14
ART
15 August 2018
New exhibition opens at FynArts Gallery
T
he FynArts Gallery, in collaboration with Lizamore & Associates, will showcase a solo exhibition by Lwandiso Njara entitled Engineering the New Jerusalem II, which opens on Friday 18 August. Growing up in a traditional Xhosa household, Lwandiso Njara’s Catholic schooling by nuns from India and Switzerland exposed him to different ideologies and technologies. In Engineering the New Jerusalem II, Njara depicts his understanding of a changing identity – as influenced by his upbringing and education. This body of work takes form in pen, graphite & charcoal drawings, and sculptures in PPC cement, resin, animal bone and steel. The artist portrays a cross-pollinated sense of identity which emerges from the physical hybridity of his sculptures and drawings. “I believe that my work resembles or explores the new contemporary robotic or technological African urban identity,” says the artist. He often blatantly merges polarities in one body through using the lamb, the goat and the cow fused with mechanical gears and engines, all acting as signifiers for the artist’s own hybrid sense of identity. Njara was born in 1987, in Libode, Eastern Cape. He obtained his Matric certificate at Port Elizabeth College
Lwandiso Njara’s solo exhibition of drawings, Engineering the New Jerusalem II will open at the FynArts Gallery in The Courtyard on Friday. and a BTech (Fine Art) from the Tshwane University of Technology. Among his proudest accomplishments are the 2009 runner-up award and the 2014 Merit award he won at the PPC Young Sculptor Competition. He also won first prize in the Thami Mnyele Fine Arts Awards in 2012. Njara’s work has been shown in several group exhibitions and three solo exhibitions entitled Altar, Engineering a New Jerusalem I and Engineering a New Jerusalem II. The artist regularly exhibits with Lizamore & Associates and his work has been shown at the Cape Town Art Fair, the Turbine Art Fair, Trent Art Gallery in
Pretoria and the Ron Belling Art Gallery in Port Elizabeth, amongst others. Njara’s work is centered on the contradictions between his Catholic education and ancestral Xhosa rituals. The artist treats these two polarities as binary opposites which he does not necessarily seek to resolve, but rather uses to construct a new emergent identity. His work can be viewed as a negotiation between his Catholic education and his traditional upbringing; not in any way suggesting that identities are singular and fixed, but that
they could possibly be perceived as multi-faceted and fragmented. Through his pieces, he explores an experience of identity construction, spiritual awakening and development during his boyhood years in rural Transkei. He brings this investigation of his own identity in conversation with the human existence within technocratic social orders. These post-colonial constructs of identity are explored through the use of large bronze/concrete sculptural works. Njara’s work is often unpolished and raw, exposing the internal workings of machines through tools, cogs and mecha-
nisms. These relate to his need to deconstruct these binaries and consider each mechanism’s contribution to his identity and reflect the hybrid contemporary African identity. Although Njara’s work conveys a personal investigation of his identity, this exploration can be applied to a collective conscious, where the diversity within South Africa is creating a hybrid third culture, and essential, separatist, understandings of identity are disappearing as our nation becomes transconscious. The exhibition will be opened by Gordon Froud at 17:30 on Friday.
