BUSINESS ART November 2009 | E-mail: subs@arttimes.co.za | Member of the Global Art Information Group
A Dream come true: Circa is a Mark Read’s dream project on the corner of Jan Smuts and Jellicoe Road, Rosebank, Johannesburg
Photo: Tristan McLaren
Johannesburg ablaze with new creativity Alex Dodd looks into the new and exciting creative flames Johannesburg has to offer SA Yesterday I had the luck of arriving at the corner of Jan Smuts and Jellicoe Road just in time for the unfolding of a small historic moment. Two men were climbing up the huge metal grid wall opposite Circa gallery that, in a matter of months, will be covered in lush green foliage. A few steps down from Everard Read Gallery, Circa is a Mark Read’s dream project. This extraordinary oval-shaped building has been designed by architect Pierre Swanepoel of Studio MAS Architects & Urban Design to host exhibitions and events that will both fascinate and educate. Read intends for it to be a space ‘where contemporary art will show alongside rare cultural curiosities, where ancient fossils will interface with modern biodiversity, and where green technology will co-exist with a piece of the moon.’
The site was abuzz with eleventh-hour activity in the runup to next week’s grand opening, with construction workers putting the final touches on Speke, the downstairs shop (a joint venture between Read and Mark Valentine from Amatuli Fine Art), which will feature a selection of iconic artefacts. Artworks by Karel Nel and Willem Boshoff were being unpacked in preparation for the inaugural exhibition, entitled Penelope and the Cosmos. And outside two brave men were scaling up the wall with a huge banner rolled up under their arms. When the men got to the top, those looking on collectively inhaled for one fleeting moment, before the banner unfurled down the length of the wall, grabbing the attention of drivers passing by on Jan Smuts. And there it was: the graphic announcing the first exhibition to be taking place in this dazzling new addition to Johannesburg’s cultural landscape. Afterwards I took a slow spiral-
ing meander around the outside of the building upwards to the top floor, which houses the Darwin Room, a plush private lounge likely to develop a bit of cult status as the space comes into its own. Plushly decorated by Christine Read, this salonstyle retreat complete with lustrous grey silk wallpaper adorned with giant insects and arachnids opens out onto a deck with views that stretch as far as the Magaliesberg. Looking out over Johannesburg from the top floor of Circa, one is filled with a sense of expansiveness that is rare in a city so split up and divided by walls. Another zeitgeist project unfolding in Johannesburg in tandem with Berlin’s 20-year celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 is the Goethe-Institut’s Cracking Walls. One of the most daring aspects of this programme is a visionary collaboration with architect Alex Opper and his students at the University of Johannesburg’s Faculty of Art,
Design and Architecture, who were tasked with re-imagining what the Goethe-Institut premises in Parkwood could look like minus the predictable foreboding perimeter wall. An exhibition called Fallwall, currently showing inside the Goethe-Institut, showcases the alternative solutions dreamed up by the students as well as the winning design, which could actually come into effect, replacing the wall with a much more peaceful, inviting parklike atmosphere that renders the building way more open to the public. In a city as violent and crimeridden as Johannesburg, the intentions of some individuals who comprise that ‘public’ aren’t always as filled with peace and love as we might wish them to be, but somehow one dreams of an initiative such as this one setting a daring new precedent in openness in a city that is too strongly governed by defensiveness and fear. Another compelling aspect of
the Cracking Walls programme is Exceeding the Limits: Art Strategy Against the Establishment – a three-day international conference investigating the way in which the arts visualise and reconsider cultural memory. Participants will include filmmakers Rehad Desai and Brian Tilley, writers Ivan Vladislavic, Fred Khumalo and Antjie Krog, satirist Jonathan Shapiro, composer Philip Miller and others… Paranoia and fear in Johannesburg are at the heart of one of the projects comprising international award-winning photographer Mikhael Subotzky’s current show Two Projects, taking place both at the Goodman Gallery and the Goodman project space at Arts on Main. The new large-scale photographs on exhibition downtown are a continuation of Subotzky’s exploration of ‘crime, social marginalisation, and the public and private institutions of punishment and security’, which he began with his Die Vier Hoeke prison series, continued with
Umjiegwana (The Outside), which documented the lives of ex-prisoners, and extended into Beaufort West, an exploration of a community mired in extreme poverty. In this new series Subotzky explores aspects of security in contemporary society. His lens brings us back into touch with the mind-bogglingly absurd aspects of our monitored, walled and guarded lives to which we generally inure ourselves to keep on surviving and staying upbeat about life in gangster’s paradise. But when the anaesthetic cocoon is punctured, you can’t help longing for a society defined by a stronger civic commitment to openness – spatial openness, philosophical openness, political openness. There is so much we in this city can still learn from the world-changing events of 1989. Do we have the courage to bring down our walls? Let them fall to rubble.
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