The Poetry In Between

On these beautiful summer mornings I wake up early and go out onto my balcony with a cup of tea to start the day’s tasks under the influence of the ever changing view of the mountain. This photo was taken minutes before I write this, but the bright morning sun has already softened to a grey mist and it looks as if it might rain again.

This week, Performa director RoseLee Goldberg and I have been emailing back and
forth discussing what topics we might cover at our forthcoming interview to take
place on February 26 as part of the talks programme at the Cape Town Art Fair. In New York, RoseLee is one of the most powerful figures in the art world, often attending several different art events in a single evening, interested in everything, known by everyone, always on the lookout for fresh talent, pushing artists into new performance directions.

I have also been trying to find out what is happening about the official South African
entry to the Venice Biennale, this year to take place in May. The Department of Arts and Culture are holding a very expensive lease on a space adjoining the Arsenale. I tried VANSA first and received this reply from Molemo Moiloa:

‘Dear Sue

Lauren has forwarded me your mail re. Venice. I’m not sure I can be of much help
but the following is what I am aware of:

A modest number of proposals were received last year and the first round of  adjudication was held in November. A second round of adjudication, based on tender regulations for price, BBBEE scores etc etc was to be held very soon after. My estimation is that a curator was likely determined before the end of last year and that DAC is probably already in discussions with the selected curator and team.

When it will be officially announced to the public is anyone's guess. Best to speak to Andries Oberholzer, I think he would be able to give more details. I spoke to him last year re. lack of briefing session etc and he was very helpful.’

This was a start, so I emailed Andries Oberholzer and got an Out of Office Reply with an alternative email address for Allen Mukansi. I contacted Mukansi, who responded that he had forwarded my query to his (unnamed) manager. A second email to Mukansi requesting the name of the manager has been unanswered. Dead end.

 Igshaan Adams, Plate 6 from the series Neoscope (2014)

As a senior artist, I am often asked to recommend younger artists for studio visits or for a possible residency, and it’s great when that artist takes the opportunity and runs with it. Last year, I nominated Igshaan Adams for the Paul Klee Sommerakademie in Bern. The curatorial theme focused on the Rorschach test.  Adams was accepted, one of 12 out of more than 160 nominations, and started thinking about the theme before he even went. The results can be seen on his almost sold-out show at Blank Projects, in Cape Town. The compelling piece above is called Pardoe. My response to his test is to see blood leaking out of a sheeted bed.



Tony East immersed in Kendell Geers’ Hanging Piece, 1993

Over at the Goodman, gallery manager Tony East smilingly avoids the bricks of Kendell Geers’ installation in the foyer at the opening of the show ‘The Poetry In Between: South-South’, curated by Carolyn Drake, and looking at relationships between the artists of this country and of Brazil.

Ariel Reichman’s performance on the show recovers a childhood memory of an
unfailing morning routine when a bell pressed in his parents’ bedroom would summon a uniformed domestic with ‘Tea for the master and coffee for the madam’. With all this artworld activity, not to mention a stimulating engagement with a highly informed group from the Art Institute of Chicago, has there been time for my own work?

Indeed. The fabulous Itaiian art publishing house Skira is working on a monograph of
my work which will be published, all going well, later this year, so much preparation on that front. Which images? What to say about them? And I am also starting a new body of work on trauma and its intergenerational effects as part of a major project under the group guidance of the remarkable psychologist,
Professor Pumla Goboda-Madikizela.



 Sue Williamson: De Kock Ready to Sing 1997

Perhaps you heard her powerful interview on Cape Talk last week, commenting on the release of ‘Prime Evil’, Eugene de Kock, the subject of her book, A Human Being Died that Night. Her insights are profound. It is a privilege to be invited to work with her.

Before the doors opened

Visitors to Penny Siopis’ retrospective ‘Time and Again’ at the National Gallery in Cape Town enter the Lieberman Room to be confronted by a majestic installation  filling the rectangular space between two grey columns, the floor and the ceiling.  It looks as if it has been there forever; an extraordinary accumulation of curiosities which have slowly settled into place over time. 

The installation is called Charmed Lives, and the objects have all had a previous existence in the artist’s own life and art. The first installation was constructed in the Museum for African Art in downtown Soho, New York in 1999, for a show called ‘Liberated Voices’ (in the days when there were still museums and galleries in Soho, and not just luxe brand name stores). More followed.

For the retrospective, all the stored objects were brought out and laid on the floor at the gallery, a sea of personal and previously owned possessions. Balancing colours and textures to relate to paintings already hung in the room, and working with a team of assistants to steady the ladder and hand up objects, Penny decided on the position of each on the wooden grid built to support them.

The list includes: a plastic sheep’s head mask, cascades of dolls dressed, or partially dressed in a variety of costumes, or naked, or dismembered, a silvery silicone spiders web, an ancient gas mask, a blue kitchen colander, an animal which might be a cat, or perhaps a beaver (there is a suggestion of a flattened tail) with scratchy brown ‘fur’, beadwork, lots of it, diaphanous white fabrics trimmed with lace, dirty khaki military mesh, a little leather sling which might once have held a water bottle for a soldier in the bush, baskets, bells and an  upside down Bambi, a red board with moulded examples of grenades and limpet mines which in the apartheid years would have hung in a post office in South Africa to warn citizens to be ever on the alert for such dangers, glittering jewellery, silver trays and mugs, two round plaster plaques with white seagulls against a bright blue background, crystal pendants from a chandelier, a decorated plastic helmet once worn by a BUCS football team supporter, and more soft toys than a child could play with in a month.

Each artefact was attached to a wooden grid with cable ties by the artist, who at times stretched perilously from the top of the ladder, jamming one foot against the installation as she reached upwards to fix yet another piece into the assemblage. And like the back of a tapestry in a mediaeval museum, the colours on the front of the installation are reproduced on the reverse with woollen threads which hang down, blurring the sharp definition of the front of the installation into a soft curtain of gentle tones.