by Amy on May 22nd, 2012
A brand new solo exhibition by Anton Kannemeyer opens at the Stevenson in Johannesburg on 31 May.
The exhibition, entitled Painting and Prints for Doctors and Dentists, was inspired by his doctor’s suggestion that he pay him for consults in drawings rather than with money. The drawings had to be appropriate for the doctor to hang in his house, which means that this series deviates from Kannemeyer’s characteristically confrontational art to focus on portraiture and landscapes.
Kannemeyer, co-founder of Bitterkomix, and has published several books of his own comic and illustrative art, including Alphabet of Democracy and Pappa in Afrika. The exhibition continues until 29 June.
Stevenson is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Anton Kannemeyer.
The humorous origins of this show lie in a suggestion by Kannemeyer’s doctor that the artist no longer pay him in cash but give him art in exchange for his services. But, whenever Kannemeyer put forward a work in payment, the doctor had to ‘run it by his wife’ who invariably thought the piece was inappropriate for their home. When Kannemeyer’s dentist made the same suggestion, the artist decided it was time for an exhibition of works that ‘doctors and dentists’ might actually want to hang in their houses.
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Image courtesy Stevenson
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by Amy on Apr 24th, 2012
Shoe Shop is an anthology and an experiment in imagining different paths, speaking in different tongues – on Africa, movement, public art, migration, beauty: considering an innate humanity. The book has been shaped to create a space for transformation and fluidity, for care, and for the sole pleasure of movement. It is a site for loitering, waiting, but also for doubt and reserving a space to enquire.
The book begins with the struggle with the ideas that surround public art in South Africa. Public space remains difficult. Historically, ‘land’ is the point of original trauma and injustice. Today still, it is the glaring inequality of the geopolitical landscape that stands as testimony of a continuing structural and social segregation. The hard social realities and the untransformed landscape of apartheid have been addressed in various ways by artists and citizens. Perhaps it is time to rethink and imagine space from the perspective of the passers-by, of people walking and moving through space with their feet on the ground – negotiating, wearing, casting off, at other times weaving through, ideological territories of belonging as dictated by notions of nationality, race or gender.
The idea of migration in South Africa is of particular significance. It would be close to impossible to find a single individual whose history and self-definition are not related to some form of migration – from roving peoples, settlers and trekkers, to the more recent realities of the Group Areas Act and forced removals. Contemporary waves of emigration and immigration have in recent years turned South African urban centres into truly cosmopolitan and pan-African places.
Literal and theoretical notions addressed in the book start with feet, physicality and shoes, moving to real and imagined movements, using invented maps, possible routes, dreams and ideas about the future. The Shoe Shop reader looks at the arts, particularly photography, cinema and literature. This book exists as a bridge between the project, Migration & Media, which started in 2006 in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and its last iteration in Bamako (Mali) in 2011, and an evolving Shoe Shop exhibition and festival to be held in greater Johannesburg in May 2012, which will address physicality and movement as literal and conceptual spaces.
Loiter with intent, but beware of the agapanthus.
Artists featured in the book include Doung Anwar Jahangeer, Penny Siopis, Jürgen Schadeberg, George Osodi, Jyoti Mistry, Ismail Farouk, Emmanuel Bakary Daou, Serge Alain Nitegeka, Kemang wa Lehulere, Musa Nxumalo and Fatoumata Diabaté.
Published by Fanele (an imprint of Jacana Media) in association with the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg.
Contents
Part 1: Walking movements
…just passing through… – Doung Anwar Jahangeer
On walking – Marie-Hélène Gutberlet
Running – Jackie Lebo
The open field: Some notes on the figure of walking in African film – Annett Busch
The hooks of history: Three films – Penny Siopis
Greetings Mr Prez – Gael Reagon
Next week – Guy Wouete
Part 2: Images of and in migrating practices
Pictures from here for the people over yonder: Photography in migratory circuits – Moussa Konaté
Going home – Jodi Bieber
Traces of African migratory identities in the photographic sphere – Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo
Black street – George Osodi
Migrating images: Totemism, fetishism, idolatry – WJT Mitchell
Arriving home and moving on: The photographs of Lisl Ponger in Bamako – Jessica Nitsche
To France or wherever: The Blue Notes and exile in Europe – Max Annas
Family portrait – Sokona Diabaté
Part 3: Dialogues, struggles with ambivalences, family and history
Conversations: Fragments of an oral history of Malian photography – Bärbel Küster
Presence and absence in Sokona Diabaté’s Portrait de Famille – Christoph Singer
Ambiguous gestures, ambivalent images: Migratory aesthetics and contemporary photography – Sissy Helff
Where is home? — Thabiso Sekgala
Musa Nxumalo’s odd futures: Thenjiwe Nkosi in conversation with Musa Nxumalo –Thenjiwe Nkosi and Musa Nxumalo
We won’t move – Jürgen Schadeberg
Part 4: Space for indeterminacy, coexistence, mixing, in-betweenness
Thirty minutes of amnesia – Kemang Wa Lehulere
Applied pressure – Serge Alain Nitegeka in conversation with Joan Legalamitlwa
A Walk in the Night: Breaking the lines of force in postcolonial African narratives – Andries Walter Oliphant
Waiting: Daily rhythm in a time of loitering bylaw enforcement – Ismail Farouk
Bridging movement binaries through time: A description of a work in progress – Jyoti Mistry
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by Amy on Feb 8th, 2012
A new solo exhibition by acclaimed photographer Obie Oberholzer, most recently author of Diesel & Dust, opens at Johannesburg’s Circa gallery on 16 February at 6 PM.
The exhibition, entitled Long Distance, runs until 10 March 2012. Don’t miss it!
In his review of the exhibition, fellow artist Willem Boshoff describes Oberholzer as an “intergalactic traveller and lone planet wanderer”:
So many stars in the sky, but in this life we find few shooting stars – crazy individuals that do not conform as any of the other millions of stars that never leave their posts. Yes, few are set to streak across the skies, often from horison to horison, appearing from apparently nowhere. But what would a shooting star shoot at? Oh, pretty much the stuff that so many photographers find hard to find, and having found never quite seem to kill.
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Image courtesy Liz at Lancaster
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by Amy on Jan 9th, 2012
Photographer Jodi Bieber’s vivid portrayal of Sowetan life be on display during the Goodman Gallery‘s Summer Show, which runs until the 14th of January in their Cape Town gallery. The series of photographs are collected in her book, Soweto, which celebrates the way in which Sowetans are continually re-inventing their urban space. Bieber, who has won numerous awards, including last year’s World Press Photo of the Year Award for her portrait of “Aisha”, will feature in the exhibition alongside other artists, including Kudzanai Chiurai, one of the artists whose work is examined in the book Positions:
Bieber’s Soweto also made the cover of Gateway‘s January Issue, which features a delectable spread from the collection. Catch Bieber and Chiurai in the Goodman Gallery’s Summer Show in Cape Town, at 176 Sir Lowry road, Woodstock.
More about the Goodman Gallery’s Summer Show:
Goodman Gallery Cape presents Summer Show – opening on 15 December and running until 14 January. The exhibition has been designed as a review, focusing on new and recent work by South Africans artists either represented by or associated with the gallery. Important works from series produced by the artists over the past year are showcased, and the show also features a selection of works recently shown at the gallery’s Johannesburg spaces.
The exhibition includes prints from Siemon Allen‘s Records series, in which the artist explores images of South Africa through the collection and archiving of music records from the beginning of the 20th Century to the present day. Photography is strongly represented, with works from Jodi Bieber’s vibrant, urban-denizen take in her Soweto series, in marked contrast with David Goldblatt’s large-scale colour prints of rural South Africa. Mikhael Subotzky (who recently won the 2012 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art) and Patrick Waterhouse show recent work from their ongoing collaboration on the Ponte City project.
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by Amy on Dec 8th, 2011
When it was announced that COP17 would be taking place in Durban, the Goethe-Institute and the Heinrich Böll Foundation commissioned Gabi Ngcobo to curate an exhibition of African artists whose works add a voice to the debate on climate change.
The exhibition, which runs from 23 November 2011 to 19 February 2012 at the Durban Art Gallery, has also been turned into the book, DON’T/PANIC, which features written contributions by Nomaduma Masilela, Sean Slemon, Sean O’Toole and Jyoti Mistry.
Ngcobo was recently interviewed on SAfm, where she described how she went about selecting works for the exhibition:
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by Amy on Dec 7th, 2011
DON’T/PANIC brings together many powerful voices as it engages African artists dealing with the current ecological situation. Many of these voices are critical; sometimes overt, sometimes subtle, sometimes humorous, sometimes standing as an indictment. Some of the works may raise awareness, others offer a vision; some may simply be poetic statements.
DON’T/PANIC contributes to the dialogue around culture and climate change by adding a unique African artistic perspective to the discussion, with written contributions by Gabi Ngcobo, Nomaduma Masilela, Sean Slemon, Sean O’Toole and Jyoti Mistry.
The Goethe-Institut South Africa and the Heinrich-Böll Foundation have partnered to commission the DON’T/PANIC exhibition, taking place at the Durban Art Gallery from 23 November 2011 – timed to coincide with the COP17 Climate Change conference. This book accompanies the exhibition.
Artists featured in this book include:
Batoul S’Himi, Bright Eke Ugochukwu, Clive van den Berg, David Koloane, Dawit L Petros, Doung Anwar Jahangeer, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Donna Kukama, George Osodi, Helen Timm, Jacques Coetzer, John Roome, Jyoti Mistry, Kim Anno, Liesel Prins, Mlu Zondi, Moshekwa Langa, Nástio Mosquito, Nils Burwitz, Nomaduma Masilela, Otobong Kanga, Penny Siopis, Ruth Sacks, Sean O’Toole, Sean Slemon, Thando Mama, Thierry Fontaine, Willem Boshoff and Zamani Makhanya.
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by Amy on Nov 30th, 2011
The title of legendary photographer Obie Oberholzer’s new photographic collection, Diesel & Dust, comes from an old Midnight Oil vinyl record. “The picture on the cover of that record just seemed ideal to me,” Oberholzer said at the launch of the book last night at The Book Lounge.
The photos in Oberholzer’s book embody his “Diesel & Dust” philosophy of freedom: “Freedom is getting into your car and travelling without really knowing what your end destination will be. Freedom is having one arm that is more tanned than the other!”
Diesel & Dust not only contains amazing photographs but also Oberholzer’s anecdotes about his travels. Some of these tales are wickedly funny, such as one about Oberholzer’s “boskak“, while others beautifully poignant, such as the story about a man called Fabulous who was diagnosed with Aids shortly after Oberholzer took his picture.
With a slide show of his photographs, and narrations from his book performed by his wife, Oberholzer took Book Lounge guests on a visual journey through Africa to Egypt and beyond the Red Sea. Initially Oberholzer had also included photos from Australia in the book, “but then we lost against those buggers in the Rugby World Cup and I took out a whole chapter,” Oberholzer said.
The slide show journey started with pictures from South Africa, taken around the time of the Soccer World Cup in 2010. Oberholzer was tasked by the Organising Committee to document some of the fringe activities of the event. So he took a photo of a security guard on strike!
Oberholzer has many pictures of tombstones in small towns, as he likes to sleep in graveyards on his journeys. “Graveyards are very safe,” he said, “and there’s also this spiritual quality”.
Even though Oberholzer calls himself “the infidel” in Diesel & Dust, there is a certain mystical aspect to some of his photos and travels. In Egypt Oberholzer felt compelled by the muezzin prayers to obtain permission to photograph the interior of a mosque.
He also visited places of worship for Coptic Christians, where he took a haunting photo of a big-eyed woman. “This must be what the queen of Sheba looked like,” Oberholzer said, referring to the belief that the Coptic religion has its origin in the Queen’s visit to King Solomon. In Dubai Oberholzer visited his son and photographed a skyscraper as it might be seen from behind a veil.
Oberholzer’s sons no longer live in Africa, and he writes in his book that he is sometimes sad that they cannot travel the D37 with him, “but even worse, that they will slowly forget the wonderful vocabulary of Afrikaans swearing”. Oberholzer, however, keeps returning to the continent. He ended the slide show with photographs from the Caprivi Strip, which remains one of his favourite places in the world.
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Carolyn Meads livetweeted from the launch using #livebooks:
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by Amy on Nov 24th, 2011
Lauren Beukes was recently in Johannesburg where she attended an art exhibition organised by Rory Bester, who set Beukes’ novel Zoo City as a “curatorial problem” for a group of fine art students at Wits University.
Eight student curators were asked to pick eight different themes from the novel, resulting in an exploration of issues including “Afrophobia, amakwerekwere and Hillbrow’s migrant communities”.
As the project was entirely independent and thus out of Beukes’ control, it naturally brought about questions regarding authorial intent. As Beukes notes, “Authorial intent counts but every interpretation is valid.”
One particularly disturbing performance involved performance artist, Murray Kruger, writhing naked in a puddle in a work titled Shadow-self absorption. Beukes notes that the performance, though “disconcerting”, is like fiction in that it makes one “re-evaluate things”:
There is a naked man writhing and hissing in a dirty puddle on the concrete floor beneath a barbed wire mesh ceiling. The gathered crowd watch rapt, cell phones raised like votive candles. His red underpants are tangled around his ankles. He lies face-down, holding his breath, counting one-crocodile-two-crocodile-three crocodile-ten.
This is all my fault. Sort of.
I was thrilled when my publisher, Jacana, emailed to tell me that eight student curators at Wits were putting together a Zoo City-themed exhibition. I’d done cool collaborations around the book before; an official soundtrack from African Dope, and limited edition art toy Bares customised by local designers, in some way inspired by the novel and auctioned off for a children’s refugee charity. But those were projects I personally put together. This was entirely independent and entirely out of my control.
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