Friday, September 10

Berlin … an amazing city. It has a real energy, but also a looseness, a laidback feeling. Berliners don’t like to look they are trying too hard.
The line that came up in the workshop as the one which best expresses what it really means to live in Berlin, is, IT’S A BIT SUSPICIOUS IF YOU HAVE TOO MUCH MONEY. It feels right, but it’s a very long sentence to photograph.

The first attempt at the shoot is on the steps of the tower on Alexanderplatz. But the light is not good. And there are other problems.

A test shot on the Alexamderplatz

The rest of the week is spent looking for a better location.

One night I visit Berlin-based Candice Breitz, in her studio, and she interrupts her marathon editing of her twins project long enough to head out for a supper of Chinese dumplings at her local.

Candice Breitz

On my last day in Berlin, we shoot again, on the steps of the Reichstag.
The rain stops just in time, and everyone shows up for the shoot. The only problem is … the security police, who half way through the shoot, object to us holding up letters.

After intense negotiation, they allow us to continue. Except that we may not hold the letters up. We may, however, stand there empty handed. Pretending we are holding letters up. It’s going to be interesting working this one out …

Box lunch with Lisa Brice in the Tate Modern members room.

So it’s on to London. It’s great to catch up with Lisa Brice again, and the Alice Neel portrait show at the Whitechapel is fantastic. So is the Francis Alys, at the Tate Modern. And the sun doesn’t stop shining.

Francis Alys’ rubber mat installation at the Tate Modern

Thursday, August 19

Art writer Sean O’ Toole and I take the night train from Bern to Berlin. When the train seems to have reached rocket speed, Sean takes a photograph of a screen showing we have hit 250 km an hour.

Friday, August 20

I am in Berlin to give a talk at the Daimler Gallery, where curator Christian Ganzenberg is presenting Ampersand, current performative and contemporary art from South Africa juxtaposed with work from the Daimler Collection. My own piece from 1990, For Thirty Years Next to his Heart starts off the show, together with a section of Willem Boshoff’s classic Blind Alphabet and from there the visitor moves on to view new work from such artists as Robin Rhode, Nicholas Hlobo and Nandipha Mntambo, along with their European counterparts.

Under the auspices of the gallery, I will also do a Berlin version of my Other Voices, Other Cities series, in which I run a workshop with a group of local residents to try to establish what it is exactly about living in that city which is unique, and not quite like any other.

Christian, photographer Abrie Fourie and I breakfast together at one of the charming pavement cafes in Prenzlauer Berg to discuss the planning of the project. The workshop will be tomorrow. So today Abrie and I will cycle around Berlin looking for possible locations for the shoot, at which some days after the workshop, participants will hold up letters spelling out the message they have decided on.

El Anatsui’s hanging at the Alte Neuegalerie

The location will depend on the message, but I need to look around for possibilities first. En route around the city, we pass El Anatsui’s extraordinary hanging, which is cladding the columns of the Alte Neuegalerie as part of the Berlin wide ‘Who Knows Tomorrow’ series of exhibitions by African artists.

A possible location shot

Or should we risk the participants being run down by a tram? Abrie Fourie is the man in this shot.

By the way, I am lucky enough to be staying in a most gorgeous apartment, so spacious, with high, high ceilings and a red couch in the kitchen backing a long table, opposite the very contemporary stove and gleaming stainless steel kitchen equipment.

A beautiful kitchen

As I entered the apartment for the first time, in the early hours of Friday morning, I was seized with an immediate urge to invite friends known and unknown to dinner, to sit on the couch and talk to me over wine, while I, of course, would be cooking something delicious for us all to share.

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.

Tuesday July 27 2010

What mortifications of the flesh artists will go through to make art! Belinda Blignaut’s ‘Stealing the Words’ installation on the windows of the YoungBlackman Gallery required the artist to chew 10 000 pieces of bubblegum to make enough bubbles which in their weirdly detumescent state pinkly coat the windows of the gallery. Only by leaching the bubblegum in hot water first to draw out some of the nauseatingly sugary flavour could the artist complete her project.

Belinda Blignaut at the opening of ‘Stealing the Words’.

Anti xenophobia stickers are popping up all over town. The next meeting of the Artists Action Group against Xenophobia takes place on Saturday, August 7 in the Oliver Tambo Centre in Khayelitsha from 11 am to 2 p.m. It’s really easy to get there – just take the Mew Way exit from the N2 and you’re right there. Email organizer Suzy Bell at HYPERLINK "mailto:bellsuzy@gmail.com" bellsuzy@gmail.com for more details of the workshop.


Seen on an ad at the airport

This past weekend, 20 years of figure drawings strewn across the floor of Erdmann Contemporary gave viewers a mini retrospective of Mark Hipper’s graphic work. Many of the vigorous charcoals were done in life drawing sessions, but there were a number of the late great Robert Hodgins, naked but still robust, brought back to life by Hipper’s swift and always assured line.

Mark Hipper takes a closer look at past drawings at Erdmann Contemporary

‘Mounting Queen Victoria’ is the title of Steven Dubin’s book on the transformation of museums in South Africa, and whether museums are still relevant –or not - will be the subject of a Book Fair panel on Sunday afternoon at 2 for 2.30 at Iziko South African National Gallery. I will be part of the panel, together with Riason Naidoo of the SANG, Andrew Lamprecht, Pippa Skotnes and the author himself.

Friday, July 16

In a week when the World Cup final ended a month of celebration, a time in which all South Africans seemed to have discovered – again – how much they really liked each other, Dan Halter’s exhibition ‘Double Entry’ opened at Whatiftheworld …..


Halter’s entry visa

The title of the show refers to the artist’s visa to enter once more the country of his birth, and and focuses on the cruel situation in which Zimbabweans trying to leave the country find themselves.

Performance poet Suzy Bell flashes her Goodbye Mugabe T shirt in front of Halter’s Beitbridge Space Invader video.

And then this week, as if to bring us all down to cold reality now that the World Cup is over, there were fresh outbreaks of xenophobic violence all over the Western Cape, with Somali shop owners being chased from the shops, beaten up, and their shops looted.

So please take note that on this Saturday, July 17, there will be an anti-xenophobia creative workshop from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Oliver Tambo Centre in Khayelitsha. And if anyone needs directions to get there, phone
Suzy at 076 375 5675. For more info, email Suzy at bellsuzy@gmail.com Also, on Sunday, there will be a march from a 12 noon meeting at St George’s Cathedral.

Suzy Bell’s graffiti

We have to do everything we can to creatively bring about a change in consciousness, to make all feel welcome in our midst.