Sunday 24 March 2013

When struggle veteran Amina Cachalia died suddenly on the last day of January this year, South Africa lost one of the most charismatic and glamorous members of the struggle generation. It was all the more sad and upsetting because Amina had been so looking forward to the upcoming launch of her autobiography.

Titled When Hope and History Rhyme the book launch took place in the Wits Great Hall on March 9, and also served as a memorial to her life.  All of the Cachalia children and grandchildren  sat on the stage, and in turn, told stories which spoke of her courage and humour. 

Next weekend, I was up in Johannesburg again – this time, to finish filming of my new work, tentatively called There’s something I must tell you, a multi screen video installation discussion between grandmothers and granddaughters, in which Amina plays a central part. Much of her book tells of the family home in Luttig Street, Forsdburg, scene of constant police surveillance and harassment, but also a place where the family gathered with friends and comrades, key figures in the struggle, to celebrate and to enjoy Amina’s delicious cooking.

On Sunday, Amina’s granddaughter, Luiza, came to be photographed outside the Luttig Street house for the piece, and recalled the many good times from her childhood when she had stayed there with Amina.

Being in Johannesburg again also gave me the chance to pay a second visit to Candice Breitz’ exhibition of her new series, The Woods at the Goodman Gallery.  In order to provide three distinct soundproof spaces for each of Candice’s pieces – shot with child actors, or actors playing children in the three film centres of the world – Bollywood, Nollywood and Hollywood – the Goodman has rebuilt the gallery space to accommodate this, with ceilings over each space to enclose the sound. 

Candice Breitz: The Audition (installation view)

It is certainly the most sophisticated installation in a commercial gallery this country has seen. Lara Koseff of the Goodman told me that visitors react very differently to the darkened spaces.

Some are intimidated and leave the gallery without even entering the exhibition spaces, but many spend hours there, enjoying the beautifully shot and expertly edited pieces to the full. The Woods explore the way that children become part of the film industry, and in their energetic and sometimes desperate efforts to attract notice and win acceptance, mirror the aspirations provided for audiences by general release films. 

Wednesday, March 6 2013

Two weeks ago, I flew from blisteringly hot Johannesburg, where I had been shooting in Soweto for a new video installation piece with a film crew from Monkey Films to snowy Switzerland.

I didn’t have a camera in Switzerland, so I used my old Nokia. But I can’t seem to download the phone photos on to my laptop, so have now had to photograph the phone. How ridiculous is that.  Talk about low tech.

The first photo shows the Hotel Everland in the snow. I know I have written about this unique mobile hotel unit before, the creation of Swiss duo Lang & Baumann, but it is such a wonderful space to be in (pic two).  So enclosing. 

Lying on my bed, I can look out of the window at a very Swiss landscape of a steeply tiled roof, and trees on a snowy bank.  There’s a book on the bed.

The book is about Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei’s project Fairytale for Documenta 2007, when the artist arranged for 1001 Chinese people to attend Documenta, held in the small German town of Kassel, for one week each, as an artwork. The Chinese visitors stayed in special dormitories with linen designed by Ai Wei Wei, and could do exactly as they pleased in Kassel. There was no schedule. It was one of the most talked about works of that year. 

I was in Switzerland as this year’s guest curator for the Paul Klee Zentrum Sommerakademie in Bern, and together with the committee, our February task was to select 12 artists under 35 for the two week workshop in August. With 170 entries from 36 countries, this was a difficult task.  It would be great to involve Ai Wei Wei in the programme in some way. He is currently not able to leave China, and skype is apparently very unreliable in China. We’re thinking about how communication could happen. 

Flying back to Cape Town, on Air France, I scan through the list of film offerings, and find, in the Arts and Culture section, all the best known videos of Belgian artist Francis Alys. What a change from the usual airline blockbuster fare. And wouldn’t be a fine idea if South African Airways showed artists’ videos as part of their programme.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Moshekwa Langa, Poste Restante 2013, Found objects, Dimensions variable

On Saturday ten days ago, Moshekwa Langa wandered into the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, at 12.15 p.m. an hour and a quarter after the advertised opening time of his new exhibition ‘Mogalakwena’, still looking a little sleepy. This was hardly surprising, since he and the gallery staff had been up till 5 a.m. that morning finishing the setup.

Reflected in the mirrorlike grey floor of the gallery was a classic Langa installation, entitled Poste Restante, (above) a map like spreading of lamps, tilted vinyl records, books, and of course, thread and wool winding through and linking everything together in a gentle and nostalgic patterning. Langa has dedicated this exhibition to his grandmother, a major influence in his life, Elizabeth Ramokone Konyana Langa, who died recently.

Artist Moshekwa Langa (right) with assistant Jano January

The wall behind Poste Restante was clad in elegiac silver, the surface enlivened by two bare branches, and further along the wall was another very recent (also completed the night before) Langa work – Mokwena meets Mujaji. There are few artists who can compete with Langa when it comes to collage – works which appear totally fresh and spontaneous nonetheless have an underpinning of expert control which continues over the entire picture area.  Do not miss this exhibition.

Moshekwa Langa  

Mokwena meets Mujaji 2013 

Mixed media on paper 

204 cm x 171.5 cm

Spotting Sophie Perryer and David Brodie, both of the Stevenson Gallery, in conversation at the recent opening of Serge Alain Nitegeka’s ‘Black Cargo’ in Cape Town, one might have been forgiven for wondering if grey T-shirts, black pants and sandals were the new Stevenson uniform.

Sophie Perryer and David Brodie

Nitegeka’s exhibition closes quite soon ... February 23 … so include this one on your next gallery hop. Nitegeka’s title, which harks back to slavery but also references the desperate migratory patterns forced on to Africans seeking work in a global economy, employs the simple, stark metaphor of a black painted crate in his powerful sculptures and wall paintings.

Serge Alain Nitegeka in front of Exterior II: Studio study 

Today is Tuesday, February 19. Yesterday was the day the Department of Arts and Culture was supposed to announce the result of their call for a curatorial proposal for the next Venice Biennale. No news as yet. It’s a bit like waiting for the announcement of the new pope. Keep your eyes trained on Pretoria for smoke signals.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Please forgive this belated New Year message. To all who might have glanced at my last entry and wondered why it was so out of date, I apologise. Many factors have kept me away from my laptop, but primarily it was the unexpected and devastating death of my dear friend and greatly admired colleague, Colin Richards, whose picture heads this column. A short obituary by Chad Rossouw appears elsewhere in ArtThrob, and my own tribute to Colin will appear in the next few days.

A work from Elinor Auerbach’s Drawing with Light: A series of photographic sketches

To look back at December, then, a time when Colin was still with us. In December, the art season traditionally kicks off with the annual Michaelis end of year show. Overall, there seemed to be a number of works which depended on the mechanical – objects that spun, or whirred, or clicked. One of the most successful of these was Elinor Auerbach’s Drawing with Light: A series of photographic sketches. The playful element here was a number of handmade torches which were attached to each of her constructions of wheels and gears, and could be hand held to cast varying shadows on the wall.

Haroon Gunn Salie’s Sunday Best 

To single out a second student, Haroon Gunn Salie’s in depth collaboration with old residents of District Six was moving and coherent. Mr Abubaker Brown, who grew up in Hanover Street, chose to sing the classic Nat King Cole number, Just a little street where old friends meet, and his gently melodious voice filled the quadrangle outside the room where Salie’s collaboration with Ms Susan Lewis, Sunday Best, was an installation of her stylish blue dress, seated on the floor.

Marlene Dumas, Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones 

On December 15, UCT finally took notice of the fact that a Michaelis alumnus has been a major international art world star for at least a decade, and awarded painter Marlene Dumas an honorary doctorate in fine art. At the same ceremony, Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, the brilliant Handspring Puppets duo whose equine work for the New York production of War Horse won a Special Tony Award in 2011, were awarded honorary doctorates in literature. And if you are wondering why their doctorates were not in fine art too, I can’t work it out either.

John Nankin’s performance at ZINK 

Two nights before, John Nankin gave an astonishing one off performance at ZINK, a corrugated iron shed of a theatre, entitled Mama, Papa, Kaka (A Leg to Stand On). A surreal David Lynch-like ballet by a little girl was followed by a tour de force from John Nankin, swaggering and staggering around the stage with one leg twice the length of the other, somehow overcoming this monumental imbalance to the point where one could almost accept it as normal.

Penny Siopis’ Skirmish: Big Stink 

At the galleries, Fiction as Fiction (or a ninth Johannesburg Biennale) continued at the Stevenson, featuring amongst many fine works, a new series of small scale paintings by Penny Siopis. Working on words and phrases which have repeatedly appeared in the press over the past months, the artist presented ambiguous and compelling storyboards of our national obsessions. At the Goodman, William Kentridge pulled in probably the biggest opening crowd the Goodman had ever seen when his year end show No, It Is opened on the 18th. In the video section of ArtThrob, there is an extract from his walkabout of the show.

To all, I wish a productive New Year, in which old problems may resolve themselves and new ones present challenges which provide unexpected opportunities for growth. We have lost one of the most loved and respected members of our community, but may the lessons that we learned from Colin of the need for clarity of thought and intellectual rigour lead us forwards. And let us also remember that we can temper all of that clarity and rigour with a dash of humour. As Colin said to one student about that student’s work: ‘Sometimes, what is worse than being misunderstood is being understood.’

Tuesday, 4th December

Nicholas Hlobo’s monstrously engorged black rubber creature fills an entire gallery at the Stevenson on Joost Buckland’s ‘Fiction as Fiction (or a ninth Johannesburg Biennale)’ in the latest show to open for the Cape Town summer season. A longing for the reinstatement of the Johannesburg Biennale, presented only twice, in 1995 and 1997 is a perennial theme in the South African art world, and here Buckland expertly puts together his concept of what such an event might have looked like today… It is hard to single out artists in this fine show, but look out for strong work by Kemang Wa Lehulere as you walk into the Stevenson.

The New Church Gallery in Tamboerskloof, Cape Town

The first big show to start the ball rolling was the opening of the innovative New Church Gallery, the brainchild of collector Piet Viljoen, who took the unprecedented (iin South Africa) step of buying an entire house to display a changing selection of  works from his exceptional collection.

Wim Botha, Amanda Bloch and Piet Viljoen

Half of the top floor of the Victorian house in New Church Street has been removed to make a space for large scale installations – in the case of the first show, curated by Penny Siopis and appropriately called No. 1 - the dominating work is a suspended steel and fluorescent light tube work by Wim Botha. Other artists on the show included Bridget Baker, Paul Edmunds and Georgina Gratrix. In his opening speech, Viljoen talked of how his love of art had enriched his life, and finished by encouraging his audience to ‘Buy art!’ If only … The New Church will be open by appointment, and soon perhaps at a regular time weekly.

Brett Murray, Sanell Aggenbach, and Jeanne and Conrad Botes.

On Wednesday of last week, Mikhael Subotzky’s Standard Bank Young Artist show, ‘Retinal Shift’ opened at the National Gallery in Cape Town. The crowds at the opening did not allow for sustained viewing of the artist’s four channel video based on an interview with of one of guards at the Monument Theatre in Grahamstown, where the show started. But one was able to view a multitude of photos from Subotzky’s working life, hung salon style and utterly riveting.

Mikhael Subotzky stands in front of photographs of his own eyeballs, a key image in ‘Retinal Shift’ 

Last night, thick black braided ropes guided viewers up the steps of the City Hall and towards installations by local artists. One trail led to a little nook under the stairs, lined with tartan plastic. There, if you had the patience to sit down for a few hours, a Congolese duo would add braids to your own hairdo, making it as spectacular as you wished. It was all a part of the GIPCA Live Art Festival, which, in a five day programme, included performances all around the city.

Hair braiding as performance on GIPCA’S  Live Art Festival

Opening at the Goodman in Cape Town on the 18^th, is the latest William Kentridge exhibition, with the rather South African sounding title of ‘NO, IT IS’. Perfectly timed for the summer season.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

It can be a mistake to take biographical information which appears on the internet as accurate.  I recently visited struggle veteran Vesta Smith (above) in her Noordgesig, Soweto home. On her wall, was a powerful and moving poem especially commissioned by the Legal Resources Centre to honour Vesta for her enormous contribution to the struggle in South Africa. The poem was given to Vesta at a special ceremony in August this year, and lauds her courage and tenacity.

The mistake? The poem hails Vesta  as a ‘resilient daughter of Sophiatown’  - (probably the most famous Johannesburg area to undergo forced removals) but in fact,  Vesta  was not born or ever lived in Sophiatown.  

The Alps float behind the city of Bern

From Johannesburg, I went on to Bern, in Switzerland. I have been appointed guest curator for next year’s Sommerakademie at the Paul Klee Zentrum, and this was a planning session for next August. Artists and curators under the age of  35 are eligible for selection, and can either be nominated by one of the designated nominators … or can nominate themselves. Twelve will be chosen for the two week event.  So if you want to know more, check out the website, www.zpk.org

Sigmar Polke’s agate windows

My last day in Switzerland was spent  in Zurich with Jacqueline Burckhardt, director of the Sommerakademie, and co-editor of Parkett magazine.  One of her past curatorial projects was to find an artist to design new windows for the Grossmunster Church in Zurich, a project completed in 2009. German painter Sigmar Polke chose sliced agate to make this glowing window, one of the series of 12. A remarkable solution to classic stained glass. It was his last project before his death.

October 27, 2012

Joost Bosland sent me this pic of Penny Siopis’ name up in lights at the Prince Charles Cinema in London’s Leicester Square. As part of the events around mega art fair Frieze, where the Stevenson Gallery was showing for the first time, Penny was invited to screen her four short films, made between 1997 and 2012. The programme was entitled ‘This is a True Story’. 

 Video still from Penny Siopis’ ‘The Master is Drowning’ 2012

For her films, Penny combines documentary footage with found home movie inserts, often sourced from charity shops, to create a strange crossover between historical fact, like the attempted assassination of Nationalist prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, and the random. Old film footage has a very particular quality, a colour range which cannot really be reproduced with contemporary materials, which locate her films firmly in the past. At the same time, the disjuncture between the narrative and the images on the screen gives them an almost hallucinatory, dreamlike quality which relates to the fragmentary and imperfect nature of memory. 

  A performance by Pedro Gomez-Egena’s paper dinosaur at Blank Projects

‘Machine Worries, Machine Hearts’ was the title of a group show curated by Anthea Buys which took the ambivalent relationship between humans and machines as a theme. One evening this week, an appreciative crowd witnessed a paper dinosaur make the slow descent from a high, threatening stance to a grovel on the floor. 

The artist was South American Pedro Gomez-Egena, and his koki and cut paper dinosaur controlled by wires and weights showed that successful large scale kinetic sculptures can be made from the simplest materials.

 Johannesburg style captured by blogger Scott Schuman on The Sartorialist

As many of you probably already know, fashion photographer Scott Schumann is one of the most indefatigable bloggers around, often updating his site www.thesartorialist.com more than once a day with great street style shots from around the world. 

Late this week, some images appeared datelined Downtown Johannesburg, including the one above. The comments column carried responses both from Joburgers swooning that Scott had actually arrived in Jozi, and the usual comments directed at the clothes and the style of the person in the pic.

Predictably, a few people said they thought the woman in the background more interesting than the man. I liked this response from Camille Reddress: 

Funny how lots of people want to see ‘the woman in the background’. They see an African woman in a headwrap and a burden on her head and see it as more ‘exotic’ or ‘authentic’. Interesting. That is why I love your shots Scott because you photograph what you see not what is perceived to be ‘typical’ of a place or people.
Yep, this S.A man loves his camel coat and he looks amazing in it.

Atish Jogi then commented:

The shoes are old golf shoes, it is likely that this man has worked as or is currently working as a caddy at one of the many golf courses in Johannesburg. Great Shot! Welcome to South Africa!

This know-it-all response received a come-uppance from Energie who wrote:

I’m sorry, but you have absolutely no way of being able to make that assumption – he could have bought the shoes, or assuming they are golf shoes, he could be a golf player. You have no way of assuming that he is/was a caddy.

In South Africa, even comments on fashion blogs reflect attitudes towards race and gender.