Disguise: The Art of Attracting and Deflecting Attention

DISGUISE THE ART OF ATTRACTING AND DEFLECTING ATTENTION

15 MAY – 5 JULY 2008

THE ART OF ATTRACTING AND DEFLECTING ATTENTION Curated by Joost Bosland

MICHAEL STEVENSON

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CONTENTS

Introduction

8

Yto Barrada

62

Nick Cave

Zander Blom

Steven Cohen

120

David Goldblatt Lunga Kama

12

52

Athi-Patra Ruga

108

Installation view with work by Simon Gush

76

92

14

112

48

Kalup Linzy

32

Claudette Schreuders

26

Wim Botha

Simon Gush

80

Zanele Muholi

20

114

Rotimi Fani-Kayodé

100

Natasja Kensmil

68

Nandipha Mntambo

Penny Siopis

46

Dineo Bopape

38

88

Youssef Nabil

64

Berni Searle

70

Artist biographies

138

58

Candice Breitz

104

Dumile Feni

18

Pieter Hugo

126

Julie Mehretu

42

JD ’Okhai Ojeikere

122

Yinka Shonibare MBE

84

Acknowledgements

144

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‘Hot and angry, I rushed to the mirror and with difficulty watched through the mask the working of my hands. But for this the mirror had just been waiting. Its moment of retaliation had come. While I strove in boundlessly increasing anguish to squeeze somehow out of my disguise, it forced me, by what means I do not know, to lift my eyes and imposed on me an image, no, a reality, a strange, unbelievable and monstrous reality, with which, against my will, I became permeated; for now the mirror was the stronger, and I was the mirror.’

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1958), 94-95

‘I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore and I desperately wanted to take the mask off so I wouldn’t have to see anything. I tore off the vegetable string, but the mask stayed on, stuck to my face. I tried to tear it off again, but it was like stripping the skin off my own face. And then the transformation of the wood into flesh became complete and I was suddenly blasted by the earth-shaking bellow of a wild animal beneath me.’

Ben Okri, The Famished Road (London: Vintage Books, 2003), 286

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INTRODUCTION

‘People don’t notice us, they never see Under their noses a Womble may be.’

– The Wombles theme song In popular culture, the archetypal disguise is Superman’s pair of glasses, which turns him into Clark Kent. This story reminds us that, often, that which is disguised is hidden in plain view. Everyone familiar with the movies or comic strips has wondered why Lois Lane does not recognise that her two love interests are one and the same.

It is easy to consign disguise to a world of superheroes and spies. However, disguise is everywhere, from innocuous fancydress parties to people who recreate their entire personalities down to their names.

The reciprocity between a disguise and the disguised is at once perilous and appealing. The former New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl dressed up to avoid recognition at restaurants. While she succeeded in her scheme, she slowly started to sense a loss of self as her fictional restaurant-goers took on lives of their own.

The self is at stake. It can be concealed but also exposed and, ultimately, transformed. In this exhibition, the self-portraits of Wim Botha, Lunga Kama, Dineo Bopape and Nandipha Mntambo traverse this slippery terrain. Where does the agency of the artist end and the disguise take over? What is left of Bopape in her video Dreamweaver? Does Mntambo still control the bull in Europa?

Traces surface unexpectedly. Athi-Patra Ruga’s performance at the opening of Disguise, a staged fight with the artist dressed as an ‘Afrowomble’, left a pattern of body-paint marks on the wall. Despite being disguised, old incarnations linger. When Berni Searle removed the wreath in her new triptych, its ink left a pattern of stains. These traces remind us how memory outlives materiality, but also how it fades or distorts.

Traces generate layers. Penny Siopis uses ink and glue on canvas, sealing it with a deceptively smooth finish. The ink and glue mix and lose their individual characteristics. For Julie Mehretu the erasure becomes the action when she sands out part of the painting: ‘The surface breaks apart like dust. There’s potential in that, I hope. I have a desire to wipe away and reinvent.

Everything becomes specks or smudges and has to be developed again … In New Orleans, Detroit, Berlin, you see that type of erasure happening.1

Like process, architecture conceals too. Simon Gush’s Anticipating Ever invokes Woodstock’s history as a glass district and invites one to look at the process of gentrification, the changing present and an imagined future. David Goldblatt’s photographs of the elaborate administrative structures of the former homelands, built with money from Pretoria, remind us that they disguised labour repositories as independent states.

It is a small step from homelands to drag queens. Evita Bezuidenhout, South Africa’s most famous drag queen, made a career as ambassador to a fictional Bantustan, Bapetikosweti. Sex, gender and disguise are on intimate terms. Think of the movie Kinky Boots, where jaws drop when the flamboyant black drag queen Lola walks around Northampton. Or of Huysuz Virjin, a drag queen and popular talk show host in Turkey, who was told to lay down her frock or give up her show. In this exhibition, the frock is the show for Miss D’vine, La Rochelle, and the American video artist Kalup Linzy.

Dress has the power to liberate. What happens when you put on Nick Cave’s Soundsuit? Do the Marilyn Manson fans in Candice Breitz’s portrait feel liberated from an otherwise pedestrian existence? Recall Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), where a secret society of men tied down in respectable lives organises grandiose masked (heterosexual) sex fests, filled with ritual and escapism. Is disguise addictive or just indispensable?

Disguise has special relevance in Africa. The implications of outward appearance are amplified because of the historical significance of skin colour. The twenty-five artists in this exhibition are all from the continent or one of its diasporas. Some choose to expose, others to camouflage their heritage. Others do neither. In their work, one travels from Nollywood to Moscow, and from Teheran to Mount Umhlazi.

The exhibition navigates between stillness and cacophony. Like disguise itself, it alternates between attracting and deflecting attention – attention to the work, to its maker and to its subject matter. And now you hold the exhibition in your hands, disguised as a catalogue.

Joost Bosland 1 Quoted in Kathan Brown, ‘Julie Mehretu: Unclosed and The Residual’, Crown Point Press Newsletter, Spring 2008 (San Francisco: Crown Point Press), 3

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Installation view with works by Zander Blom, David Goldblatt, Nandipha Mntambo, Penny Siopis, Claudette Schreuders, Dumile Feni and Natasja Kensmil

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David Goldblatt ‘The men imprisoned [on Robben Island] after 1961 for their opposition to apartheid were for many years subjected to conditions of punitive harshness and deprivation by the authorities. Nonetheless, using every conceivable resource, they maintained a disciplined life and developed a rich culture. Japhta Masemola, of the PAC, had a talent for making things from “scraps of nothing”. He made ingenious mousetraps and with snares he caught guinea fowl and hares which supplemented the meager prison diet. He fashioned copies of a key, never discovered by the authorities, which enabled him to get food to prisoners in isolation cells when warders went for lunch. He made a life jacket for a planned escape, and a model house much admired by some warders but maliciously destroyed by others.

‘It was partly angry reaction to this last event and partly the encouragement of an appreciative chief warder that led Masemola to sculpt this group. It commemorates the first political prisoner on the island, the Khoikhoi chief, Autshumato, marooned there by the Dutch and, symbolically, through the cellular underpants “worn” by the sculpture, the modern political prisoners.

‘A founding member of the PAC, Japhta Masemola was arrested for sabotage in 1963 and held in jail for 26 years. In 1971 he was beaten unconscious by warders during an assault on prisoners. He died in a motor accident shortly after his release in 1989. The sculptures were destroyed by the prison authorities in 1992.’

David Goldblatt Excerpt from South Africa: The Structure of Things Then (Cape Town and New York: Oxford University Press and Monacelli Press, 1998), 186

Statue in commemoration of the first political prisoner on Robben Island, Chief Autshumato, and symbolically, by means of the statue’s modern ‘cellular underpants’, the most recent political prisoners on the Island, those of apartheid. Maximum Security Prison, Robben Island. 16 July 1991.

The sculptor was PAC founding member Japhta Masemola Silver gelatin print 69 x 55cm

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Claudette Schreuders ‘I am interested in the idea of awkwardness, of not being quite comfortable. Whether you belong or not and whether you can cope as an individual against society or how you function in a society – basically relationships between people.’1 In Eclipse, a woman holds up an infant. As in the celestial occurrence that gives the sculpture its title, the child eclipses the mother when viewed from the front. The mother holds up the child for it to see and be seen by the world. Or to hide herself.

The model for the sculpture is Schreuders’ childhood friend Esmarie, also the subject of a 1995 sculpture titled with her name. At that time, she was an enthusiastic partygoer in Jo’burg but now she is a new mother and her life centres around her child. The contrast between the two sculptures is startling – Esmarie has aged, and lost a twinkle in her eye. As Schreuders remarks, motherhood ‘means a 24-hour-day, physically and emotionally demanding job which (temporarily) obscures the mother’s pre-motherhood identity’.2 The resemblance of Schreuders’ figures to those of the nineteenth-century American sculptor Asa Ames, seen in a recent exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, is uncanny. He also made woodcarvings of friends and family, which he subsequently painted. In a surviving daguerreotype, Ames, who died in 1851 aged 27, is at work on a portrait of a man. Three of his sculptures, two women and a baby, appear to float behind him and his model. His work reminds us of the rich layers of (sculptural) history, spanning continents and centuries, that are embedded in Schreuders’ figures.

JB 1 Tina Yapelli, ‘Interview with Claudette Schreuders’ in The Long Day (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University Art Museum, 2004), 25 2 Claudette Schreuders, email correspondence, 10 May 2005

Eclipse 2008 Patinated bronze, oil paint 105 x 29 x 41cm Edition of 5 + 1AP Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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Eclipse (detail)

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Dumile Feni ‘They say Christ was like a lamb – gentle like a lamb. No, it can’t be. If what is written in the Bible is true, then Christ was no lamb. He goes into the Temple and grabs these people who are making money there and he throws them out. No, I tell you, he must have been a fighter with quite a reputation. Heavyweight. You can’t just walk into a Temple and throw people out, not even one. These people liked the money, they needed it.

They wouldn’t leave it easily. Just try it in a church today. Try to throw one person out, never mind a thousand.

I tell you they would come and grab you, not a thousand, just two of them and throw you out and call the cops and lock you up. No, Jesus was no lamb.’ – Dumile Feni1 Animism is central to Dumile’s work, and Moji Mokone’s description of the last time he saw the artist, in 1987 in his Bleeker Street digs in the Village, New York City, is testament to this: ‘Every available space on the whitewashed walls of his disheveled disused garage-cum-apartment was daubed with exquisitely drawn graphic figures of milking cows, donkey carts, acrobatic cats striking all sorts of contortions; a hissing head of a cobra peering out of a man’s nostril, stray dogs, monkeys, snakes, chickens, birds, mating frogs, holy cows and hallowed donkeys, etcetera.’2 Whether a figure is half-beast, half-man, or a scene depicts unlikely interactions between species, the line is never quite clear. Animals are used as they are in many myths – to emphasise, and also to mask man’s baser qualities. In this drawing, the confusion between species takes place because, from the vantage point of the audience, the head of the lamb exactly covers the head of one of the two human figures. The face of the other figure is distorted to resemble a mask or skull. Another drawing from 1965, illustrated in the catalogue of the 2005 Dumile Feni Retrospective at Johannesburg Art Gallery (p75), is of a similar composition, though without the second figure.

JB 1 Quoted in Barney Simon, ‘Dumile’ in The Classic, Volume 2, Number 4, 1968, 42 2 Moji Mokone, ‘Tales from “the Goya of the Townships”’, Mail & Guardian, 1-7 March 2002

Who Gets It? 1966 ContĂŠ and charcoal on paper 75 x 54cm

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Nandipha Mntambo JB: Even though some of your previous sculptures have resembled dresses, you have not actually worn them as garments. Why did you decide to start wearing your work?

NM: Before this project, I used my own body to make the casts for my work. But when I was making a bullfighting jacket for myself, I decided to make another jacket as well, which is what you see in these prints. Rather than exhibiting the sculpture, and dealing with the material residue of the animal, and the residue of my own body in its form, these photographs are separate from those elements because you never see the jacket on its own, and you never see the mold that I used either.

I am interested in the residue, in what is left behind after a long process, and now to totally exclude the sculpture takes this idea further.

The title of your new diptych is Mlwa ne Nkunzi. What does this Swazi phrase mean?

Mlwa refers to a fighter and inkunzi is a bull. In the one print I pose as the bullfighter, and in the other I am a bull figure. One could see this as a reference to Swazi tradition, where there is a rite of passage for young men in which they use their fists to beat a bull to death. However, while I was perhaps vaguely familiar with the practice, it was not on my mind when I was working on the piece. I was instead thinking of the image of the Southern European bullfighter.

Bullfighting in the European tradition, too, is a traditionally male domain.

Yes, when I was in Portugal exploring the idea of being trained as a bullfighter, my instructor’s first question was why, as a woman, I wanted to do this. He didn’t even mention the fact that I was South African. I find it interesting that on these separate continents we have the same clearly defined expectations of men and women.

What was your process in realising the print Europa?

I had decided I wanted to turn myself into a bull. I called the abattoir every day for two weeks to find out if they had slaughtered a bull. They would laugh at me but eventually when they killed one they froze it for me. When I went to pick it up I discovered that it was a white bull rather than the brown or a black one I had wished for in order to merge it with my head.

I decided to use ink and spray paint to change its colour. The photographer Tony Meintjes took various pictures of the bull’s head and of myself, and started the digital process of morphing the two.

In Greek mythology, Europa was the young woman whom Zeus seduced by taking on the guise of a bull. Do you feel an affinity for her, because the notion of the bull has seduced you?

I have always been fascinated by the way that the forms of my cowhide sculptures seduce people while the smell and the idea that it is the residue of an animal repel them. By making myself into this animal I was transforming myself into a seductive beast. The fact that Europa was deceived by this animal – which, by the way, was white just like my bull’s head – intrigues me.

A Picasso etching from 1935 titled Minotauromachia, in which the Minotaur is depicted alongside a female bullfighter, comes to mind when looking at your current work.

My process started with a sculpture called Fighters, in which two casts of my own body were positioned in such a way that they appeared to be fighting, dancing or embracing. Thinking about fighting against myself, and how to express that, was part of the beginning of my current work. In another project, I wish to stage a fight in which I am both the fighter and the bull in an abandoned bullfighting stadium in Maputo. My interest in the idea of playing both roles was also inspired by my experience attending bullfights in Portugal. I realised that the feelings experienced by the crowd, the fighter and the bull are very similar – the animal is scared, confused and is fighting to survive; the fighter needs to prove himself but he is also scared of the bull; the crowd is also scared, terrified of what could possibly happen in the ring, but they need the spectacle to happen.

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Europa 2008 Archival ink on cotton rag paper 91 x 91cm Edition of 5 + 2AP Photographer: Tony Meintjes

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Mlwa ne Nkuzi 2008 Diptych, archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper 112 x 84.5cm each Edition of 5 + 2AP Photographer: Lambro

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Penny Siopis The source of Ambush is Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print The Dream of a Fisherman’s Wife (1820).

It shows a huge octopus performing oral sex on a reclining woman, with a smaller octopus kissing her lips. The woman appears relaxed – in another world. Another world is of course where she is – octopus sex is a fantasy, not a reality. And the powerful way Hokusai works with this fantasy makes this print so erotic. Tentacles are like fingertips, arms, legs and tongues.

They caress as much as grasp and grip, and the tonic of violent possession is ever-present. There is also a kind of wild formlessness or informality in the octopus, where its shape alters radically and disturbs any sense of equilibrium.

The print is from a category of erotic Japanese prints called Shunga, part of the larger phenomenon of ‘Ukiyo’ or ‘the floating world’, the name given to Japanese depictions of domestic life that began in 17th century Edo (now Tokyo), which included licensed pleasure. Shunga prints were said to have functioned as sex manuals for new lovers. They became popular in the West in the 19th century not long before censorship laws were introduced in Japan banning the depiction of sexual intercourse, especially the picturing of the penis. Hokusai’s Dream thus became a powerful influence on subsequent depictions of sexuality in Japan, with tentacles an obvious disguise for the penis. In fact, in the contemporary genres of manga and anime, a special category is reserved for ‘tentacle porn’.

Fantasy is something we do and don’t act out. We do, in that we can picture our wildest dreams. Yet to give these dreams more concrete form is indirect (literal acting out could have comic or tragic consequences). We invariably attach ourselves to a surrogate or proxy of sort, and not only for practical reasons but for the fact that the ‘thing’ we want to express, and desire, is actually unrepresentable. Sometimes we find a good guise, sometimes we don’t. Hokusai’s octopus seems the perfect proxy for transgressive, all encompassing sexuality, where desire may be ‘bound’ but not safely contained in a very elegant and precise aesthetic.

When I first saw this Hokusai image it struck me as paradigmatic of erotica at a remove, in a sort of displacement or disguise that offers little of the stability and safety such things are usually meant to promise.

Ambush itself is a large canvas stained in ink and glue. The liquidity of the ink and viscosity of the glue curdle into forms reminiscent of Hokusai’s image. But the forms are bloody, liquid, energetic, congealed to the edge of formlessness; a kind of unsettling primary organic process of becoming. This assertive, excessive materiality disguises Hokusai’s image as much as

it gives it shape. The closest I can get to the feeling this has for me is the base materialism of Georges Bataille’s ‘informe’.

Much of what I do veers between control and contingency. Form is liquid, almost animal; what arises (and I try to maintain the surprise of first marks, of primal stuff) is what dries, what comes to rest, what survives.

Apparently westerners have interpreted Hokusai’s image as a rape scene. Others have seen the octopus as a kind of Zeus who disguised himself as an animal to ravish unsuspecting young women. In reality or myth, the octopus has special qualities.

The octopus is a master of disguise. It camouflages itself in its habitat. When all else fails, it confuses its presumed predators by squirting dark, black ink in their path and around itself. For copulation it uses a detachable ‘arm’. It can squeeze through a space no bigger than its eyeballs. It sees everything all at once and, remarkably, has no blind spot. It has three hearts and its nervous system is highly complex. It is allegedly brilliant at ‘problem solving’, leading some to speak of its intelligence, an intelligence so sophisticated that it can be neurotic. Intelligence is often judged by the capacity for deception, for disguise. As a clever, sexual creature the octopus has stimulated and animated many sexual fantasies. Some of these are hinted at in the text that structures the white habitat of the canvas. The words string together myriad expressions of sexual transgression, culled from high literature, poetry, technical documents, psychosexual narratives, pornography. The authors I use include Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Antonin Artaud, Anaïs Nin, Angela Carter and Jeffrey Eugenides, as well as some more demotic texts from trashy sources. These words largely replace the original text in the Hokusai image but I have included a translation of this text (as silly as it actually is) along with these erotic expressions. Strung together these texts tie up (loosely) to create another story.

Penny Siopis

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Ambush 2008 Ink, glue and oil on canvas 200 x 250cm

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Ambush (detail)

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Natasja Kensmil In the play Anastasia by Marcelle Maurette, two men try to convince the Empress that the woman they have brought to her is her missing granddaughter. After an initial skepticism, the Empress, overcome by emotion, wants to believe them: EMPRESS: Malenkaia! I couldn’t believe it at first. You’ve come from so far away, and I’ve waited so long for you. (She is pulling off her glove) Don’t cry, just rest yourself and don’t speak. You are warm, you are alive, that is enough … I can stand no more for now. Can’t you hear how that weary old heart of mine is beating? I must go, but don’t be afraid. I shall come back … I need you. (She is visibly overcome, leaning over against the settee. She rises; ANNA reaches out, clutching her dress) No, let go of my dress. That is what you used to do as a child … (She is crying and laughing) Be sensible, Malenkaia, I’ll go as I used to, speaking to you as I left the side of your little bed. We will go – tomorrow if you like – to my old palace in Finland. It is still there and it’s still mine. There is a very old man there, our lamplighter. Each night he goes from one room to another lighting the empty lamps until, for him, the great, dark rooms are ablaze with light. The other servants take no notice.

They realize that he is childish. And perhaps that is true of us all, and we are lighting dead lamps to illumine a grandeur that is gone … Good night, Anastasia. (She makes the sign of the cross as if blessing her) And please, if it should not be you … don’t ever tell me! 1 Anastasia Romanov was the youngest daughter of Nicholas II, the last Czar of Russia. After his abdication in 1917, the Czar, his wife and their five children were imprisoned and ultimately murdered in captivity by the new Bolshevik regime in 1918.

Gregori Rasputin, the mystic and family friend whose influence over the Romanovs helped fuel anti-Czarist sentiment, purportedly predicted their gruesome end before his own untimely death in 1916. But popular theories abounded in which the young princess escaped death and continued her life under a different guise. The best documented case is that of Anna Anderson, who died in 1984 after a life-long quest to be recognised as Anastasia. Subsequent DNA tests have exposed Anna’s imaginative and detailed account of her life as fiction, but the notion that Anastasia survived the execution persisted.

The title of Natasja Kensmil’s triptych, The Exorcism of Anastasia Romanov, refers to the quest to determine the late Grand Duchess’ fate through science and imagination. Serendipitously, on April 30 of this year, as Kensmil laid a last hand on these drawings, Associated Press announced that a team of scientists from the University of Massachusetts had solved the Romanov mystery through DNA tests that positively identified newly recovered remains as those of the Romanov family.

Kensmil’s use of history and the scope of her ambition recall Hegel’s ruminations on the power of art ‘to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible’ through ‘the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions’.2 She approaches the world with the belief that ‘the present comes into existence after a negotiation with the past’,3 and in the same way that her drawings consist of layers superimposed upon one another, erasing images to create new ones, so historical events inscribe a landscape with meaning. ‘One can determine the fate of a culture from the history of the space it inhabits, or which it overlooks.’ The execution of the Romanov family is a rich historical event, pitting forces of mysticism against atheism, the state against the family, the communist utopia against the old European feudal idyll. ‘The mystery of the undiscovered body of Anastasia Romanov fascinates me because the spirit of the absent individual is being kept alive for all those years. It determines, and creates, many divergent political interpretations of the attack on the Romanovs. The mystical aspect of this story creates a space waiting to be filled.’ And while the scientific mystery is now solved, Anastasia’s myth will persist.

JB 1 Marcelle Maurette, Anastasia (New York: Random House, 1955), 121 2 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 51 3 Quotes by Natasja Kensmil from email correspondence, April 2008

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The Exorcism of Anastasia Romanov 2008 Triptych, charcoal and oil pastel on paper Left panel 153 x 150cm, middle 152 x 150cm, right 146 x 150cm Courtesy of Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam

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Zander Blom The seductive, seemingly abstract photographs of Zander Blom’s Drain of Progress project are the result of playful, do-ityourself interventions in his working space. In the corners of his studio, using the architecture as his canvas, he creates patterns with cardboard, paint, tape and other available materials. He photographs his creations, after which they are either altered or destroyed. Mimicking the unique nature of paintings and sculptures, he prints the photographs in editions of one.

Blom’s project and its accompanying book present themselves with pomp. The cover of the catalogue announces its imagined, and imaginary, status as a catalogue raisonné. The production values of the book signal respectability, and its faded cloth and lettering create the impression that the book has been around for a long time (the artist, on the other hand, has not – Blom is 25 years old). Moreover, a number of pages in the book contain self-conscious, bombastic pronouncements about Blom’s engagement with Modernism’s greats, from critics such as Clement Greenberg to painters like Jackson Pollock.

The narrative presented by the catalogue and related press releases frays on closer inspection. A first hint lies in the errata sheets included in the publication. Perhaps they reflect an obsession with detail and intolerance of error, adding to the project’s self-importance. But their contents suggest an altogether different interpretation. Ranging from the serious to the silly (like Errata Sheet 11, which inserts, without context or apparent purpose, an inane doodle of a demonic creature), they make a farce of the convention. In Blom’s introduction he writes that The Drain of Progress is a ‘corrupted, unachieved, undeserved and incomplete Catalogue Raisonné’.1 Blom admits that his pretence regarding Modernism is an alibi to engage in what he likes doing most – fiddling with form in everyday life.2 He disguises his actual project, which fits uncomfortably with dominant themes in contemporary South African art. In fact Blom has more affinity with someone like Thomas Demand, who also creates transient scenes devoid of human presence for the sole purpose of photographing them before they are destroyed, than with any of the Modernist artists Blom overtly quotes.

JB 1 Zander Blom, The Drain of Progress: A Catalogue Raisonné 2004-2007 (Johannesburg: Rooke Gallery, 2007), 7 2 Ibid

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Previous page

Untitled Bedroom 1, Corner 3 3.14pm, Thursday, 29 March 2007 2007 Ultrachrome ink on cotton rag paper 55.9 x 80.5cm Edition of 1 + AP Facing page

Untitled or Dynamic Decomposition Bedroom 1, Corner 3 6.56pm, Sunday, 20 May 2007 2007 Ultrachrome ink on cotton rag paper 55.9 x 80.5cm Edition of 1 + AP Courtesy of Rooke Gallery, Johannesburg

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Julie Mehretu Buildings are the places we shape and reshape our lives. There is a red house at the end of the street with a purple door, in the land of Mordor. Corridor. And crows that sit in parliaments. Riddle me this. My father has fallen into earth and his language follows behind him. My love is like a breath in a cold dark cave and time. I pick through the ruins of Julie’s art in silence. ...

Her characters do not colonize the clean lines of architecture. The lines colonize the chaos. This is Lagos. So what if the streets end in swaps? It’s like when you begin by drawing a circle, matt says, and end up with an eye.

• What do you see in this work?

There is a trumpet blowing a black star. Bald-headed African soldiers goosestep with rocket launchers. They haven’t eaten in days. Gandhi’s funeral cortege moving through the heart of a nation and Einstein weeps for his loss. DBNL Squared, I believe is the right equation.

Somebody is throwing a poem at a tank and another to the left laughs as his lover says, yes, yes, yes. Is that Gandalf dressed like the Pope? A dark sun, a dark son. In the storm there is a motorized crane reaching for a power line, its neck bent out of shape like a giraffe with a broken neck. African women swaying in the sun.

Julie believes Addis Ababa is the center of the world. No she doesn’t. This is nothing more than a child drawing the world in the sand. A careless foot smudges it. It is still the world. ...

Perhaps it is not Julie’s paintings that need excavation.

Perhaps the paintings demand that we excavate ourselves.

Perhaps Julie is not a cartographer, but a lens grinder.

Perhaps these paintings are layers of reality and history and politics.

Perhaps Julie is a shaman and these marks are her personal language.

• How come we all speak it?

Chris Abani Excerpt from ‘Layer Me This’ in Parkett, No 76, 2006

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Previous page

The Residual 2007 Colour sugar lift and spit bite aquatints with hard-ground etching, drypoint and burnishing 103.5 x 127.6cm Edition of 25 Facing page

Unclosed 2007 Colour hard-ground etching with spit bite aquatint and drypoint 103.5 x 127.6cm Edition of 25 Courtesy of Crown Point Press, San Francisco

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David Goldblatt David Goldblatt has been photographing people and places in Johannesburg for some 55 years. He is bringing together this immense body of work in a book to be published at the end of 2009. It will be entitled TJ, the old car registration prefix for the city, and will comprise both black-and-white and more recent colour photographs, including many previously unpublished images.

Jo’burg is a city of dreams and broken dreams, a conglomerate of paradoxes and disguises. Opulence and adversity exist side by side, and the shift or slip from one to the other is a common occurrence. In the early days a gold nugget, or now a BEE deal, could create instant wealth but in this city of continuous change, a new building or set of characters quickly overlays yesterday’s heroes and losers. Tuscan-style villas, casinos and malls and Edwardian-inspired tower blocks and mansions mask the contemporary African reality of the landscape and camouflage new riches as old money. In the early 1970s, when this photograph were taken, the black underclass surely survived in this city of gold by hoping and dreaming, by imagining other realities from the harsh circumstances in which they lived. In this photograph, taken at a gathering of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the Jabulani Stadium in Soweto, a backdrop of rolling alpine hills masks the reality of dusty, wintery townships on the Transvaal highveld.

Michael Stevenson

Gathering of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jabulani Stadium, Soweto, Johannesburg. 1972 Silver gelatin print 55 x 55cm

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Simon Gush For Disguise, Simon Gush replaced a window in the gallery’s façade with a cottage window made of panels of hand-blown glass. Through this uneven glass, visitors can contemplate the rapidly changing neighbourhood of Woodstock. The area was once home to an artisanal glass industry, and the characteristic fern motif of Woodstock glass is engraved in the bottom right corner as a reminder of this tradition.

JB: How did you decide to look at Woodstock’s gentrification as a form of disguise?

SG: My original idea was to look at disguise in relation to architecture and how this might conceal or reveal ideologies. This led me to think about gentrification in the context of the gallery’s move to Woodstock. Gentrification is a complex issue, and the way in which artists and galleries are used as part of the process is well documented.

The more I thought about gentrification, the more it seemed to fit with the idea of disguise. The process is steeped in the creation of an idea or image of a place. This idea is used to attract business and investment to the area. Gentrification is a particular kind of development in which the capital comes from private sources as opposed to government funding and so this image is crucial. Of course there are many other issues arising from the nature of this process.

Your interest in gentrification goes back to when you lived in the Johannesburg CBD. In the meantime, your work has focused on other themes. How does this interest fit in with your larger project?

A way of describing this might be to quote Douglas Gordon in conversation with Liam Gillick: ‘We no longer come across anything for the first time, we always arrive mid-flow.’ I think one could add that we always leave mid-flow too.

My interest and knowledge are very much based on the fact that I lived in the Johannesburg CBD during a process of gentrification, although I don’t know if this ever formed the most explicit part of my work while I lived there.

I do think of my work as having a larger project but it is moving in new directions all the time and also often looks back at earlier concerns. Broadly speaking, I am concerned with producing works, like this one, that are sensitive to the context of their production, display and dissemination.

Your approach to gentrification stands apart from the usual Marxist-driven critique of the process, where concern for those forced to move as rents and property values rise is matched with contempt for those responsible. You are less judgmental.

I think there may be two issues at hand here. The first is the ethics of gentrification and the second is the place of the artist within this process. I am not looking to negate some kind of stance on gentrification but rather to find a way of talking about it in which the conversation does not reduce it. Development is a key concern in South Africa and Woodstock will certainly benefit from the injection of capital; however, this does not mean that there are not major problems associated with it.

As an artist, I believe there is a need to take positions but in this case I don’t feel that it is necesssary to point out the same problems. I also don’t live there and it is not my immediate environment. I have seen too many photographs by artists of poor people affected by bad development policies to find this an interesting approach. I am more interested in opening up questions about what is happening and what ideologies are at play. The piece encourages viewers to look at the neighbourhood through a distorted image of nostalgia. So, in a way, I have attempted to make visible a major tool of the ideology. But the audience still have to think for themselves. There are no easy answers to the problem and I don’t want my work to provide them.

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Anticipating Ever 2008 Hand-blown glass, wood 140 x 195cm

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David Goldblatt A thread running through David Goldblatt’s essay examining the ideology of architecture in his book, South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, was the follies of apartheid. One of the National Party government’s most deluded follies, intended to disguise the harsh realities of apartheid, was the Bantustans. By forcing blacks to become citizens of these unviable puppet states, South Africa’s black population would be reduced and the illusion that apartheid was functional would be enhanced. In these four photographs Goldblatt considers, in characteristic calm yet critical manner, these absurd administrative buildings in the homelands, constructed in remote parts of the country and paid for by the apartheid government in Pretoria. These buildings usually formed part of elaborate and lavish town-planning exercises, which included pastiches of all the symbols of statehood in their schemes to disguise the homelands as independent African states.

Not coincidentally it was South Africa’s most famous drag queen, Evita Bezuidenhout, who made a career as ambassador to a fictional Bantustan, Bapetikosweti. In his autobiography, Between the Devil and the Deep, Pieter-Dirk Uys recalls how Evita got her job: ‘Around this time, the homelands were born. The Transkei was ripped prematurely from the body of the land, and Bophuthatswana appeared from an expensive Caesarean, its five barren pieces spread across the motherland like bits of a dismembered body.

“Ludicrous, absurd, crazy!” they all shouted.

“Wonderful!” I whispered, because it was real. It was policy. And a perfect job for a non-existent diva. Evita would become the South African Ambassador in her own homeland! …

‘We had to find a name for a fictitious homeland that would sound as absurd as the real ones … the combination of familiar sounds … resulted in ‘Bapetikosweti’.

‘And so Evita Bezuidenhout became the South African Ambassador to the Independent Homeland Republic of Bapetikosweti, a homeland also fractured into pieces, with lavish hotel and casino, and an entertainment centre where South African laws could be put on hold and tits flashed.’1

The notion of disguise was taken further by Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the chief minister of the homeland KwaZulu, on the occasion of the opening of the Legislative Assembly on 2 April 1982, when he argued that:

If there is wishful thinking amongst some of our brothers and sisters in exile [the ANC], that this building is an edifice of what they call destructive tribalism, there is also other wishful thinking. There is the wishful thinking of the National Party that this noble edifice can be turned into a base for yet another pathetic miserable quasiindependent state. Let these two groups of wishful thinkers confound each other with their distortions and lack of perception, but let us here gathered today see this building for what it is … The KwaZulu Legislative Assembly building is a functional building designed to enable us to participate in modern administration, using the most updated technology available. … The science of management cannot be practised under thorn trees.2

Many of these buildings are now shadows of their former glorious selves. Yet the power of architecture to convey an ideology continues to find expression in the new South Africa. At some point, Goldblatt could produce a Structures Revisited, and he would bring our awareness to the symbolic, and often pretentious, architecture of our times and that which it disguises.

MS 1 Pieter-Dirk-Uys, Between the Devil and the Deep: A memoir of acting and reacting (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2005), 143-144.

2 Quoted in David Goldblatt, South Africa: The Structure of Things Then (Cape Town and New York: Oxford University Press and Monacelli Press, 1998), 253-4

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Offices of the Department of Economic Affairs and/or the Department of Justice, Civic Square, Bisho, capital of the Republic of Ciskei (Eastern Cape). 10 July 1990.

The architects were Osmond Lange Silver gelatin print 55 x 69cm

The Legislative Assembly Building, Giyani, capital of the Republic of Gazankulu (Limpopo Province). 10 April 1989.

The architects were the Partnership Jan van Wijk Silver gelatin print 55 x 69cm

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The Legislative Assembly Building of the non-independent Bantustan of KwaZulu with a memorial to Shaka, King of the Zulus, Ulundi (KwaZulu-Natal). 27 May 1990.

The architects were Moolman, Van der Walt, Vlok and Van der Westhuizen. The sculptor was Naomi Jacobson Silver gelatin print 69 x 55cm

The National Monument of the Republic of Ciskei at Ntaba kaNdoda (Eastern Cape). 10 July 1990.

The architects were Zakrzewski Associates Silver gelatin print 55 x 69cm

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Wim Botha

Paradiso, XVII, XXV, excerpts, via Babel Fish from Italian

Generic Self-portrait as an Exile 2008 Carved Learner’s Dictionaries (Afrikaans, English, isiZulu, seSotho) 46 x 32 x 27cm

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Generic Self-portrait as an Exile (detail)

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Yto Barrada Yto Barrada turned to photography while conducting research on Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank as a doctoral student in political science. She felt that the formal requirements of a dissertation left no room to convey the personal or bizarre in the stories she witnessed. Moving back to Morocco, she found herself living near another politically contentious border, this time between Europe and Africa, and since 1997 she has examined the impact of the Strait of Gibraltar on the people living on its shores. In an interview with Charlotte Collins, Barrada explains her fascination with the border: ‘What inspired me is I looked through my window and that’s what you see. You see a border, you see all these discussions about the Mediterranean Sea, the mother of all seas, the fact that we all come from the same place, all these discourses about love and sharing, and the actual situation is much more violent. That space is a border, it’s a closed border ... Legally, nobody can get out of the country – “nobody” meaning a big, big majority ...

‘The fact that the border is closed creates this situation of longing, desire to cross, and the violence of that desire is that it’s confronted [by] a wall. What I try to describe in my images is that state, that situation. The imaginary place that the Strait of Gibraltar becomes, because since the border is closed many people [try to cross it], all the time ... People try to cross illegally, on little boats. ‘“To cross” is called “to burn” because you burn your past, your identity, your papers, because if you’re caught on the other side ... you’re sent back right away. So there’s this obsession to get [to] the other side ... that animates the streets of the city of Tangier, that governs everything you do from the morning to the night.’1 In The Smuggler, we see a tradeswoman who has devised a way to earn a living within this contested terrain. Ceuta is a Spanish enclave on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, which for customs purposes is considered part of Europe. The method used by the smuggler, hiding goods under her dress, recalls the strategy used by women in the resistance movement in neighbouring Algeria. In a practice depicted in the seminal 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, women smuggled guns and explosives across French checkpoints beneath their traditional clothing, exploiting French sexism and preconceptions about Muslim culture.

JB 1 Yto Barrada and Charlotte Collins, ‘Morocco Unbound: An interview with Yto Barrada’, OpenDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net/ arts-photography/barrada_3551.jsp)

The Smuggler’s Belt, Steps 1 to 9 For the past 30 years, TM has made regular trips to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta to smuggle back fabrics, clothing and brand-name goods ordered by shop owners in Tangier.

Because she is an older woman, Tax and Customs Officers usually do not search inside her coat at the border.

2006 Archival inkjet print 144 x 110cm Edition of 5 + 2AP Courtesy of Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Beirut/Hamburg

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Youssef Nabil In these two portraits, Youssef Nabil depicts Shirin Neshat and Ghada Amer, friends and fellow artists, wearing traditional dress from their respective countries of origin. Neshat wears a chador and dark lines of make-up beneath her eyes; both are popular in Iran and associated with the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini. Amer is depicted as an Egyptian peasant. Due to their success as artists, Neshat and Amer are familiar faces, if not celebrities. The effect of the dress is startling: while their faces are essentially uncovered, a first glance is no longer sufficient for recognition. The religious and political associations of the headscarf demand one’s attention before considering and recognising the facial features. Nabil’s images remind us of the consequences of racial, or perhaps cultural, profiling.

By extension, the photographs draw attention to the growing significance of the hijab in local and global politics. For instance, despite proposals for a ban, France allows most forms of head coverage in its universities, while the scarf is still banned on campus in the majority Muslim Turkey. In Egypt, too, the hijab is contested. In January 2007, the New York Times reported an incident where a minister criticised the headscarf: ‘When one of Egypt’s longest serving ministers called the hijab “regressive” recently, 130 members of Parliament called for his resignation.

‘Behind that challenge lies a long competition for the loyalties of Egyptians between the Muslim Brotherhood, which is technically banned but feels it benefits every time a woman puts on a veil, and the country’s authoritarian leaders, who fear the power of religious symbolism and have tried to co-opt it with less and less success.’1 Both Neshat and Amer grew up in predominantly Muslim countries. Both women have confronted these issues in their work, Neshat in her Women of Allah series of photographs and also her most recent exhibition, Women Without Men, based on a novel of the same title about five women’s lives in 1950s Iran. In 1991, after a series of bombings in Paris linked to Muslim fundamentalists, Amer collaborated with Ladan Naderi in a series of performances where they toured Paris dressed in burkas to produce a photographic series titled I Love Paris. They did utterly normal things, like attend gallery openings or visit popular tourist spots, but because of their attire and the political climate their presence would garner considerable public attention.

Unlike those involved in the political debates across Europe and the Middle East (and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world), Nabil’s portraits quietly reserve judgment. Neshat and Amer look beautiful, glamorous even, and nothing hints at possible motives, political or otherwise, for their temporary disguise.

JB 1 Michael Slackman, ‘In Egypt, a New Battle Begins Over the Veil’, New York Times, 8 January 2007

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Ghada Amer, Cairo 2006 2006 Hand-coloured silver gelatin print 65 x 40cm Edition of 9

Shirin Neshat, Casablanca 2007 2007 Hand-coloured silver gelatin print 65 x 40cm Edition of 9

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Lunga Kama In Lunga Kama’s self-portrait, Ubuhle Bumnyama, the artist is wrapped in a bright orange cloth, adorned with white dots on his face and partially exposed chest. His strong, young body and the flowing drapery recall Greek statues and the notion of the young man as embodying ideal beauty. That Greek statues have become symbols of homoerotic desire imbues the image with sexual ambiguity, further heightened by the dress-like robe.

Ambiguity extends beyond the picture’s sexual innuendo, however. The Xhosa title can be translated roughly as ‘Black is beautiful’, but also as ‘The beauty in darkness’. The first translation could indicate an embrace of Kama’s ethnicity, drawing on the history of black pride and black consciousness. The second translation suggests the embrace of something else as well – perhaps an embrace of desire that takes place in the dark, but also of the darkness within oneself.

The white dots, which could be the body decoration of a fictional African culture, upon closer look reveal their true identity.

The word ‘Lilly’ is written on them in tiny script, barely legible in its photographic reproduction. While this evokes the concept of ‘lily white’, and seems at odds with the title’s subject matter, it is also a brand name: Eli Lilly is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and the largest manufacturer of drugs for psychiatric and mental health-related conditions. The dots are pills and, more specifically, Kama’s own medication.

In Shades of Black, an earlier series of self-portraits, Kama depicted himself wearing a medal. Once again this could be mere decoration, but the medal belongs to Kama who received it in 2007 for completing a ten-kilometre run in Stellenbosch, where he grew up and studied art. Asked why he decided to use it as a prop in a self-portrait, he answered that he awarded the medal to himself for his hard work. It is this process of self-acceptance, finding a visual outlet for the ambiguities of his life, that marks his art and places him in a rich tradition alongside other artists in this exhibition, such as Rotimi Fani-Kayodé and Zanele Muholi.

JB

Ubuhle Bumnyama 2008 Lambda print 100 x 67cm Edition of 5 + 2AP

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Berni Searle Berni Searle’s work has an extraordinary ability to resonate with narratives beyond the direct context of its creation and dissemination. The following excerpt from Zadie Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth, is a case in point: ‘Samad released his hand and rummaged in his pocket, dabbing his finger into a repository of white dust he kept in there, slipping it discreetly into his mouth. He leant against a wall and drew his fingertips along the stone. It was a tiny missionary church, converted into a hospital and then abandoned after two months when the sound of shells began to shake the windowsills. Samad had taken to sleeping there because of the thin mattresses and the airy windows. Samad had taken an interest too (due to loneliness, he told himself; due to melancholy) in the powdered morphine he found in stray storage cabinets throughout the building; hidden eggs on an addictive Easter trail. Whenever Archie went to piss or to try the radio once more, Samad roved up and down this little church, looting cabinet after cabinet, like a sinner moving from confessional to confessional. Then, having found his bottle of sin, he would take the opportunity to rub a little into his gums or smoke a little in his pipe, and then lay back on the cool terracotta floor, looking up into the exquisite curve of the church dome. It was covered in words, this church. Words left three hundred years earlier by dissenters, unwilling to pay a burial tax during a cholera epidemic, locked in the church by a corrupt landlord and left to die in there – but not before they covered every wall with letters to family, poems, statements of eternal disobedience. Samad liked the story well enough when he first heard it, but it only struck him when the morphine hit. Then every nerve in his body would be alive, and the information, all the information, all the information on walls, would pop its cork and flow through him like electricity through a ground wire. Then his head would open out like a deckchair. And he would sit in it a while and watch the world go by. Tonight, after just more than enough, Samad felt particularly lucid. Like his tongue was buttered and like the world was a polished marble egg. And he felt a kinship with the dead dissenters, they were Pande’s brother – every rebel, it seemed to Samad tonight, was his brother – he wished he could speak with them about the mark they made on the world. Had it been enough? When death came, was it really enough? Were they satisfied with the thousand words they left behind?’1

All the images invoked by Once Removed find counterparts in this brief moment in the novel: war, memory, traces, history, trauma, (intersections between) world religions, death, dreams and politics, to name a few. The novel’s main driving force, the formation of family across continents and generations, was also the premise of About to Forget, an earlier work by Searle in which colour bleeds from red crêpe paper cut-outs until only a trace of form remains. White Teeth is, of course, a rather arbitrary point of reference. However, it is exactly this power to enrich other stories, accompanied by a requisite refusal to be tied to a particular place and history, that gives Searle’s vision its commanding presence.

JB 1 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 100-101

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Once Removed (Head I, II, III) 2008 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper Triptych, 112 x 95cm each Edition of 5 + 2AP

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Once Removed (Lap I, II, III) 2008 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper Triptych, 112 x 95cm each Edition of 5 + 2AP

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Rotimi Fani-Kayodé ‘In African traditional art, the mask does not represent a material reality: rather, the artist strives to approach a spiritual reality in it through images suggested by human and animal forms. I think photography can aspire to the same imaginative interpretations of life. My reality is not the same as that which is often presented to us in western photographs. As an African artist working in a western medium, I try and bring out the spiritual dimension in my pictures so that concepts of reality become ambiguous and are opened to reinterpretation.

This requires what Yoruba priests and artists call a technique of ecstasy.’1

Throughout Rotimi Fani-Kayodé’s short life, his ancestral Yoruba cosmology remained integral to his work, and he sought to make work that reflected his awareness of these spiritual realms and emotional states. Yet he sensed that audiences in Africa, or rather the capitals of Africa, would be hostile to his imaginative engagement with his primordial themes: ‘I sometimes think that if I took my work into the rural areas where life is still vigorously in touch with itself and its roots, the reception might be more constructive. Perhaps they would recognize my smallpox Gods, my transsexual priests, my images of desirable black men in a state of sexual frenzy, or the tranquility of communion with the spirit world. Perhaps they have far less fear of encountering the darkest of Africa’s dark secrets by which some of us seek to gain access to the soul.’2 In these previously unpublished images, Fani-Kayodé has used the technique of multiple exposures to create ghostly images in a tradition that dates back to the invention of photography, to provide manifest proof of the immaterial. These efforts, by Fani-Kayodé and many others, to reconcile the physical and spiritual worlds go radically against the grain of photography’s primary purpose: to record the visible, material world with truth and accuracy.3 In the first image he has used two exposures to show front and back views of his sitter, a format recalling early anthropological photographs of natives from distant lands. In the second he has used three exposures to produce an image where the sitter simultaneously hears-no-evil, sees-no-evil and speaks-no-evil. In the third image, using four exposures, the sitter appears as the subject of the ascent of man but quirkily turns his eye to the viewer in the last exposure.

MS 1 Rotimi Fani-Kayodé and Alex Hirst (London and Paris: Autograph and Editions Revue Noire, 1996), 6 2 Ibid, 9 3 See the catalogue for the exhibition The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, 2005

Untitled Circa 1985 Silver gelatin print 40 x 60cm, edition of 10 All photographs courtesy of Autograph ABP, London

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Untitled Circa 1985 Silver gelatin print 40 x 60cm, edition of 10

Four Twins Circa 1985 Silver gelatin print 40 x 60cm, edition of 10

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David Goldblatt These two portraits (to be published in TJ, David Goldblatt’s upcoming book of photographs of Johannesburg) were taken in 1972 and 1975 in Hillbrow, when this suburb of high-rise flats was inhabited by whites only, and their black servants.

The workers in these photographs dream of a life where it would be commonplace to own a car and be driven about by a chauffeur, or go for a stroll in the park dressed as a dapper gentleman. They speak of playfulness and a desire to escape, however briefly, the country’s suffocating obsession with race – as in this moment in Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait with Keys: ‘As he’s running along the Braamfontein Spruit early one morning, Mike sees a man lounging on a scrap of wasteland beneath a pylon, right beside the footpath. Mike is visiting the country, he’s heard the stories about people getting mugged for nothing more than their shoes, so he’s wary. He slows down, considers turning back. But now he’s close enough to recognize the man: it’s the gardener of the townhouse complex where he’s staying, apparently relaxing before he reports for duty, smoking the first cigarette of the day. The man recognizes him at the same moment and calls a greeting. Mike stops to chat. Their paths have crossed half a dozen times in the past week around the complex, and Mike was struck by his surly submissiveness, but now he seems forthright and approachable.

‘Meeting here on no-man’s-land has freed him to be a different person. Or rather, has freed them to stand in a different relation to one another, because Mike realizes he must also be a different person, here. When the gardener lights his second cigarette, Mike takes one too, although he’s trying to cut down, although he’s in the middle of a run. They talk for twenty minutes about work and soccer and politics, and then it’s time to go back into the past, where their old selves are waiting.’1 MS 1 Ivan Vladislavic, Portrait with Keys: Joburg & what-what (Houghton: Umuzi, 2006), 170

She said to him, ‘You be the driver and I’ll be the madam’, then they picked up the fender and posed. Hillbrow, Johannesburg. 1975 Silver gelatin print 55 x 55cm

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A flat cleaner going for a walk on his afternoon off, Hillbrow, Johannesburg. June 1972 Silver gelatin print 55 x 55cm

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Yinka Shonibare MBE ‘With the Trojan horse, you can go in unnoticed. And then you can wreak havoc.’

‘I always like to work with iconic things, and Swan Lake is very well known, probably the most popular ballet. It’s also a perfect choice because the basic story concerns a prince who wants to get married, and there’s a good, sweet swan, Odette, and a bad swan, Odile. Usually the two roles are danced by the same ballerina. In all productions Odile is put into black clothes and Odette wears swanlike, nicer things. The roles – one as the ego and one as alter – in my version are more ambiguous: you would not necessarily be able to tell who is the bad one and who is the good one. One role is danced by a black ballerina and the other is danced by a white ballerina, and between them is an empty gold frame; the ballerinas do solos from Swan Lake, but they mirror each other’s movements, creating the illusion that one dancer is a reflection of the other. The way the piece is lit, it’s actually quite convincing as a reflection. Kim Brandstrup is the choreographer, and the dancers have done very beautifully. The interesting thing is that at some point they switch places so that the white ballerina is the reflection, and then it keeps going back and forth.’

Yinka Shonibare MBE Quoted in Anthony Downey, ‘Yinka Shonibare’ in BOMB Magazine, Issue 93, Fall 2005

Odile and Odette 2005 High definition digital video Duration: 14 mins 28 secs Edition of 6 + 2AP Courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

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Odile and Odette

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Kalup Linzy Kalup Linzy is best known for All My Churen, a parody of American soap operas in which the artist himself (often in drag) plays many of the characters. Turning next to music videos, the other perennial presence on daytime television, he has entered a territory laden with precursors to his own characters. Where the soap opera was a blank canvas for a black man in a dress, popular music created the canon to which he pays tribute. As Mark Anthony Neal writes: ‘Of interest to me here is Patti LaBelle’s own history with black male homosexuals who embrace feminine modes of performance. LaBelle has been linked to [Judy] Garland’s legacy on the strength of her over-the-top rendition of Garland’s signature tune, “Over the Rainbow.” Originally recorded by the Blue-Belles in 1966, the song remains the cornerstone of Patti LaBelle’s live performances. As Paul Outlaw writes, “for a gay man of color, it has always been permissible to identify secretly with a Superwoman, whose big personality or big voice expresses his yearning for romance.” According to Outlaw, “if a brother get too caught up in the image of black femininity – ‘Oo, I wanna be like her’ – he may have to behave like the snap queens made notorious (and popular) by In Living Color’s Antoine and Blaine,” adding that for some of these gay black men “getting in touch with that inner girl-child demands the Divas.” It is in this context that Patti LaBelle has become one of the primary templates for a black male performance (either as homosexuals or in comedic drag performances) of the “Diva.” In his classic live recording Living Proof, disco star Sylvester, who for a long time was the most well known “out” black musical performer, coyly references LaBelle’s stature among black male “Divas” (those who are gay, bisexual, heterosexual, and “unknown”) in his stirring (and LaBelle-like) performance of the LaBelle composition “You Are My Friend.” Within this context, black gay men were not a “friend of Dorothy: but rather a “friend of Patti.”’1 Broadcast on YouTube before it makes it to the gallery, the irreverence of Linzy’s art matches the irreverence of his characters. The result lies somewhere between an opera and a mixtape; in Linzy’s work, R Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet meets Me’Shell Ndeogéocello’s If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night). And, if nothing else, it will be remembered for its ode to the clitoris: ‘This ain’t no chewing gum.’

JB 1 Mark Anthony Neal, Songs in the Key of Back Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 93

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SweetBerry Sonnet 2008 Digital video, colour, sound 37 mins 54 secs Edition of 5 Courtesy of Taxter & Spengemann, New York

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Zanele Muholi In the Miss D’vine and La Rochelle series, I wanted to look at the lives of young, black queens and drag artists. I wanted to examine how their gender-queer identities and bodies are shaped by – but also resist through their very existence – dominant notions of what it means to be black and feminine, and to give queens and drag artists some visual voice in the cultural landscape of post-apartheid South Africa.

This is about the politics of reality, which we sometimes forget to acknowledge when we speak about the ‘politics of identity’ or the ‘politics of representation’ in the post-apartheid era. It is as if the everyday and every-night existence of body and being can be reduced to a one-dimensional performance of an abstracted identity that has, since 1996, full Constitutional protection.

However, what is missing is an acknowledgement that the realities of social identity are almost always marked on the body by an interconnected process of force – often violent – and choice, and that these marks are a visual extension of the self as it interacts with a social world still fragmented by economic, racial, gender and sexual oppressions and injustices.

Little is known or has been written about why young drag queens work to ‘entertain’ for very little pay, sometimes for nothing at all. Why do they do what they do, what is their history and legacy? Why are they not recognised as cultural activists?

The landscapes in which they travel do not offer safety, but become the spaces of emotional and bodily/physical trauma through the realities of hate crimes and gay bashings, inadequately funded social services and NGOs that do not cater to the needs of these people but to their own political economic visions. Capturing the dignity, beauty and pain of drag queens and artists in Johannesburg is a way for me to highlight that we are all agents in our own lives, not just victims. In reality, their lives, our lives, as gender queers are more than just a drag.

Zanele Muholi

Miss D’vine I-V Johannesburg: Born Kae Mogogole in Pretoria, She adores Ru Paul and also wishes to perform abroad one day. She is part of a drag queens’ and artists’ movement that aims to bend the political attitudes of a ‘less than’ democratic society. She hangs around with her mentor, La Rochelle, and like-minded friends in her Hillbrow flat. Before Miss D’vine, there was the late Miss Thandi, Mama Nigeria (Azu), and our living legends like Gaga, Gigi and other emerging drag queens taking the queer performance scene by storm.

2007 Lambda prints 86.5 x 86.5cm each, editions of 5 + 2AP

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La Rochelle I-III 2007 Lambda prints 45 x 45cm each Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Steven Cohen ‘I always feel like an haute couture suicide bomber in those shoes.’1 Steven Cohen’s Golgotha began with his discovery of two human skulls in a shop in Soho, New York City (for sale alongside other assorted parts of the skeleton), and their purchase for almost two thousand dollars, ‘including tax to the American government’. Thus prompted to ‘step into the gap between the legal and the moral’, Cohen fashioned the skulls into ‘skulletoes’ (‘spike-heeled genuine human skull platform sandals’, described by the New York Times), which are worn in a series of performances/actions that have taken him to those bastions of high commerce, Wall Street and Times Square. The work will be presented in its final phase – during which Cohen intends to ingest the cremated remains of his brother Mark, who committed suicide – at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in November.

‘This is a work made with the body and about the body – in every sense, from being alive to bones and ashes.

It dances between the morality of shopping and rituals of lamenting – in a life where anything is for sale and everything concludes in death. The work is not about bringing the dead to life, but about bringing the dead into life literally and physically – and about how we live – the demands made on us by a commodity-mad capitalist society – what we consume and what remains.’

For Golgotha, Cohen – who has performed his ‘conceptual drag’ in impossible-to-ignore outfits since the mid-1990s, on the streets, at political gatherings, on rugby fields, in voter registration queues, shopping malls and art galleries – dons a suit for the first time since his Bar Mitzvah 32 years ago. Perhaps the ultimate disguise for the drag artist, the suit as a signifier of conformity deflects attention away from itself, becoming invisible, an accessory to the face (exquisitely made-up with ears accented by real butterfly wings) and the ‘shoes’.

‘I just present an image of three skulls, one living.’

Sophie Perryer 1 Quotes by Steven Cohen from email correspondence, 12 May 2008

Golgotha #1 2007 C-print 90 x 80cm Edition of 3 Photographer: Marianne Greber

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Golgotha Stills from video of performance, Wall Street, New York City, October 2007 Duration of video: 3 mins 19 secs. Cameraman: Joshua Thorson

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Candice Breitz In her Monuments series, Candice Breitz continues to use her own, and in the process others’, obsession with popular culture as raw material to create uncanny spectacles. She chose five musical acts whose mythmaking has inspired people to devote their entire lives to fandom: Iron Maiden, Abba, Britney Spears, the Grateful Dead and, seen here, Marilyn Manson. Breitz invited fans to Berlin, where she staged group portraits with the fans dressed up as (or at least emphasising their affinity with) their idols.

The portrait of Manson’s fans is, not surprisingly, the one in which disguise takes the most extreme form. While the other acts certainly have distinctive styles, Manson’s appearance goes beyond style into the realm of disguise. The following excerpt from his autobiography captures the importance of costumes to his concerts: ‘Each concert was a new adventure in performance art. Since clubs liked to book us on holidays, we always tried to do something special those nights. For our first set on New Year’s Eve, I wore a tuxedo and a top hat.

For the second set, a girl named Terri disguised herself as me, wearing a black wig, a tuxedo, a top hat and a very realistic strap-on dildo. When she walked on the stage, everybody thought it was me with my dick hanging out of my pants, which was nothing new by that point. As the band began its version of Cake and Sodomy, I crept around her and gave her a blow job, so that it seemed like I was sucking my own dick. Maybe that’s where the rumor that I surgically removed my ribs so that I could give myself fellatio started.’1 JB 1 Marilyn Manson with Neil Strauss, The Long Hard Road out of Hell (New York, NY: ReganBooks/HarperPerennial, 1999), 117

Marilyn Manson Monument, Berlin, June 2007 2007 Digital C-print mounted on Diasec 180 x 463.5cm Edition of 6 Courtesy of Francesca Kaufman, Milan; White Cube, London; Yvon Lambert, New York

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Athi-Patra Ruga Automaton Town, wednesday 2pm ... jethro celebrates yet another tiny victory against Grand Automaton by kicking ass and healing the child of the thing ... He is getting a bit ahead off himself tho’ ... he thinks his craft is some kind of fertile cesspool for self-indulgence ... bitch be going around town claiming that ... in his trademark flustered manner. ‘it’s delicious ... to be ambitious ... butt-fucking to the top can be quite vicious ... so all ya’ll bitchuz ... keep yo worst wishuz.’

Granted coz if you clocking jets work of late ... ‘you know it is prestigious’.

The Liquid Tapedeck sits on the other side of the cesspool burying a broken promise ... the child with Peter Saville’s eyes did not make it through the Red Hair Extension Session ... shame. No one would believe the boy who claimed Fanon and Fela gave him the coodies ... they really have no powers over that grave. THE SOUTHERN WIND BLOWS. HARD ...

And the trees don’t move. It’s altruism they don’t blow ... in solidarity with you.

‘Spread them ... YEAH ... Spread ’em ... yeah.’ Tonight after my victory for another life i have managed to convince of my great investment in Black cc, i shall go. take some lsd and ride home ... not my cerebral ... But my sensual world.

Gorde is scared of Haile Selassie and the Sodomites [apparently they heal differently from us ...]

But all this healing reveals the lack in me ... or whatever.

Finish Athi-Patra Ruga I Apologize 2 – Cape Town May 2008

Clockwise from top left: First Moment of Rejection (Mom and Dad); X2 Watusies Blowing;

The Sun Highlights the Lack in Each; Polka Dot Bikini; First Moment of Rejection (My First) 2008 Tapestries 42 x 45cm; 47 x 44cm; 42 x 48cm; 42 x 60cm; 42 x 60cm

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‘… but don’t worry you can suntan’ (for Katrina) 2008 Performance: 15 May 2008 Installation: Afro wigs, mannequin, Power Ranger mask, Afro comb, inflatable pool toys, canola oil, body paint, sweat

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Rotimi Fani-Kayodé ‘On three accounts I am an outsider: in matters of sexuality; in terms of geographical and cultural dislocation; and in the sense of not having become the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for. Such a position gives me a freedom of having very little to lose. It produces a sense of personal freedom from the hegemony of convention…

It opens up areas of creative enquiry which might otherwise have remained forbidden.

‘Both aesthetically and ethically I seek to translate my rage and my desire into new images which will undermine conventional perceptions and which may reveal hidden worlds. Many of the images are seen as sexually explicit – or, more precisely, homosexually explicit. I make my pictures homosexual on purpose. Black men from the Third World have not previously revealed either to their own people or to the West a certain shocking fact: they can desire each other.

‘For this reason I feel it is essential to resist all attempts that discourage the expression of one’s identity. In my case, my identity has been constructed from my own sense of otherness, whether cultural, racial or sexual. The three aspects are not separate within me. Photography is the tool by which I feel most confident in expressing myself. It is photography, therefore – Black, African, homosexual photography – which I must use not just as an instrument, but as a weapon if I am to resist attacks on my integrity and indeed, my existence of my own terms.’

Rotimi Fani-Kayodé Extract from ‘Traces of Ecstasy’ in Rotimi Fani-Kayodé and Alex Hirst (London and Paris: Autograph and Editions Revue Noire, 1996)

Untitled Circa 1985 Silver gelatin print 63 x 63cm Edition of 10 Courtesy of Autograph ABP, London

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Dineo Bopape From: “dineo bopape” Date: 28 April 2008 1:22:25 PM To: “Joost Bosland” Subject: Re: Dreamweaver hey joooooooooooooooooooost! > Could you take me through the elements of your costume? I see a beard, glasses, an umbrella... the space is also the costume, the light, the darkness, the music/and sounds, the editing ... all this becomes part of the costume to make ‘the illusion’ that alludes to a ‘fantastic’ story about this bearded, boobed (multi-sexed) white vest and white y-fronts wearing person, floating/dancing/moving in the dark with a light bulb and wearing a white cloud of plastic bags ... fighting demons, dancing, moving about, making gestures that are disconnected, ‘taken out of context’ beard and underpants – masculinity, a hypermasculine image/idea in combination with a very feminine body figure become androgynous something magical (perhaps this makes the character ‘gender-less’ – the sex/gender of the character perhaps becomes erased by using the beard ... hmmm .... still a question to myself too), like a ‘priest’ who possesses the ability to make things magic the umbrella like a magic wand mary poppins/shembe the white cloud/dress of plastic

> Is it important that you yourself play the character, or could it have been anyone? that i play the character seemed the only choice i like my body and i enjoy using it i could not imagine anybody else performing out what was then still abstract in my mind it didn’t occur to me to use somebody else > Where was it shot? it was shot in a basement underneath the house of a friend, it was being renovated, so we snuck in after hours when the construction workers were away > The footage recalls early documentary footage from Western Africa, but the sound samples also invoke Hollywood, in particular James Bond.

What is going on? yeah it does quote the euro-african ‘ethnographic film’ in some sense, tinged w 1930s broadway/josephine baker time type performance perhaps to refer to a fiction an illusion, what better illusion makers than hollywood? but i guess it is the combination of both sound and image that reference that era, the sounds – early disney films, swing jazz etc and james bond ... hahaha – ‘mission impossible’ xx dineo

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Dreamweaver 2008 Stills from video Duration: 7 mins 53 secs

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Dreamweaver 2008 Video projection, carpet, mirror balls, found objects (bench, flags, sign, framed puzzle) Installation dimensions variable Edition of 3 + AP

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Nick Cave Soundsuits are the central concept of my work in that they integrate both sculpture and performance. I am now focusing more in the realm of the sculptural, where I am responding to the work of Lee Bontecou, Martha Graham and her collaboration with Isamu Noguchi, Richard Hunt, Martin Perrier – but also to Egungun, Talismanic, Bobo Oule and Ndebele attire. It is about sculpture first. I am obviously also addressing attire and its relationship to performance but it all falls into one big melting pot.

I see the body as a carrier but I don’t think about the wearer of the work. When I focus on the Soundsuits for movement or performance, I have to be very open to accepting the diversity of character that someone might bring to the Soundsuit.

When I step into one myself, it is like a suit of armour disclosing all my flaws, allowing an expression not limited by inhibitions.

But someone else will bring a whole new and different approach to the opportunity as the wearer of the Soundsuit.

At the core of my work is a response to the 1982 Rodney King incident in LA. I was – and still am – reacting to the character description of him as a human being in the media: ‘BIGGER THAN LIFE’, ‘WORKED OUT WITH PRISON WEIGHTS’, ‘STRENGTH OF FOUR MEN’, ‘FEARLESS’. This made me, as a black male, feel humiliated, discarded, less than, devalued, and yet responsible.

And what was so disgusting was that the four police officers got off on all the charges.

Nick Cave

Soundsuit 2007 Found, beaded and sequined hand-sewn garments, mannequin, metal armature 254 x 66 x 35.6cm Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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JD ’Okhai Ojeikere As a keen archivist, JD ’Okhai Ojeikere has documented the hairstyles of women in Nigeria in the years since independence.

This series has been published, and was exhibited at Documenta 12. Ojeikere has also been looking closely at other aspects of postcolonial Nigeria, notably the evolving middle-class theatre tradition. These photographs, with their assigned numbers in Ojeikere’s archive, were taken between 1958 and 1969 when he set up his camera during rehearsals and performances.

Theatre evolved into a powerful force in Nigeria in the 1950s, as Chinua Achebe reflects:

‘The theatre production was one of the most immediate, direct forms of response to what’s happening politically.

You can put it onstage the next day if you like. Yes, there were different kinds of response, but it seems to me we might even go back in our own history to see how this response to the political colonial situation operated, and the forms it took even before our time. For instance, take the Igbo people: there were writers writing about the history of their towns. I’m thinking, for instance, of Iweka, who wrote the history of Obosi and Igboland, half in English and half in Igbo. He was one of the first people to be taught the European alphabet, and the first thing he does is to attempt to tell his story with this new tool. ...

‘What makes the 1950s interesting is that we had had sustained colonization, and this was coming to an end.

There was a feeling in the air that we were new people, that we were going to create a new heaven and a new earth. Something was in the air that made this possible, almost inevitable. We were responding to something inside us, but also to the atmosphere of freedom. It was going to happen, there was no question in our minds.’1 JB 1 Obiora Udechukwu, ‘Interview with Chinua Achebe’ in Okwui Enwezor, The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994 (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 316 – 317

Facing page DRA 015/58: Scene from ‘The White House Inn’ as performed by the University of Ibadan Theatre Arts Students in 1958 Page 124 DRA 186-67: Scene from a play performed by Yaba College of Technology in 1967 Page 125 DRA 261-69: Scene from ‘Isé’ as performed by the Edo Cultural Troupe in 1969 Silver gelatin prints 61 x 61cm each Courtesy of the artist

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Pieter Hugo ‘In the diabolical heat of that afternoon six illegitimate sons of minor warlords, whom I first thought were minotaurs, enacted a battle of ascendancies. They fought near the burnt van. No one came to separate them. They lashed at one another with long sticks, clubs, and whips. They all looked alike. They were the interchangeable faces of violence and politics. They were all muscular. They looked like failed boxers, like the thugs and the bullies, and the carriers of loads that I had seen at the garage. They were hungry and wild.

Their chests were bared. Their faces were awesome. And they fought for hours as if they were in a dark place, trapped in a nightmare.’ – Ben Okri, The Famished Road1 ‘Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.’ – JG Ballard2 Nollywood movies are a rare instance of self-representation through the mass media in Africa. Movies tell stories that appeal to and reflect the lives of its public: stars are local actors; plots confront the viewer with familiar situations of romance, comedy, witchcraft, bribery, prostitution. The narrative is overdramatic, deprived of happy endings, tragic. The aesthetic is loud, violent, excessive; nothing is said, everything is shouted.

In his travels through West Africa, Pieter Hugo has been intrigued by this distinct style in constructing a fictional world where everyday and unreal elements intertwine. By asking a team of actors and assistants to recreate Nollywood myths and symbols as if they were on movie sets, Hugo initiated the creation of a verisimilar reality. His vision of the film industry’s interpretation of the world results in a gallery of hallucinatory and unsettling images.

The tableaux of the series depict situations clearly surreal but that could be real on a set; furthermore, they are rooted in the local symbolic imaginary. The boundaries between documentary and fiction become very fluid, and we are left wondering whether our perceptions of the real world are indeed real.

Federica Angelucci 1 Ben Okri, The Famished Road (London: Vintage Books, 2003), 225 2 V Vale and Mike Ryan, eds, JG Ballard: Quotes (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 2004)

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Previous page Gabazzini Zuo. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008 Facing page Dike Ngube and Gold Gabriel. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008.

Page 130 Rose Njoku. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008 Page 131 Malachy Udegbunam. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008 Page 132 Tarry King Ibizu, Uche Echa, Edeh Emmanuel Ozoemena, Ifanyi Ololo, Ifechukwude Ben, Ehiedu Kelly Nduka. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008 Page 133 Chris Nkulo and Patience Umeh. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008 Page 134 Chommy Choko Eli, Florence Owanta, Kelechi Anwuacha. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008 Page 135 Mr Enblo. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008 From the Nollywood series C-prints 110 x 110cm each Editions of 9 + 2AP

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Installation view with works by Zanele Muholi, JD ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Kalup Linzy and Pieter Hugo

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Yto Barrada was born in 1971 in Paris and educated in Tangier; she continues to divide her time between the two cities. Recent solo exhibitions: Galerie Polaris, Paris (2007); Galerie of Marseille, Marseille (2007). Selected group exhibitions: 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); Maghreb Connection, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo (2006); BIACS Seville Biennial (2006); Africa Remix (20042007); Premieres, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005). In 2006, Barrada was awarded the first Ellen Auerbach Award in Berlin. Her book, A Life Full of Holes - The Strait Project, was published by Autograph ABP, London, in 2005.

Zander Blom was born in 1982 in Pretoria and lives in Johannesburg. Solo exhibitions: The Drain of Progress at Whatiftheworld, Cape Town (2008) and Rooke Gallery, Johannesburg (2007); Sounds and Pictures at the Premises, Johannesburg (2006).

Recent group shows: za: giovane arte dal Sudafrica, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena (2008).

Dineo Bopape was born in 1981 in Polokwane. She graduated from the Durban Institute of Technology in 2004 and continued her studies at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions: It’s a celebration bitches!!!, Thami Mnyele Studios, Amsterdam (2008); Non in mind (fictions unending), Marthouse Gallery, Amsterdam (2007). Recent group exhibitions: za: giovane arte dal Sudafrica, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena (2008); Cape ‘07, Cape Town (2007); Off-spring, De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2007).

Wim Botha was born in 1974 in Pretoria and lives in Johannesburg. He has upcoming solo exhibitions at Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin, and Art Extra, Johannesburg (2008). Recent solo shows include Apocalagnosia, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2007), and A Premonition of War, his Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2005 national touring exhibition (2005-6). Selected group exhibitions: Political Iconography, Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin (2007-8); Family Relation, Warren Siebrits, Johannesburg (2007); Afterlife, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2007); Cape ‘07, Cape Town (2007); Africa Remix (2004-2007).

Candice Breitz was born in 1972 in Johannesburg and lives in Berlin. She is Professor of Fine Art at Braunschweig University of Art. Recent solo exhibitions: Collection Lambert en Avignon, France (2008); Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2008); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León (2007); White Cube, London (2007); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2006). Recent group exhibitions: American Idyll: Contemporary Art and Karaoke, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2008); Star Power: Museum as Body Electric, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2007); World Receiver, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2007); Seduction, Beijing Centre for Creativity, Beijing (2007); 51st Venice Biennale (2005). She was the winner of the Prix International d’Art Contemporain, Monaco, in 2007.

Nick Cave was born in 1959 in Missouri and lives in Chicago, where he is Chair of the Fashion Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected solo exhibitions: Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Florida (2007); Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2006); Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago (2006). Recent group exhibitions: Working History: African-American Art and Objects, Cooley Gallery at Reed College, Pittsburg (2008); Crafty, Mass Art, Boston (2006); Unholy Alliance: Art and Fashion Meet Again, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2006).

Steven Cohen was born in 1962 in South Africa and lives in La Rochelle, France, where he works with the Ballet AtlantiqueRégine Chopinot. He has an upcoming show at the Centre Pompidou in November 2008; recent solo exhibitions include Fuck Off and Die, Chapelle Fromentin, La Rochelle (2008). Selected group exhibitions: The Enterprise of Art, Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Naples (2008); Under Pain of Death, Austrian Cultural Forum, New York (2008); Rencontres Internationales, Madrid (2008); Spier Contemporary, Spier, Stellenbosch, and Johannesburg Art Gallery (2007-8).

Rotimi Fani-Kayodé was born in 1955 in Nigeria. He received his formal education in the USA before settling in the UK in 1983, where he lived and worked until his death at the age of 34 in 1989. A founding member of Autograph ABP, his photographs have been exhibited internationally, most recently at Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2007), and Galerie JeanMarc Patras, Paris (2006). Previous exhibitions include the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), The Other Story, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (1996); Fotofest, Houston, Texas (1992); Ecstatic Antibodies, Battersea Art Centre, London (1990).

Dumile Feni was born in 1942 in Withuis, South Africa, and died in New York in 1991. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2005, travelling to Durban Art Gallery and other venues. Feni represented South Africa at the 1967 São Paulo Biennale. His work was recently included on ‘Take your road and travel along’: The advent of the modern black painter in Africa, presented by Michael Stevenson, Michael Graham-Stewart and Johans Borman at the Joburg Art Fair (2008).

David Goldblatt was born in 1930 in Randfontein and lives in Johannesburg. He won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2006. He has upcoming solo exhibitions in 2008 at the Museu de Serralves in Porto, Portugal, and Galerie Paul Andriesse in Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions: Joburg, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2008); Intersections Intersected, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2008); Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2007); Intersections, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, and Berkeley Art Museum, University of California (2007). Selected group exhibitions: Make Art/Stop AIDS, Fowler

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Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles (2008); Apartheid: The South African Mirror, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Spain (2007); Documenta 12 (2007); Africa Remix (2004-7).

Simon Gush was born in 1981 in Pietermaritzburg and lives in Ghent, Belgium, where he is a candidate-laureate at the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten. Solo exhibitions: Salute, Michael Stevenson side gallery, Cape Town (2007); Déjà vu, Johannesburg Art Gallery (2003). Selected group exhibitions: .za giovane arte dal Sudafrica, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena (2008); Perfect Lovers, Art Extra, Johannesburg (2008); Bad Moon Rising, Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (2008); El Manifiesto De Santiago, Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (2007).

Pieter Hugo was born in 1976 in Johannesburg and lives in Cape Town. He is the winner of the KLM Paul Huf Award 2008, and the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2007. Recent solo exhibitions: Bertrand & Gruner, Geneva (2008), Warren Siebrits, Johannesburg (2008); Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool (2008); Yossi Milo, New York (2007); Extraspazio, Rome (2007).

Selected group shows: Street & Studio: An urban history of photography, Tate Modern, London (2008); An Atlas of Events, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2007); 27th São Paulo Bienal (2006).

Lunga Kama was born in 1983 in Cape Town; he is an undergraduate student at Stellenbosch University. Selected group exhibitions: Spier Contemporary, Stellenbosch, and Johannesburg Art Gallery (2007-8); Greatest Hits, AVA, Cape Town (2007).

Natasja Kensmil was born in 1973 in Amsterdam and lives there. Recent solo exhibitions: Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam (2007); Cobra Museum, Amstelveen (2003). Group exhibitions: Zwaar beladen met zielen, Crossing Border festival, Den Haag (2007); Sister Sledge, Lieu d’art contemporain, Sigean, France; Into Drawing, Instituto Universitano Ollandese di Storia dell Arte, Florence (2007), Contemporary Artists from the Netherlands, Jordan Schnitzer Museum, University of Oregon, USA (2007).

Kalup Linzy was born in 1977 in Florida, USA, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow for 2007-8.

Selected solo exhibitions: All My Churen, LAXART, Los Angeles (2006); PS1, New York (2006); Taxter & Spengemann, New York (2006). Recent group exhibitions: Uncertain States of America: American Video Art in the 3rd Millennium, Moscow Biennial (2007); Empathetic, Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (2006); Black Alphabet, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2006); Masquerade: Representation and the Self in Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2006).

Julie Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa and lives in New York. Recent solo exhibitions: Black City, Kunstverein Hannover and Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek (2007), and MUSAC – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon, (2006); City Sitings, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit (2007). Recent group exhibitions: Comic Abstraction, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007); Sydney Biennale (2006); Distant Relatives/Relative Distance, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2006); The Unhomely, Seville Biennial (2006); Africa Remix (2004-6). In 2005 she received a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the ‘genius grant’.

Nandipha Mntambo was born in 1982 in Swaziland and lives in Cape Town. She graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2007 with a Masters in Fine Art. Solo exhibition: Ingabisa, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2007).

Recent group exhibitions: 8th Dakar Biennale (2008); Black Womanhood, Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (2008); Upstairs/Downstairs, AVA, Cape Town, (2008); Apartheid: The South African Mirror, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (2007); za: giovane arte dal Sudafrica, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena (2008).

Zanele Muholi was born in 1972 in Umlazi, Durban. She is currently completing her Masters in Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. Selected solo exhibitions: Being, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2007); Vienna Kunsthalle Project Space (2006); Only Half the Picture, Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg (2006). Recent group exhibitions: Peripheral Vision and Collective Body, Museion, Bolzano (2008); .za: giovane arte dal Sudafrica, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena (2008); Black Womanhood, Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (2008); Body Work, Le Case d’Arte, Milan (2007-8).

Youssef Nabil was born in 1972 in Cairo and lives in New York. He has an upcoming solo exhibition at Michael Stevenson in August 2008. Recent solo shows: Art Extra, Johannesburg (2008); Third Line Gallery, Dubai (2008); Sleep in My Arms, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2007). Recent group exhibitions: Far from Home, North Carolina Museum of Art, USA (2008); Perfect Lovers, Art Extra, Johannesburg (2008); Arabiske Blikke, GL Strand Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark (2006).

JD ‘Okhai Ojeikere was born in 1930 in Ovbionu-Emai, Nigeria, and lives in Lagos. Before opening his own photo studio he worked as a press and advertising photographer. Recent exhibitions: Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007); Scalo/Guye Gallery, Los Angeles (2006); Art Museum of the University of Houston (2005); Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2004).

Athi-Patra Ruga was born in 1984 in South Africa and lives in Johannesburg. He owns a clothing label, Just Nje/Amper

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Couture. He has a solo exhibition upcoming at Art Extra, Johannesburg, in 2008; his first solo show, She is Dancing in the Rain with her Hand in the Toaster, opened the Michael Stevenson side gallery series in 2007. Selected group exhibitions: Peripheral Vision and Collective Body, Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2008); 8th Dakar Biennale (2008).

Claudette Schreuders was born in 1973 in Pretoria and lives in Cape Town. Selected solo exhibitions: The Fall, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2007); Recent Works, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2005); The Long Day, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, and other US university museums. Selected group exhibitions: Printmaking Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Personal Affects, Museum for African Art, New York, and The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (2004-6).

Berni Searle was born in 1964 in Cape Town, and lives there. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at Michael Stevenson in August 2008. Recent solo exhibitions: On Either Side, Rutgers University, New Jersey (2007); Approach, Johannesburg Art Gallery (2007); Approach, USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida (2006). Recent group exhibitions: New Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007); Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2007); Apartheid: The South African Mirror, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (2007).

Yinka Shonibare was born in 1962 in England and raised in Nigeria; he lives in London. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004. Recent solo exhibitions: Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, touring to Brooklyn Museum, New York (2008); Prospero’s Monsters, James Cohan Gallery, New York (2008); Scratch the Surface, National Gallery, London (2007); Jardin d’Amour, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris (2007). Recent group exhibitions: Fourth Plinth Commission, National Gallery, London (2008); African Art Today, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Check-List Luanda Pop, 52nd Venice Biennale (2007).

Penny Siopis was born in 1953 in Vryburg and lives in Johannesburg, where she is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. Recent solo exhibitions: Lasso, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2007); Three Essays on Shame, Freud Museum, London (2005). Recent group exhibitions: Apartheid: The South African Mirror, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (2007); Bound, Tate Liverpool, UK (2007); Afterlife, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2007).

Installation view with work by Wim Botha

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Joost Bosland would like to thank all the artists, Kathleen Reinhardt, Renee Mussai, Mark Sealy, Tony Meintjes, Idille Kellerman, Gabrielle Guy, Ray du Toit, Mario Todeschini, Nico Wheadon, Amaize Ojeikere, Bettina Malcomess, Valerie Wade, Gavin Rooke, Marianne Greber, Chris Abani and Macmillan South Africa for permission to use the text on Julie Mehretu, Betsy Sussler, SimonĂŠ Bosman, Sandra Light, Joanna Stella-Sawicka, Angela Kunicky, Paul Merrington, Erica Chidi and all the staff at Michael Stevenson.

Catalogue no 35 May 2008 Publisher Michael Stevenson

Editor Sophie Perryer

Buchanan Building

Design Gabrielle Guy

160 Sir Lowry Road

Photography Mario Todeschini

Woodstock 7925

Image repro Ray du Toit

Cape Town, South Africa

Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town

Tel +27 (0)21 462 1500 info@michaelstevenson.com www.michaelstevenson.com