows of long past activities are still faintly perceived among the rusting machinery. The immense dockyards where great ships look like naked, gigantic Leviathans, with steel bones and hard skin. And when Papetti's eye lingers on Human Figures and austere Interiors,one hears lost voices, witnesses recreated gestures -  the transient essence of life.

everard-read