Monday, August 23

Last week, I visited the unique Hotel Everland for the last time.
The creation of Swiss artist friends Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann, this moveable hotel for two will leave its position on the roof of their studio in Burgdorf and cross the Atlantic to become part of the collection of a Kentucky art museum.

The Hotel Everland

Staying in Everland with its retro curves and its calm aqueous toned interior in which one’s thoughts seem free to float undisturbed will be just a memory.

Inside Everland

The occasion was the annual Paul Klee Sommerakademie in Bern, which offers 12 emerging artists the opportunity to participate in a 10 day workshop with a leading curator – this year, the international critic and writer, Jan Verwoert. The theme of his workshop was ‘When your lips are my ears, our bodies become radios’, and for the period of the workshop the fellows, including Cape Town Gugulective member Kemang Wa Lehulere, had to produce a daily radio programme and a poster. But that is only one aspect of the workshop – other lectures, debates, intense discussions, immerse the fellows in considerations of what art is, or could be. Or should be.

Jan Verwoert

At the conclusion of the workshop, the nominators, from all over the world, are invited to review the procedures, and this year, attend the launch of a book produced by last year’s fellows, including Bettina Malcomess. Meeting up again with one’s fellow nominators like the American writer Steven Madoff and the director of the Bern Kunsthalle, Phillipe Pirotte, becomes a pleasant summer ritual. Phillipe tells me Moshekwa Langa is scheduled for a major show at the Kunsthalle in the coming months.

The River Aare

A highlight last year was very physical – a plunge into the swiftly flowing Aare River which runs through Bern, its opaque icy green reflecting its glacial source, but this year, it’s just too cold to contemplate a swim.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Yesterday was a day of sad and shocking news. Artist Mark Hipper has died. at the too young age of 50. His body was found in his home in Grahamstown by a friend who had gone round to see why he had missed a meeting. Apparently a few days before he had told his new gallerist Heidi Erdmann that he was not feeling well. It is believed his death resulted from diabetic complications.

Only three weeks ago I stood with Mark and Heidi and Manfred Zilla in Erdmann Contemporary in Cape Town, looking at the work of the past 20 years, sheets and sheets of paper covered in charcoal drawings of figures, most clearly executed at high speed, a technique which can be disastrous if the hand holding the charcoal is not that of a master.

In a review of his work at the Joao Ferreira Gallery in 2003, I wrote:

‘'Disquieting' is a word that could be used to describe almost all of Mark Hipper's work. Or liminal. Nothing in his work is quite what it seems, and there is much which resists an exact interpretation. A viewing audience is constantly being engaged in a disturbing dialogue, one which is heightened by the way the artist suddenly switches from one medium to another, from an apparently straightforward charcoal drawing to a suggestive watercolour to a carved body mask to this new installation. It is a dialogue in which it is worth engaging.’

Mark Hipper, The Inquisitors (2002) Painted jacaranda, Installation view João Ferreira Gallery

The retrospective of his work planned to take place in September when the Erdmann Gallery reopens will still go forward, though now with an elegiac undertone.

Mark Hipper, rest in peace.

Wednesday, August 4

Dineo Seshee Bopape is back from a two year stint in New York where she completed her MFA in new media at Columbia and has set up her installation ‘The eclipse will not be visible to the naked eye’ at the Michael Stevenson. It opened last Thursday.

What IS visible to the naked eye is a dense assemblage of rotating mirrors, lino-like wallpaper, lace curtains and flowers, flowers in vases, videos and photographs … nature has been subjected to the Bopape sense of exuberance and colour and brought inside. At the same time, there is also a disquieting sense, as In the red roses in the first scene of the classic David Lynch movie, Blue Velvet, that all is not as it seems ….

Dineo Seshee Bopape

Across the street at Blank Projects, Swiss artist Kerim Seiler has done what might seem to be the opposite, though working from a very different point of view. Carrying with them brightly coloured neon tubes and wooden stakes, Seiler and his collaborator Gregor Metzger moved out of the gallery, making their ‘Nomadic Structures’ sculptures in places from urban to deep in the wilds, introducing the fluorescent colours of the city into nature.

Kerim Seiler

The week finished with an invitation to high tea at the Mount Nelson. Could anything be more colonial sounding than that? Finger sized cucumber and egg mayonnaise sandwiches, little choux pastry tubes filled with smoked salmon, warm scones with apricot jam and clotted cream, and a rich Black Forest cake. Yum. My host was Steven Dubin, in town to promote his book, ‘Mounting Queen Vicforia: Museum transformation in a democratic South Africa, and after tea we listened to Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka.

Wole Soyinka

Said Soyinka, in a response to a question about how young writers should be addressing social issues like poverty: ‘Please don’t freeze out the age-old existential concerns of literature in favour of immediate concerns like AIDS and child soldiers’.

A response which applies equally to the visual arts.