Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Today, a picture round up of the last ten days in Cape Town.

Odidi glam trashes her way through a cabaret number at the opening of Nicholas Hlobo’s Umtshotsho at the South African National Gallery on May 30.
Inside the gallery, one of the eight sculptures on Umtshotsho (which refers to a traditional party for young people about to enter adulthood) is a figure draped in swathed and beribboned rubber and red lace – off to a mad Halloween party in Sherwood Forest, perhaps.
On the street outside my studio, two giant vuvazelas are loaded on to a truck – off to add to the World Cup festivities, no doubt.
Kendell Geers is in town for the opening of his show at the Goodman, and in a parallel event, planned to repeat his 1993 work Title Withheld (brick) in which he threw a brick through the window of the Market Gallery in Johannesburg.

‘The idea was to make a hole to let the street in and the stuffiness of the gallery out’, says Geers.

This re-enactment was to take place at YOUNGBLACKMAN, the storefront gallery on Roeland Street, but when Geers arrived at the gallery carrying the brick he was going to throw, he found one already at the gallery door, with a hate mail message attached.

In the end, this seemed fortuitous. The level of violence has increased since 1993, so where once a single brick made a strong statement, now the ante had to upped.

So the hate-mail brick was pitched through the window too, and became part of the piece, along with a few extras. Which is why there are three holes rather than just one.