14 APRIL – 17 MAY 2011
Curated by David Brodie
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CONTENTS
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GERALD MACHONA
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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
34 ODILI DONALD ODITA
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SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA
MESCHAC GABA
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ZANDER BLOM
DINEO SESHEE BOPAPE
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INTRODUCTION 12 NARE MOKGOTHO 10
ÂNGELA FERREIRA
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INTRODUCTION David Brodie
A truly global city … is composed not only of flows of money, skills, knowledge, security, machinery, and technology, but also of ideas, people, images, and imaginaries – a cultural economy. ... Worldliness, in this context, has had to do not only with the capacity to generate one’s own cultural forms, institutions, and lifeways, but also with the ability to foreground, translate, fragment, and disrupt realities and imaginaries originating elsewhere, and in the process place these forms and processes in the service of one’s own making. Extracts from Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (editors), 2008
At the heart of Geography of Somewhere is a paradox: the works on exhibition may be understood as coming from the city, but they are not of the city. They draw aspects of their vocabularies from conditions of the urban, yet are not simply descriptive. There is an articulate formalism present in the artists’ practices that understands the city as a headspace rather than a language. Their ways of seeing ask that we set aside our access to such space through geography or topography, and look to the city as metaphor. In so doing, they offer us a tangential, poetic link to the experience of the city, a kind of musical score. This score is a disjunctive, often roughly hewn flow, with an acknowledged hybridity that emerges from the accumulation of vast numbers of sources and contexts. The work of these artists is united by a method of inquiry rather than by style. The artists are clearly conscious of their practices’ location within current trends. Their reflective outlook brings with it a fluid approach to formalism and abstraction, and to their roles within broader conversations of art-making. The relationship between this resurgence of interest in form and formalism and the socio-political dynamics that underlie these works is complex, and forms the crux of the exhibition. Geography of Somewhere posits the works of a loose grouping of younger artists – Zander Blom, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Gerald Machona, Nare Mokgotho and Serge Alain Nitegeka – as a counterpoint to those of Ângela Ferreira, Meschac Gaba and Odili Donald Odita. The former’s language harnesses a more penetrative, aggressive sense of fracture, and is grittier than the latter’s. There is a quietness to the forms of the more established artists, perhaps arising from the fact that they are not exclusively located or
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immersed within African metropolises. Their Diasporan experiences differ historically and materially from the recent, embodied experiences of displacement which underlie the works of, in particular, Machona and Nitegeka. While the city is present in the work of Blom, it makes itself known through its conspicuous absence rather than the artist’s active engagement. Blom’s gesture – his withdrawal from public space - is seemingly austere. But this strategy allows him to move deeply into his delight, and grappling, with the dialectic of studio practice and art history. Blom’s alienation from the city marks him as an ‘anti-flâneur’ of sorts: The ‘stroller’ no longer experiences the street as a means of understanding or participating in the city, but has rather committed himself to the (internal) loop of the studio. Surrounding himself with literally hundreds of visual references, Blom is at once deeply concerned with the history of art and supremely committed to the immediacy of the art object. Bopape’s installations are hypercoloured, immersive environments. They reveal space as an accumulation of emotional and phenomenological affects that exist on the edge of incoherence. Objective processes of urban space-making – hyperfluidity, aggregation, layering, disjunction – unfold in a deeply evocative and personal manner. Bopape’s attempts to locate herself in space and time find their metaphoric measure in the dance between surface and screen: lo-fi videos and roughly hewn photocollages become an aesthetic of coding personal history, while her idiosyncratic bricolage demands that we honour seemingly ordinary moments and banal objects. Bopape constantly shifts between real space and mythical space, between the imagination and the senses – reminding us that our experience of the present comprises more than the sum of the parts of ‘concrete reality’. A 1970s-era Mozambican radio tower, used to transmit information in rural areas, is the key motif in Ferreira’s Cape Sonnets installation. A photograph of one such tower led the artist to the work of the Russian Constructivist Gustav Klucis. In Ferreira’s tower and Klucis’ original agitprop kiosks we may imagine the disembodied voices of revolutionary celebration – and hear the warning bells of failed political ideals and impending violence. In Ferreira’s work the rural African setting is interchanged with that of urban Europe, and news broadcasts are replaced by the creolised Afrikaans poetry of Austrian/South African poet Peter Blum (1925-1990). We are presented with the voice of a citizen denied – a ghostly monument to a failed modern moment.
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The city is the central subject in several of Gaba’s works. In his most recent intervention, Gaba gained permission from the mayor and the minister of arts and culture to declare the city of Cotonou as the ‘Musée de l’Art de la Vie Active’ – Art Museum of Real Life. This grand declaration included an opening address that highlighted the absence of a museum in Benin’s economic capital, followed by a procession through the city of 30 white-clad figures wearing Gaba’s latest series of ‘tresses’. These headdresses, woven from artificial hair braids, symbolise historical icons including Martin Luther King, Kwame Nkrumah, Jesus Christ, Fela Kuti and King Guézo of Dahomey (now Benin). Machona’s video work Untitled 2010 (Harare) presents us with an impeccably suited figure dancing on a rooftop above the Harare skyline. With the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and government offices in the background, this gargoyle performs a slowed down and grotesque coming-of-age narrative of migration and economy. This body of work re-imagines perceptions of migrant workers through the use of a traditional Malawian (Chewa) masquerade known as Gule Wamkulu or Nyau. This rite of passage is performed by young men as a means of expressing their identity. Masks and secrecy play an important role in the practice’s ability to re-imagine self and negotiate a new sense of group identity. Machona states: ‘My practice is interested in how those that migrate into a society negotiate cultural and ethnic conflict. Through this Chewa tradition, which I have appropriated and evolved, I aim to … challenge attitudes of intolerance towards these newcomers. It is an attempt to reconstruct new identities based on economic and occupational practices and not derogatory labels such as Makwerekwere.’ Mokgotho’s Look Who’s Laughing is a site-specific sound installation that appropriates canned laughter – that convention of the televised sitcom – to activate a sense of audience beyond the confines of the white cube. The gallery’s front window becomes a ‘screen’ through which the public is invited to watch the ‘actors’ inside, the space becoming the setting for a strange hybrid of reality TV and situational comedy. The canned laugher bursts forth in jagged loops, demanding that we laugh at anything and everything. It operates as a menacing soundtrack to a scene where the symbolic relations of power and exchange are laid bare, where the actions and exchanges within the gallery space are revealed as ‘performance’. The character of the bricoleur appears again in Nitegeka’s work. The artist’s favoured materials – wooden packing crates and black charcoal – speak of adaptation
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and survival. Nitegeka’s bricoleur is a more political persona than Bopape’s, his improvisation a marker of migration and fracture. His work with the poetics of displacement relates to a broader history of cities, especially African, which have always experienced migrancy and displacement as an integral part of their modernity. His interest in modernism and abstraction is ironic and self-proclaiming, and his work can be read in relation to the language of the sublime: ‘behind aesthetic choices are ethical respondents’, declared Pierre Soulages. High modernism offered the promise of ‘bearing witness to the unrepresentable’; Nitegeka’s abstraction declares that there are no more witnesses, only participants. If the remarkable colours found in the paintings of Odita are partly a product of memory and projection, then the unpredictable, vibrant forms that appear are equally part of the artist’s ‘internal geographies’, with the paintings metaphorically re-enacting moments of cultures coming together, clashing and dispersing. Engaging the expressive potential of vibrant colour relations, spatial compressions and skewered perspectives, Odita is at the forefront of examining how abstraction may speak for both a personal and a cultural experience of dislocation. Postscript The photographer and catalogue designer have been discussing the difficulty of shooting any one work in isolation. As we flick through the images on the camera we realise that all shots include multiple works. There is a constant sense of looking at and through works simultaneously. Canned laughter pierces interior space and breaks up Blum’s sentences as they are broadcast from Ferreira’s tower. Nitegeka’s dark tunnel frames Odita’s clashing forms. Shards of light from Bopape’s disco balls bounce off an alcove that holds Blom’s canvas and oil. As we negotiate our movements through the city, so too must we choose how we move through gallery space: with an eye that can take in the whole scene and its context, while also having the capacity to focus on the singularity and materiality of an object. There are moments when, if we do not ‘edit’ but attempt to take it all in, the overlap and multiplicity may feel overwhelming, and we tumble into cacophony. But cacophony is the jagged edge of this musical score. Paradoxically, the all-at-oneness of processes, sounds and materials provides the appropriate setting for us to notice that what has emerged – both singularly and collectively – is something utterly original, that could never have been predicted or planned, and which speaks directly to the symbolic life of the city at this very moment.
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NARE MOKGOTHO
Extract from Will You Laugh for Me, Please? by Slavoj Zizek On April 8, Charles R Douglass, the inventor of canned laughter – the artificial jollity that accompanies comical moments on TV shows – died at 93 in Templeton, California. In the early ’50s, he developed the idea to enhance or substitute live audience reaction on television. This idea was realized in the guise of a keyboard machine; by pressing on different keys, it was possible to produce different kinds of laughter. First used for episodes of The Jack Benny Show and I Love Lucy, today its modernized version is present everywhere … When I come home in the evening too exhausted to engage in meaningful activity, I just tune in to a TV sitcom; even if I do not laugh, but simply stare at the screen, tired after a hard day’s work, I nonetheless feel relieved after the show. It is as if the TV were literally laughing in my place, instead of me. Yet before one gets used to canned laughter, there is nonetheless usually a brief period of uneasiness. The first reaction is of mild shock, since it is difficult to accept that the machine out there can “laugh for me.” Even if the program was “taped in front of a live studio audience,” this audience manifestly did not include me, and now exists only in mediated form as part of the TV show itself. However, with time, one grows accustomed to this disembodied laughter, and the phenomenon is experienced as “natural.” This is what is so unsettling about canned laughter: My most intimate feelings can be radically externalized. I can literally laugh and cry through another.
Look Who’s Laughing 2011 Speaker and sound Duration 19 min 50 sec, looped
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ÂNGELA FERREIRA
Oor Monnemente Gepraat Peter Blum Wat spog jul so met julle monnement? Hy’s groot ma’ lielak, en hy staan so kaal da’ op sy koppie. Wie’t vir hom betaal – al daai graniet en marmer en sement? O ja, hy’s groter as ’n sirkustent – ma’ waa’s die pêd, die mooi nooi innie saal? die lekka clowns, die leeus in hul kraal? Nei, daa’s g’n spots nie vir jou Kaapse kjend! Hier het ons stetjoes, elkeen soos ’n mens: ou Afduim-Murray, Hofmeyr met sy pens; hier’s Jan van Riebeeck, bakgat aangetrek in sy plus-fours; Cecil Rhodes wat jou wys wa’ die reisiesbaan lê; en vorie Paalmint-hys ou Mies Victôria met ha’ klein spanspek.
All efforts have been made to obtain permission to reprint Blum’s sonnets. Due to the difficulties in identifying a family member or institution entitled to give permission, we have failed to do so. However, the printing of the material seemed important as it offers relevant support for the audio component of the artwork.
Kaapse Sonnette/Cape Sonnets (Gump thatching lathes) 2011 Gump thatching lathes, screws, megaphones, sound system 300 x 153 x 174 cm Broadcast of Afrikaans and English versions of Peter Blum’s 6 Kaapse Sonnette published in Blum’s Steenbok Tot Poolsee (Nationale Boekhandel, 1955). English translation: Marji Geldenhuys. Readers: Basil Appollis (Afrikaans), Marji Geldenhuys (English). Duration 12 minutes, looped
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ZANDER BLOM
Alles is Boring Jaco + Z-dog Okay. Wel ek het wakker geword... Ons word wakker, en ons fokken besluit ons moet gaan koffie drink. Ons maak koffie. Ons kry koffie en ons sê: Okay, wel ons moet ‘n bietjie melk kry. Ons gaan koop melk, ons gaan gou die melkies koop. Ek sê: Okay, wat gaan ons nou doen? Wel, nou moet ons gaan en ons moet gaan fokken breakfast kry. Ons gaan kry breakfast maar daar’s niemand daar nie. So, dan gaan ons na ‘n ander plek toe. Ons gaan fokken Parkhurst toe. Al wat in Parkhurst is, is ou tannies en fokken... ryk bitches. Okay fine, Parkhurst gaan nie werk nie. All works Untitled, 2011
Toe besluit ons... Um, ons sal, maybe like um, Greenside toe gaan, want daar’s daai Vida, en Zander het een keer ‘n hot chick gesien by die Vida. So kom ons gaan na die Vida toe. Okay cool. Daar’s niemand by die Vida nie. Okay wat nou? Well toe besluit ons, ons moet maybe, uh... Linden toe gaan. Ons gaan Linden toe en al wat daar is, is fokken agro, emo motherfuckers. Toe gaan ons.. - Brand my arm! - Ja: “Brand my... brand my met jou sigaret!”, sulke shit jy weet? Whatever. Toe besluit ons. Fok Dit, ons gaan Kaap toe! Ek sê... Ek sê, Z- dog... Ons kan nie so aan gaan nie. Kom ons gaan Kaap toe. En ons klim op daai vliegtuig. Sonder sletting hand luggage, man. Ons is so hardcore, ons klim sonder handluggage op en hulle sê: “Ons het nie meer Vodka of Gin op die vliegtuig nie.
Page 15, left to right Ink and graphite on paper 75 x 104.5cm Oil and graphite on linen 149 x 198cm Page 16-17, clockwise from left Ink and graphite on paper 37 x 52.5cm Oil and graphite on linen 168.5 x 238cm Ink and graphite on paper 74.5 x 57 cm Oil and graphite on linen 75 x 105cm Oil and graphite on linen 56 x 76cm Page 19, clockwise from left Oil and graphite on linen 75 x 107cm Ink and graphite on paper 99 x 70cm Ink and graphite on paper 56 x 74.5cm
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Julle sal moet bier drink teen fokken 30 000 voet in die lug.” Oh-o... En ons kom in die Kaap, en dis fokken boring. En ek sê: Ek sê, Z-dog... Z-dog, luister vir my: ons kan nie so aangaan nie. Kom ons gaan Durban toe. Ek sê, Z-dog... kom ons klim op ‘n vliegtuig en gaan Durban toe. En ons klim op daai vliegtuig en ons vlieg fokken vinnig Durban toe. Ons kom in Durban aan, en dis fokken boring. Ek sê, Fok Dit, Z-dog, kom ons huur ‘n fokken bakkie. Kom ons huur ‘n bakkie en ons ry by die kus op tot ons fucked-up is. Hy sê: “Sure let’s do it”. Ons ry Umhlanga toe en dis fokken boring, Ons ry fokken Ballito toe, nee wag wag. Nee Ballito was befok. -HahahaOns ry Umdloti to en dis boring, Ons ry... Ballito toe... was amazing. Ons ry Shaka’s Rock toe en dis fokken boring En ek sê, Z-dog! Ek kan nie so aangaan nie, man. Kom ons ry Swaziland toe! Kom vat hierdie kar en ons fok deur Afrika. -In ons fokken moer in!En ons gaan Europa toe, Kom ons gaan fokken Holland toe! En ons vat daai fokken bakkie en ons ry daai bitch al die pad tot in Holland
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En ons kom in Holland aan... en dis fokken boring Ek sê, Ek sê... Z-dog! Ons kan nie so aangaan nie, man. Kom ons gaan fokken New York toe En ons klim op ‘n vliegtuig en ons gaan fokken New York toe op ‘n private jet met cocaine en bitches. En ons kom by JFK, En ons vat ‘n Limo Ons gaan fokken New York toe, Ons gaan na die nice-ste deel, whatever dit is, En dis fokken boring. Ek sê Z-dog! Fok dit kom ons gaan Suid-Amerika toe. Ons gaan Ecuador toe, dis boring Ons gaan Brazil toe, dis Boring Argentinië, boring Rusland, boring China, boring Thailand, boring Alles is fokken boring Alles is boring! Toe se ek: Z- dog! Fok Dit. Kom ons gaan huis toe. Toe gaan ons huis toe... En dit was befok!
Alles is Boring, Die Eerste Leerstelling, 2009 © Jaco van Schalkwyk en Zander Blom
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DINEO SESHEE BOPAPE
Tuesday, January 11, 2011 from oct2010 artist statement My work engages the poetics of the performative (cultural) object. I indulge in the poetic elasticity & materiality of things (objects, space, event, memory, time...). The object-based installations exist in a site ephemerally, performing as temporal situations. (Perhaps sites in which a proposed event is to happen/or not) together with the videos, they collectively produce a site for a (semi-contained) disrupted narrative, an orchestral discord of small stories performing as poems or fragments of a language, sites of memory that are continuously dismantled. these sites recall other things/events/stories/situations relating to their function and place within the everyday or in language....(as with the birds & flowers in …microwave cosmic… video: in English slang, women are sometimes referred to as birds or flowers and as ‘sweet’). Yet central to the character of the proposed narrative/sites is a thing that cannot really be accounted for. Perhaps a time lapse… …A feeling resulting from some type of affectation, the application of some ‘special’ effect(s) – (decorative icing), perfume, something in excess (which could also be a lack)... as with the spatial relations between objects or that between image and sound within particular video frames. One of my primary concerns is how to tell a story, how to de/re/construct a story... how to tell an old story anew. How to forget, and how to remember. There is ‘nothing’ really…a vacuum that one has to account for. It is a situation over-saturated with ‘it’. A memory erased, or in the process of being erased or reshuffled… as in/ post a traumatic situation: When ‘sense’ is somewhat distorted and there emerge some holes (spaces of ‘nothing’, [and things that mean nothing]: that fail to occupy a space within the visible/sensible). I am interested in video time and in some sort of a decay of a linearity There is something about mediation and artifice, things acting as things/things acting as props around which multiple stories dance/and are entangled. There is
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also something about ‘things’ becoming motifs or masks of themselves - like flower prints on a piece of fabric/lace… a certain type of virtual life/space…that I am fond of exploring further, Something about video space, which I have ‘begun’ to explore in my last show “long live the immaterial…effect no.55” (in reference to Yves Klein) the blue has become something I have been interested in - the blue of the sky, the blue of the bluescreen - a space in which anything can be projected, the blue of church uniforms…. bluescreening/green screening, masking, saturating… editing. I have also been thinking of ideas of the ideal, the politics of aesthetics: afro diasporic aesthetics: those of various classes: within Africa or globally, a politic of taste (?), the use of stock images of our global culture(s) - ie sunsets, nature’s beauty, love, the family, the hero, the history, the icon, the self, the collective cultural archive, motifs, pattern(s), mediation and representation. I am interested in pursuing these thoughts further through my work. But my primary concern I’d say is the question of representation.
queen of necklace sketch II part 3 2010 Mixed media 365 x 290 x 170cm feelin cosmic 2008 SD digital video Duration 1 min 34 sec, sound
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SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA
Notes on Protection and Pragmatism: Addressing Administrative Failures in South Africa’s Refugee Status Determination Decisions A study report, Protection and Pragmatism: Addressing Administrative Failures in South Africa’s Refugee Status Determination Decisions, undertaken by the Forced Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand, based on a review of 324 rejection letters collected from asylum seekers at all five permanent Refugee Reception Offices in South Africa, identified the following irregularities: • Status determination was hardly operating. • Generic rejections were issued which bore little or no consideration of the specifics of individuals’ claims. • Many rejection letters contained outdated and inaccurate information and often about the wrong claimant. • The presence of numerous identical letters revealed that individualised decisionmaking was not taking place. • The fundamental decision of whether it is safe for an individual to return to his or her country of origin relied on the unthinking cutting and pasting of material. “Most of the decisions reviewed were in essence generic rejections that could have been issued without any status determination interview ever taking place; they were based solely on the asylum seekers’ country of origin. They were characterised by errors of law, an absence of reasons, a lack of individualised decision-making, and a widespread failure to apply the mind.” (Roni Amit, Protection and Pragmatism: Addressing Administrative Failures in South Africa’s Refugee Status Determination Decisions, 2010)
Tunnel IV 2011 Paint on wood 370 x 450 x 250 cm Pages 26-27 Installation views of Tunnel IV with (p27) Black Subjects: Studio Study II (2011, paint on wood, 136.5 x 111cm) and Black Subjects: Studio Study I (2011, paint on wood, 9 panels, 355 x 200 cm)
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Black Subjects vs Tunnel III 2011 Paint and oil on wood 2 panels, 238 x 122.5cm each
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Black Subjects: Studio Study I 2011 Paint on wood 9 panels, 355 x 200cm
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MESCHAC GABA
Projet parade icônes historiques dans le Musée de l’Art de la Vie Active Meschac Gaba (extract from artist’s statement) Ce projet icône historique permet de revisiter l’histoire de notre monde en se basant sur les grands hommes qui ont marqué notre temps, notre monde et qui ne sont plus. Ils seront représentés par leur icône ou des symboles qui les représentent ou qui peuvent les représenter réalisés en perruques. Cela deviendra des perruques iconiques portées par des acteurs ou des modèles habillés en blanc qui vont défiler dans la ville de Cotonou que je déclare le MUSEE DE LA VIE ACTIVE. Ce serait un parcours pour montrer la beauté de la ville et aussi le micro macro économie que je considère comme les pièces d’art contemporain du MUSEE DE LA VIE ACTIVE que la ville de Cotonou est devenue par ma déclaration. Le micro macro économie représente la survie de jour après jour des habitants de cette ville. Il faut créer pour survivre. Quand on circule dans la ville de Cotonou on voit des installations partout. C’est comme un musée à ciel ouvert. Je me suis beaucoup inspiré de cette ville de Cotonou. C’est pour cela que je la déclare le MUSEE DE LA VIE ACTIVE et c’est pour pouvoir voir cette ville que je propose ce parcours avec les perruques icônes historiques qui représente la première pièce historique de ce musée. Le micro macro économie est la deuxième pièce qui est une pièce d’art contemporain que le parcours ou parade va faire visiter. Dans la ville de Cotonou comme capitale économique du Bénin il n’y a pas un musée ethnographique, historique ou d’art contemporain. La déclarer MUSEE DE LA VIE ACTIVE va faire penser à la création d’un musée réel pour les artistes et l’histoire de cette ville. Les deux pièces que je montre dans ce musée sont: 1. Les perruques icônes historiques portées par des modèles. 2. Le micro macro économie développé par les habitants de la ville.
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MusĂŠe de l'Art de la Vie Active 2010/11 Video of performance, Cotonou, Benin Duration 9 min 38 sec
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Courtesy of Meschac Gaba, Laboratorio Art Contemporain and Galleria Continua. Produced with Laboratorio Art Contemporain and Galleria Continua in co-operation with ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe for the exhibition The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds after 1989 at ZKM (17 September 2011 – 19 February 2012)
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ODILI DONALD ODITA Colour should not be submissive It cannot be subjugated It will not obey It should not play nice Colour is unruly It is not for the faint of heart It can be hard and strong It can be bold It can be clear and true It can also lie It can trick and deceive us all Colour does what it wants It misbehaves But most importantly, Colour can change our minds Odili Donald Odita, 2010
Echo 2010 Acrylic on canvas 228 x 178cm
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Television (Red, White, Blue, Black) 2009/10 Acrylic on plexiglass 4 panels, each 101.6 x 127cm
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GERALD MACHONA
Extracts from Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Monetary Policy Statement, January 2011 by Dr G Gono, Governor 3. Inflation 3.36 In 2010, the economy continued to experience low and stable inflation, against the background of sound macroeconomic policies and general improvement in the supply side of the economy. 3.37 Zimbabwe’s inflation remains well below levels prevailing in other countries in the region, reflecting macroeconomic stability 4. Multinational Banks 4.1
The Reserve Bank has noted with serious concern the continued aloof attitude by some multinational banks towards the need to actively support the domestic economy.
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In some cases, this aloof attitude has been explicitly exhibited through the extension of the illegal international sanctions on Zimbabwe by these banks, taking instructions from their international parentages.
4.3 Under these misguided practices, some internationally owned domestic banks are deliberately declining loans to Zimbabwean companies and individuals appearing on the illegal EU/USA sanctions lists. 4.4 Equally retrogressive, the internationally owned banks are paralysing the money and capital markets by sterilizing huge domestic deposits which funds they are not passing on to the productive sectors of the economy through lending. 4.5 The low levels of overall loans to deposit ratios at these banks are a development which is constraining the economy’s recovery. 4.6 Over the outlook period, the Reserve Bank will ensure that these retrogressive attitudes and practices are decisively dealt with in the interest of laying a solid foundation for sustainable financial intermediation in the economy.
Untitled 2010 (Harare) 2010 Digital video Duration 4 min 3 sec
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Untitled 2010 Digital print on photographic paper 83.5 x 55.5cm
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Amai Doenda kuJoburg ne Mari Ye-bepa 1 (Mother I Am Going to Joburg with Paper Money 1) 2010 Digital print on photographic paper 83.5 x 55.5cm
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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES ZANDER BLOM was born in 1982 in Pretoria, and lives in Johannesburg. His most
recent solo show, Paintings. Drawings, Photos., took place at Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2010). Group shows include Ampersand at Daimler Contemporary, Berlin (2010); Why Not?, Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin (2009); Disguise: The art of attracting and deflecting attention, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2008); and .ZA: Young art from South Africa, Palazzo Delle Papesse, Siena, Italy (2008). Blom was included in the Younger than Jesus artists’ directory published by the New Museum, New York, in 2009. He was awarded a Red Bull House of Art residency in São Paulo, also in 2009. DINEO SESHEE BOPAPE was born in 1981 in Polokwane. She is a 2007 graduate of
De Ateliers in Amsterdam and in 2010 completed an MFA at Columbia University, New York. In 2008 she won the MTN New Contemporaries Award, and in 2009 was included on Younger than Jesus, the first Generational triennial at the New Museum, New York. Group shows include Ampersand, Daimler Contemporary, Berlin (2010); Act IX: Let Us Compare Mythologies, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2010); and Rebelle: Art and feminism 1969-2009, Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, The Netherlands (2009). ÂNGELA FERREIRA was born in 1958 in Maputo, and lives in Lisbon. She represented
Portugal at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include Carlos Cardoso - Straight to the Point at Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon (2011); Werdmuller Centre and Other Works, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2010); and Hard Rain Show, Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon, and Centro de Arte Contemporãnea La Crieé, Rennes (2009). Group exhibitions include Propaganda by Monuments at the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), Cairo (2011); Utopia and Monument II: On virtuosity and the public sphere, steirischer herbst festival, Graz, Austria (2010); the Bucharest Biennale (2010); and Modernologies: Contemporary artists researching modernity and modernism, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2009) . MESCHAC GABA was born in 1961 in Cotonou, Benin, and lives in Rotterdam. He studied
at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His survey exhibition Museum of Contemporary African Art & More travelled to the Museum de Paviljoens in Almere, the Nertherlands; the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany; and the
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Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, in 2009/10. Group exhibitions include The Global Africa Project at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York (2011), and the Liverpool Biennial (2010). GERALD MACHONA was born in Zimbabwe, and lives in Grahamstown. He has a BAFA
from the University of Cape Town (2009) and is currently pursuing his MFA at Rhodes University. He held a solo exhibition of recent work at the AVA, Cape Town, in 2010. Group exhibitions include US II at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2010), and the Refugee Day exhibition at the Cape Creative Centre, Cape Town (2010). NARE MOKGOTHO was born in 1986 in Johannesburg, and continues to live there. He
graduated with a BAFA (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2009. He is part of the performance art collaborative MADEYOULOOK. He held a side gallery exhibition at Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, in 2010. Group exhibitions include Postdated Solvency at Outlet Project Room, Johannesburg (2010); Absa L’Atelier (2009); and Sasol New Signatures (2008, Runner-Up Prize). SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA was born in Burundi in 1983, and lives in Johannesburg.
He is currently completing his MFA at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was awarded a Fondation Jean-Paul Blachère prize at the Dakar Biennale in 2010, and won the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts in 2010. He has a solo exhibition at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2011, and held small solo shows at Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, in 2010 and 2009. Group exhibitions include Space, Ritual, Absence: Liminality in South African visual art at FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg (2011); Where are you? Voyages dans l’espace, Galerie Beim Engel, Luxemburg (2011); and Time’s Arrow, Johannesburg Art Gallery (2010). ODILI DONALD ODITA was born in 1966 in Enugu, Nigeria, and lives in Philadelphia,
where he teaches painting at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Recent solo shows include Body and Space at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2010); Perspectives 169, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Texas (2009) and Television, Project Series, Ulrich Museum at Wichita State University, Kansas. Group exhibitions include ARS 11 at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2011); The Global Africa Project, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2010); and the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007).
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JOHANNESBURG 62 Juta Street Braamfontein 2001 Postnet Suite 281 Private Bag x9 Melville 2109 T +27 (0)11 326 0034/41 F +27 (0)86 275 1918 CAPE TOWN Buchanan Building 160 Sir Lowry Road Woodstock 7925 PO Box 616 Green Point 8051 T +27 (0)21 462 1500 F +27 (0)21 462 1501 info@stevenson.info www.stevenson.info Catalogue 56 May 2011 Cover View of the city of Johannesburg from Juta Street, Braamfontein Editor Sophie Perryer Design Gabrielle Guy Photography Mario Todeschini Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town