Trade Routes Revisited

1997

2012

Trade Routes Revisited

Trade Routes Revisited

In memory of Colin Richards

1954 – 2012

1997

2012

Trade Routes Revisited A project marking the 15th anniversary of the second Johannesburg Biennale

Co-ordinated by Joost Bosland

CAPE TOWN AND JOHANNESBURG

Contents I Joost Bosland 7

2012 R | 1997 R & R

Reflections: Artistic director 11 | 1997 Okwui Enwezor Excerpts from an interview 18 | 1997 Brenda Routes to global culture (Mail & Guardian) 22 | 1997 Hazel Friedman The curator as God (Mail & Guardian) 22 1997 Brenda Atkinson Behind the biennale blues (Mail & Guardian) 26 | 1997 Jen Budney Who’s It For? (Third Text) 30 2012 Isaac Julien Reflections: Artist 38 | 2012 Raphael Chikukwa Reflections: Volunteer guide 41 | 1997 Manthia Diawara Moving Company (Artforum) 42 | 2012 Colin Richards Reflections: Curator, Graft 48 | 2012 Ângela Ferreira Reflections: Artist 53 | 2012 Paul Edmunds Reflections: Technical assistant 56 | 1997 Dan Cameron Glocal Warming (Artforum) 58 2012 Olafur Eliasson Reflections: Artist 62 | 2012 Jo Ractliffe Reflections: Artist 64 | 1997 Christian Haye Spin City (Frieze) 66 | 2012 Sue Williamson Reflections: Artist 74 | 2012 Wangechi Mutu Reflections: Artist 76 | 1997 Carol Becker The Second Johannesburg Biennale (Surpassing the Spectacle) 78 | 2012 Rory Bester Reflections: Catalogue and conference co-ordinator 95 | 2012 William Kentridge Reflections: Artist 98 2012 Okwui Enwezor Atkinson

2012 T R R E Trade Routes Over Time Cape Town – Curated by Joost Bosland 101 If A Tree... Johannesburg – Curated by Clare Butcher 129 Fiction as Fiction (Or, A Ninth Johannesburg Biennale) Cape Town – Curated by Joost Bosland 159

2012 R & R Sean O’Toole Trade Routes Over Time 186 | Anthea Buys Trade Routes Over Time 188 | Sean O’Toole Highs and Lows:

The rise and fall of biennials in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal and South Africa 190 Acknowledgments 192

‘1997 was an incredible moment of hope, of excitement, and many of us didn’t know what we were doing, but we had intuition and a sense of what the biennale needed to be. It needed to be about South Africa in the world, and Africa in the world – renouncing parochialism. The attempt to realise the event as a meeting of worlds meant we had to bring the best of the world.’

Okwui Enwezor, 2012

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The second Johannesburg Biennale, organised by Okwui Enwezor in 1997, was a pivotal moment in the presentation of contemporary art in South Africa. The response on the ground was marked (and marred) by tension between the local and the international and, in essential ways, the immensity of the achievement of the biennale team went unacknowledged. Combined with a fraught relationship to its principal funder, the City of Johannesburg, these tensions illustrated an event that was, or so it appeared, out of sync with its context.

At the time, the Johannesburg Biennale was at the cusp of an explosion of biennales in likely and unlikely places. In a Frieze review of the exhibition, Christian Haye presaged this development: ‘The effect of having so many shows will inevitably produce a discourse of its own ... The next couple of years will see biennales in Berlin, China and a theatre near you.’ The ubiquity of biennales is now a given, and to critique it has become platitudinous, but in 1997 (and before in 1995) the notion of a biennale in Johannesburg was still a radical one.

When the biennale is invoked in South Africa in the present day, it is mostly as an illustration of the country’s seeming inability to realise a recurring international exhibition. Its theme, Trade Routes: History and Geography, as well as the positions it staked out, the structure it invented, and the debates it sparked, appear to have been forgotten, although they have significantly influenced most large-scale international exhibitions since. Fifteen years on, Trade Routes Revisited – a series of three exhibitions and this publication – reflects on arguably the most important exhibition in South Africa ever, and a seminal exhibition in the history of biennales.

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2012

Okwui Enwezor Reflections [Artistic director] Notes from an interview by Joost Bosland and Michael Stevenson

The second Johannesburg Biennale set in motion many important things in my life, including my own intellectual development. Its point of departure for me was always South Africa. I was in the country in January 1996 to meet with David Goldblatt, finalising the material for the Guggenheim show [In/sight, 1996]. Initially I was invited to be a member of the jury searching for the artistic director. I then received a second fax, asking me to be a candidate for the appointment instead. When I was offered the position I accepted under the condition that a number of things would have to change in the structure of the biennale.

In particular, there were to be no national pavilions.

Shortly after accepting, I was in Cape Town and went to visit Cape Point. I was astonished by the experience of standing there, where the two oceans met. I knew at that very moment this would be my concept: the

Okwui Enwezor (left) and Christopher Till (right) give Prince Charles a tour of the Electric Workshop during the opening weeks of the second Johannesburg Biennale

meeting of worlds. Like the deeply conflicted story of South Africa’s historical origin, the exhibition was going to be called Trade Routes. It was bubbling in my mind – I couldn’t wait to get back to the hotel to write it all down. I wanted to make an exhibition that took globalisation as its point of departure, to argue that globalisation actually started here, in South Africa.

The confluence of history and geography would give the exhibition a contextual basis. It would be of the globalisation of art, trade routes of arts and culture, circulating like commodities, merchandise, objects and artefacts. The jury accepted my proposal.

Much of my conceptual stance came from the critique of the pavilion model, especially having read Jürgen Habermas’ Postnational Constellation; to enact that, one had to deconstruct it. I was interested in saying farewell to the 19th-century model of Venice, São Paulo and all the rest of them. It was, in fact, quite radical to directly say ‘no national pavilions’ – it was polemical.

It wasn’t simply artists; we invited a conversation of curators. We did what was needed to bring a different circuit of the contemporary to South Africa.

If we were going to make a show about a globalisation born from Africa, it could not only be about South Africa, or even just about Africa, which is why I argued for the absence of national presentations. (Part of my proposal, which proved too ambitious, was for The Short Century to be the historical section of the second Johannesburg Biennale.) 1997 was an incredible moment of hope, of excitement, and many of us didn’t know what we were doing, but we had intuition and a sense of what it needed to be. It needed to be about South Africa in the world, and Africa in the world – renouncing parochialism. The attempt to realise the event as a meeting of worlds meant we had to bring

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the best of the world. It would not be about charity, or about Africa’s marginalisation. I didn’t want to pretend that my experiences in New York counted for nothing. I knew many of the artists, I knew many of the works, and I wanted to show a competent international exhibition in Africa, one which many people would see.

Of course, in those days, if you wanted to organise a big international exhibition, you would go to IFAS, the British Council, the Scandinavians and so on, to fund artists from their respective regions. Travelling with Clive Kellner, who was my assistant at the time, we had to convince all the funding agencies to pool their resources together. We said to them: ‘Your artist will only look good if the entire show looks good.’

Dennis Oppenheim, Alfredo Jaar, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, they all brought great works. None of them have disappeared. Wangechi Mutu was still a student; Rivane Neuenschwander was still a student.

Stephen Friedman was just starting his gallery; he came to Jo’burg. We nearly missed Berni Searle – our studio visit was at the airport because Emma Bedford insisted we meet her even though we didn’t have the time. We had a short meeting at Cape Town airport, and Kellie Jones immediately invited her. Tracey Rose had just graduated. We showed Stan Douglas’ Nu•tka• – he still says it looked its best in Jo’burg. We were able to show ambitious media work, because the Dutch supported it. They sent us Joep Münstermann and Robert Clarijs. It was one of the last curatorial trips of the Norton Foundation; they flew them all out business class and put them up at the Mount Nelson Hotel – Nancy Spector, Thelma Golden, Amanda Cruise. They were all there. In a crazy way, it worked.

Of course we had to contend with levels of

“Without Jo’burg I would have never been the artistic director of Documenta.

I remember the interview in Berlin for the post … they asked me how I could handle such an enormous project like Documenta. I looked at them and told them I had just done it in Johannesburg – without any resources!” insularity, sometimes merely short-sighted, often ugly.

The project itself was contentious on many levels. On the one hand, people involved in the making of the biennale worked really hard. On the other hand, we had no support from places that should have supported us. Nevertheless, there was the other side of the whole generation of young artists who were really evolving their own critical language because of this sudden international event called ‘biennale’. South Africa was at the forefront of the establishment of international biennial culture, and local artists were confronted with a sense of activity in the international art scene.

The contemporary art world was on the verge of globalising. That’s why I’m really proud of Jo’burg.

It was not a mimic of a pre-existing model. We can rightfully say that the Johannesburg Biennale was one of the pioneers of the shifts. It was the year of nonEuropean biennials: you had Venice, Documenta, Münster, but you also had Gwangju, Istanbul, Johannesburg. Without Jo’burg I would have never been the artistic director of Documenta. I remember the interview in Berlin for the post … they asked me how I could handle such an enormous project like Documenta. I looked at them and told them I had just done it in Johannesburg – without any resources! You

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can cite something you have realised in Africa at the same level, the same scope, with minimal resources, as legendary. The fact that I could have the confidence to say that, and not have it challenged, was extraordinary.

South Africa made it possible.

It is a profound disappointment for me that the biennale was culled. The end of that encounter is the great tragedy. It’s a deep pity for me; it’s one of my biggest disappointments that the Johannesburg Biennale stopped. It became a victim of the rancid politics of the country, where the scope of imagination was not very broad. But on the other hand, one could argue that the failure of the 1997 biennale became a catalyst for the professionalisation of the current South African artistic landscape. While South African curators have not emerged internationally, galleries like Stevenson and Goodman have. Artists are constantly profiting from this.

One has to give great credit to Christopher Till – he was a great visionary. Think of the things he did at Johannesburg Art Gallery. Think of the biennale.

Think of the Apartheid Museum. Christopher is really the unsung hero in many ways, and it is important that this is not forgotten. His foresight and commitment made the biennale possible.

To really think about the second Johannesburg Biennale one must acknowledge the first one in 1995, and the fact that the first one had such ambition and such scope. It had a great impact and some innovative projects were initiated, yet not followed up. Perhaps the exhibition format was a traditional one, but its attempt to set up a curator trainee programme, for instance, still remains an unfulfilled idea. One can only imagine what could have happened in South Africa if it had been followed up in a sustained

manner. Nevertheless, South Africa’s cultural landscape represents an incredible wealth of resources that I am constantly confounded by, both in terms of the level of sophistication, in parts because of the remnants of colonial institutional structure, but also the resilience of the people that work in these institutions. The education system in South Africa has served the country well; it creates an environment for the kind of intellectual ambition that would have been otherwise impossible. This makes up for the lack of stabilisation in the cultural sphere.

The important thing is the direction in which things have moved since, that there is a greater sense of self-reliance, and under self-reliance comes the great investment that galleries have made. And that really enables South African artists to have an opportunity to see other works. The glass is getting fuller and fuller because of individual efforts. It’s a pity that the institutions don’t have the resources, the support or the right kind of leadership required to make this happen. Great talents that can really help institutions are not cultivated to take big institutions forward. Nevertheless, after 17 years, I still remain incredibly enamoured with South Africa and I come back all the time. I can’t think of a single show I have done since the Johannesburg Biennale that has not included South African artists.

9 I thought seeing small towns in South Africa was important so I really immersed myself in the country.

I even gave a talk in Bloemfontein, and all these elderly ladies didn’t understand a word. It was very essential that I made these visits. I lived in Norwood for two

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Penny Siopis, My Lovely Day, 1997, single-channel digital video, sound, duration 21 min 12 sec

years as David Goldblatt’s neighbour. There was this incredible sense of being in South Africa during this moment, it was really amazing. It was a transformative experience for me, and it really was a homemade biennale. It would not have been possible if I had not lived in South Africa.

The great thing for me about the biennale was that one first had to think it. One had to think what the model would be, what the conversation would be, and what the ideas and ideals would be … Then one had to realise it, and use one’s network and resources to make that possible. We were the first recipient of funding from the Prince Claus Fund, which was on the verge of starting when I visited Amsterdam for my research. They paid for the catalogue. The Rockefeller

Foundation paid for the conference. Think of the speakers: Achille Mbembe, Gayatri Spivak, Kobena Mercer, Paulo Herkenhoff … The contributors to the catalogue: Francesco Bonami, David Koloane, Julia Kristeva … The artists … If I flip through the catalogue now, even I am surprised to see who all was in the show.

We were beneficiaries of the fact that South Africa represented an implicit possibility in the world.

We managed to find funding to bring almost all the artists to South Africa. This had an incredible effect on the artists at the time. We had chartered a plane to bring people from Jo’burg to the opening in Cape Town. When one makes shows, one has to create a condition of hospitality and respect and admiration for the artist.

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9 We were beneficiaries of this incredible artists’ energy.

Think of Penny Siopis’ My Lovely Day. I will never forget that story. I met with her and went through her plans for her installation - a film with a mass of found objects. I suggested she just do the film, telling her I didn’t want this installation of stuff, this debris of history. But trapped in that debris was a set of canisters of 8mm film. I asked about it, she told me about her grandfather’s cinema and that she was afraid of what the film might contain. But she watched the film, and called me and told me that she knew what she wanted to do, and what came out of it was one of the masterpieces of the biennale.

The piece that Hans Haacke made for the biennale consisted of flags in front of the Electric Workshop.

Behind the line was Mark Wallinger’s Union Jack in Irish colours and then David Hammonds’ AfricanAmerican flag in front of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. New pieces were produced. Today few biennales are capable of realising new projects.

Hans Haacke’s work was The Vindication of Dulcie September. The South African activist Dulcie September had been assassinated in Paris in 1988. In 1997 I called Hans, and a few weeks later he sent the proposal. Then the Truth and Reconciliation Commission arrived in Jo’burg the week that the biennale opened, and it was being broadcast on the radio. Antjie Krog gave her report, and the family of Dulcie September gave

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their testimony. On the opening day of the biennale, Pik Botha was questioned about Dulcie September’s assassination. Again, we were the beneficiaries of the extraordinary things happening in South Africa – extraordinary things that were amazing the world, that became a model for the world.

I knew Olafur Eliasson from his show at Tanya Bonakdar in New York. I had seen his series of photographs of ice and I wanted to show that. But when I was in Copenhagen in 1996 to meet Lars Grambye, the director of a new organisation called the Danish Contemporary Art Foundation, he said that he would only support Olafur if he’d do a new project. Olafur started thinking, and he wanted to do an action, but didn’t know what it would be. When he arrived he did a reconnaissance of Jo’burg, found a water reservoir and asked about it, and was later granted permission.

Titled Erosion, the idea was to create an ephemeral sculpture by pumping water out and flooding the area.

On the eve of the opening the action took place, and he emptied hundreds of thousands of gallons of water.

It flooded the entire area. Clive Kellner had secured a copy shop that could make an instant book. This was done in the afternoon; the composition and design was already resolved. It was really very quick. And this book became the first of a small series, which stuck to

this format we’d been able to produce in Jo’burg.

This was Isaac Julien’s first installation as an artist – he was a filmmaker up to that point. Even Meschac Gaba was in the biennale, as a student, in an internet project that Hou Hanru did with Rijksakademie students. Imagine an internet show in 1997! Also, so much of the show was not institutional – we did lots of site-specific projects: billboards, bus stops. We did a big billboard near where the Nelson Mandela bridge and Stevenson’s Johannesburg gallery is now. Peter Robinson did stuff in newspapers. Don’t ask me how we were able to realise all of this stuff … We even ran a film festival.

It was very interesting how much of an effort the artists made. There was also a project in the Workers Library by Svetlana Kopystiansky which kept the library open 24 hours a day, and this was announced in The Star. I still have the publication they did. Marko Peljhan’s work was a satellite system tracking the movement of American military planes around the Horn of Africa and broadcasting it, which was illegal.

For some reason, in South Africa, only a few critics really addressed the effort we had given, which was a pity. Most people were primarily concerned with the lack of local artists. I had done an interview with Hazel Friedman; when asked about South African representation I told her I wanted to reduce the quantity by 90 percent from the previous biennale. She published it and it got me in hot water, I was actually being honest. If we had played the numbers game, we would not have had as strong a show. That said, South African artists are really responsible for making the biennale and the subsequent art scene possible.

I remember the actual show vividly. With no national pavilions, this was also the beginnings of

“On the opening day of the biennale, Pik Botha was questioned about Dulcie September’s assassination.

Again, we were the beneficiaries of the extraordinary things happening in South Africa.”

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producing teams in this way for biennales, a model that is now a convention. I assembled all the people.

The selection of the curators came from direct personal conversations; my own inclinations of people could bring different dialogues into the exhibition. I wanted to work with a very specific team. You don’t want to know what they were paid, but they were very enthusiastic! I read Colin Richards’ stuff, I really enjoyed it, and I had met him several times. He wasn’t a ‘curator’, but he was a critic and a serious academic, and I just wanted to work with intelligent people. If you trust them, you know good things will come out of it. Of course there were people who wanted me to choose someone else, but one had to take some risks that would not endear one to the political climate.

On the one hand, people saw me as the captive of the white intelligentsia, a comprador of neo-colonialists.

On the other hand, I was seen as this pretend-African from New York. One couldn’t do anything right.

The danger would have been to have a predominantly South African team, and I didn’t want that. It needed to be an international exhibition.

Even long before I assembled my co-collaborators, I knew I wanted to have a global understanding, a curatorial round table. Octavio Zaya had already been a collaborator. I knew Kellie Jones. Hou Hanru and I had never met, but I had read something he had written for the Tate conference called Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts which led to the establishment of InIVA. I met him in Paris after getting his contact details from Hans Ulrich Obrist.

We discussed the biennial and he immediately tried to connect ‘Trade Routes’ to the Opium Wars, so I asked him to submit a proposal. Hou Hanru’s show was called Hong Kong Etc and as you know, 1997 was the

year Hong Kong went back to China. Then I met Yu Yeon Kim, who was introduced to me by the Chinese artist Wenda Gu. This was before the explosion of the Chinese art scene. I had asked for a Chinese curator, but Gu was not nationalistic and proposed the South Korean, Seoul and New York-based Kim. Gerardo Mosquera I already knew and admired; he was a veteran of the scene having been part of the Havana biennale for a long time. The only person who departed from the script was Kellie Jones; she wanted to be polemical, she wanted to make a show with only women. Most biennials lacked a female presence, and this became a statement.

There was an emergent sense of possibility in that narrow sliver of time between 1994 and 1997. It could not have happened later. People all over the world were curious. South Africa got a lot of support for the biennale; the biennale also got a lot of support from the city initially, but once the politics came into it, knife-fighting took place in the city council ... things changed slightly. It was a moment in which we wanted to frame something, and to frame it in a way that was compelling. The only thing that really failed was the book of the conference: papers were submitted but we lacked the funding needed for its production.

Something had shifted. All of this came about because we really wanted to do an international show.

Many of these artists were appearing in their first biennales. None of this would have been possible if it had not been South Africa, and if it had not been 1997.

Okwui Enwezor is the director of Haus der Kunst in Munich. His most recent curatorial credits include La Triennale 2012, Paris, and Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life for the International Center of Photography, New York.

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1997

Okwui Enwezor Excerpts from an interview by Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt, publishers of Universes in Universe, which took place on 5 July 1997, during the preparation phase of the biennale

Published on www.universes-in-universe.org Reprinted with kind permission of the authors

With the next [Johannesburg] biennial, we want to open up a path that is a little more heterogeneous. By this, I mean in terms of the way in which we deal with the current issues – particularly in this historically vital period – in the face of modernity. I believe that the making of a biennale, or any exhibition of this magnitude, requires processes of critical thinking that need to be revisited constantly.

We want to avoid situations where we set up a position of a kind of fetishistic relationship between the audience and the object. In addition, we are concerned by the fact that overtly violent tones of nationalism around the world make it difficult to limit the biennale to issues and ideas based on national representation. There is a tendency among curators and artistic directors to take the old model of seeing themselves as authors, so to speak. In order to move beyond this habit, in which we do not allow ideas and processes to be complicated, we have chosen to make Johannesburg into a different kind of forum.

I decided to invite curators from different parts of the world, and my only restriction for them was that it would not be nationally based. I want them to go beyond their own territorial proclivity. I invited Gerardo Mosquera from Cuba; Hou Hanru from China, who now lives in Paris; Yu Yeon Kim, based in Seoul and New York; Octavio Zaya from Spain, who has worked with European, Latin American and African artists and who lives in New York; Kellie Jones from the USA; and Colin Richards from South Africa, to be co-collaborators.

The aim of the exhibition section Alternating Currents, which I prepared with Octavio Zaya, is to really look at issues that resulted from what I consider very problematic terms: postcolonialism,

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multiculturalism, and globalisation, and to look at how local subjectivities rub against these discourses without finding definite answers, and without becoming subsumed by those particular discourses.

We wanted to look at issues related to border crossings, but not border crossings in the classic sense of a celebration of hybridity. We wanted to see if people actually do cross those borders as we always believe that they have. At the edge of very extreme nationalisms, we want to explore what the role or what the situation is of being a citizen in the particular context of shifting political landscapes.

We want to explore national violence, as well as the question of the national sovereign subject as presently constituted around this idea of a nation. We are not so interested in how some of these questions are set in and around themselves, but how they flow in and out of each other, oftentimes producing quite legible disfigurations. I think that the most important thing about Alternating Currents is how it assumes that, in the context of globalisation, there are new temporalities that enter into our frame of thinking, and it looks at how those things are taken into account.

As part of the general concept of the biennale, we asked ourselves if, in the present situation, it’s necessary to have the biennales institutionally based.

We decided that it is not necessary, and are therefore extending the dialogue beyond the confines of the institution. Therefore, even though Alternating Currents has about 80 artists, 20 percent of them are not going to be shown in any way inside of the exhibition space itself. Some of the artists have made propositions to us that would engage the entire city as a discursive site. To make this possible, we are going to be using a lot of billboards as primary sites

for artists, and there will be a series of interventions, including gardens built by artists. In Hou Hanru’s Hong Kong Etc, he will be setting up an entire video network in different locations in the city, on which the different artists are going to be shown. There will be works far from the centre site of the biennale, which set up a relationship between supposedly nonartistic sites and the traditional institutions.

How do I find this year’s Documenta? ... This is a tough question. Let me just begin by saying that the present Documenta is a tough show to love. But it is a very, very serious show, which I believe makes no concessions between the object and the audience or by playing into the mechanisms or the expectations of the marketplace.

Having said that, we in Johannesburg have other priorities, and our priorities do not in any way coincide with the ones of exhibitions like Documenta.

Even if Catherine David has made great attempts to break apart this incestuous relationship between the market, dealers, institutions and so on, it still remains an astonishingly western institution and I don’t mean that in any kind of derogatory way, it simply means that it is a different kind of spatial practice that exists in that area.

From my own perspective it would be utterly naive for me to travel to China for two weeks and then to come out and say that, from what the people are doing there, only poetry is being written properly. That is why for the Johannesburg Biennale we have invited those thinkers and curators who have the ability to raise, to a very high level, questions of culture that may not always be so readily apparent to many of us from different economic, cultural and political contexts. What I wanted was to see how these curators

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and collaborators, who I respect immensely, could challenge my position. That is the way we have tried to handle it. We’ve just said: look, collaboration is a good thing. It is the way that we learn or we build bridges to different forms of knowledge that are not part of our own traditions.

Again I find that Catherine David’s priorities are hard priorities and she has made a very, very wonderful show. If you have seen previous Documentas or if you have seen the catalogues, this one seems a little bit different. It does remain to be seen what comes out of it. I give immense credit for convening the ‘100 Days/100 Guests’ because it says that art exhibitions can happen alongside very critical thinking patterns, without this critical thinking becoming subsidiary to the art exhibitions. She is also proposing that if you don’t like the exhibition, you can listen to the talks; if you don’t like the talks you can read the book, you know, The Bible; if you don’t like The Bible, you can surf the internet … She has provided different ways for different people to enter into the discourse. But for us in Johannesburg, we want people not only to enter the discourse but to extend it.

The cover of the Mail & Guardian’s Friday section of 10 to 16 October 1997, featuring an artwork by Kendell Geers, TW (Score), 1 August 1997, created for the second Johannesburg Biennale. The work also appeared on bus shelters around the city

1997

Mail & Guardian articles Š Mail & Guardian and the authors

1997

Š Mail & Guardian and the author

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After more than a year of political foreplay and a consummation between Art and the Public that never quite took place, the second Johannesburg Biennale faces closure a month early, following the last-minute withdrawal of funds by the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council.

According to Executive Officer for Arts, Culture, Development and Facilities Victor Modise, the council “was aware of the financial crisis some time ago”. This, and the fact that the council’s financial commitment of R3,5-million just two months ago made it the biennale’s primary sponsor, indicate a communicative gap behind an act that is startling in the scope of its political ineptitude. And the existence of future biennales is in jeopardy.

According to sources both within and outside of the Africus Institute of Contemporary Art (AICA), the biennale’s administrative headquarters, neither they nor other local parties involved in the biennale were consulted.

Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa, AICA director and chief mediator between the council and the biennale, says the former approached biennale staff only after they had taken the decision to close: “They decided, then they asked us. It’s only now that they realise the consequences of what they’ve done.”

Modise denies accusations of unilateral decisionmaking, but his version of events supports such a view of the committee’s processes. His meeting with biennale management before November 8 to discuss and cost “options for closure” suggests that closure was a fait accompli that simply required co-operation over strategy.

Such apparently uneven consultation is not the only aspect to the closure controversy: the amount

that the city hopes to save ranges, in different reports, from R200 000 (unofficial) to R1-million (official).

According to Dhlomo-Mautloa, AICA’s shortfall is in the region of R400 000.

Although biennale staff are scrambling to raise the amount – they have already received an additional contribution of R108 000 from the Department of Arts and Culture, which will fund another week – the blow could not have come at a worse time of the year. Just two weeks before Christmas, private-sector people are away, staff are exhausted, and there’s little chance of recalling existing sponsors and asking them for more money.

Ironically, this is also the period in which the biennale would have received most of its foreign visitors, following extensive international media coverage, with the value of local print media coverage in the first month alone estimated at over R3,2-million.

The ironies of closing after two years of intensive planning in the face of dire financial odds, and having spent 95% of the budget, are not lost on anyone. But opinions vary as to where, and if, blame should be laid.

Dhlomo-Mautloa herself is tolerant of the council’s financial problems: “Council isn’t closing us down out of spite,” she insists. “South Africa should be proud of what they’ve helped us do against incredible odds, and we should remember that we’re not the only casualty.”

Biennale executive director Christopher Till supports Dhlomo-Mautloa on this point. “Ultimately, the decision to cut spending on the biennale was taken out of council’s hands by the so-called ‘committee of 10’, which seems to be a higher body that decides on cuts nationally. They’re not interested in the minutiae of each situation, and unlike the council, they don’t

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see the biennale as a special case.”

But South African National Gallery director Marilyn Martin describes the decision as “shortsighted and philistine”; Goodman Gallery director Linda Givon, a major private sponsor of the biennale, is “deeply concerned about future biennales”; and Henri Vergon, cultural director of the French Institute, which is lobbying for additional foreign support, describes the decision as a fatal one for local art in a climate of what he calls “Afro-pessimism”.

“Many people are waiting for another sign that Africa is a failed continent that cannot get large projects together,” says Vergon, and the closure takes place “when for once Johannesburg could have been internationally recognised for its cultural initiatives, rather than for crime.”

This year’s biennale has been fractured not only by internal political and financial problems, but by a cool public reception and considerable local disgruntlement over creative director Okwui Enwezor’s handling of his South African constituency.

Enwezor, in turn, has expressed concern about what he perceives as South African xenophobia, and has regularly chastised the South African media for their apathy and indifference to the event.

According to Givon, a stalwart of the South African art world for 32 years, Enwezor should have “assumed the cloak of our xenophobia before trampling on it - his lack of confidence in us has been both marginalising and humiliating”.

Givon is one of several critics who feel the biennale has failed to engage the community in which it is situated, conversing instead with an international audience celebrating this biennale as a landmark event which has invigorated the form per se.

While Trade Routes: History and Geography has undoubtedly broken with the tradition of the Large Exhibition, the presentation of the event in a specialised academic discourse that addresses global cultural and economic phenomena is perhaps a contributing factor to the paucity in the media of critiques of the art itself. A grittier engagement with artwork has been partially precluded by overdetermining analysis that is as annoying to some people as it is seductive to others.

The question of whether or not the biennale should take place at all is not on anyone’s lips. But there is debate about whether government or the private sector should bear the brunt of the costs, which this year amounted to R8-million (a negligible amount by international standards). And there is also the question of how future Johannesburg biennales will find ways of engaging the general public.

“I’m concerned about the possible negative response should the biennale close,” says Till, “but I’m more concerned that the spirit is kept alive, and that the process continues to unfold, whatever the teething problems may be ... The primary challenge is to get the biennale into the public domain.”

That South Africans should still be defensive in the face of international initiatives on their home turf

“The question of whether or not the biennale should take place at all is not on anyone’s lips. But there is debate about whether government or the private sector should bear the brunt of the costs.”

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is perhaps not surprising: ours is still a traumatised society not fully healed by the ideology of rainbowism and the band-aid of sporting victories.

The challenge to both local and international cultural producers is to work with our history, to engage it, and perhaps to see biennales as catalysts for that engagement. They are not the conclusive episodes in our past, nor are they the only routes to our future.

And, like any cultural event, they cannot be the salve for every political and cultural problem. But with sufficient education, and in tandem with other, complementary projects, they could be useful markers in the process of our own making.

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1997

Published in Third Text, Volume 12 Issue 42 Reprinted with kind permission of the author

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Odili Donald Odita’s End-Fin, 1997, reproduced on a bus shelter as part of the second Johannesburg Biennale.

Photo: Werner Maschmann

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2012

Isaac Julien Reflections [Artist] Notes from an interview by Joost Bosland

It was while making Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask that I was approached by a young art critic, Okwui Enwezor, to show the film on the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale. I had heard about Okwui’s work on photography for the Guggenheim, where he was part of the team that organized In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present. I first met Okwui when he asked for access to the research on the Frantz Fanon film. We gave him a copy of the film, and handed over all the research we had done. I think he was really surprised that we would just hand over all this material. We had made the film and were afraid the research would remain dormant, so it was nice to have it reactivated.

At this point, Okwui already had his idea for what would become The Short Century.

In response to the invitation, I made a version of the visual essay as a two-screen work, called Fanon SA 1997. In 1996 I had been teaching in a cinema studies programme, and I was already becoming attuned to transitioning to the art context. Before Fanon SA 1997, I had only made two works for an art context.

In the installation I abstracted certain images from

the documentary that corresponded to a lyrical register in Fanon’s writing. Images extracted from the film were presented in condensed form, quoting Fanon’s text ‘There is no colour prejudice here’ as the actor playing Fanon waved an ANC flag. We also showed the original movie in the cinema. (It was later shown in Experiments of Truth, an exhibition by Mark Nash at the Fabric Workshop and Museum Philadelphia: a meditation on the relationship between art and documentary, which of course was one of the themes of Okwui’s Documenta 11, where Nash had been a co-curator.)

My first time in South Africa was in 1994, when I was invited to show work at the lesbian and gay film festival in Cape Town, and stayed with Edwin Cameron. (Previously, my work had been shown on the Weekly Mail Film Festival in 1989, for which we got permission from the ANC Cultural Desk.)

Because I had been in South Africa before, I realised perhaps more than others what had happened between 1994 and 1997. In 1994 the borders had not been opened. In 1997, people were moving to Johannesburg from elsewhere in Africa, and this had an effect on the populace. It was undoubtedly visible that Johannesburg was becoming the economic capital of Africa. The projected hope of 1994 had shifted to a more pragmatic scenario.

You also had something that was being orchestrated under very difficult circumstances. Installing was difficult, but we weren’t in Germany. (Steve McQueen came, did not like the room he was allocated, and went back home. As I had been to South Africa before, I knew that I’d need to have a certain patience with the way things would be installed. I wasn’t under any illusion that my projection would be working after I left. The projectors might have even disappeared.)

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One could also sense a xenophobia against Africans who were not South African at that time. There was an indifference coupled with an anxiety about the idea of South Africa opening up, and not recognising what an amazing exhibition the 1997 biennale was.

That said, I had been to several large international shows in the years leading up to 1997 (including Catherine David’s Documenta), and I had the distinct feeling that the second Johannesburg Biennale was decidedly important. It was the first time that you had this international group of artists side by side; it was five steps forward from David’s Documenta. It was completely reassembling all the different trajectories of contemporary art practice from anywhere. It was this complete repudiation of the Eurocentric framing: in the complete geographical displacement of 1997 Johannesburg, all the works looked quite different.

I am tempted to say that it was the first exhibition where you could witness a curatorial turn towards an admission of the international, cosmopolitan trajectory, where the ‘global’ wasn’t a mere add-on to the modernist political premise art of international centrifugal forces.

There were dinners every night, like any biennale – it was a celebration, which has been a bit obscured by all the writing about it since. I knew there were lots of tantrums from various corners, but they did not really reach the visiting contingent at all. If there was a response from its local audience that misunderstood its intentions, that does not surprise me. It was so ahead of its time that, if that show had been organised anywhere else, the response might have been much the same. We could see that this was very new, and if you do new things, you come up against a certain parochialism, which is a normal response. What the

biennale and Okwui were doing was connected to the works. You had this idea of crisscrossing trajectories of individual artists making their work, coming together in Johannesburg. I knew when I saw it that Okwui stood a chance to do the next Documenta.

Peter Norton, Catherine David, everyone was there.

It was a specific moment in the late 1990s with a specific euphoria.

Also, it was a meeting of African artists. There was an international cosmopolitanism to the ‘biennale explosion’. Think of Cairo, or Dakar, or even Festac.

These were attempts at structuring modernisms from different centres. The Johannesburg Biennale did not happen out of nowhere. The Istanbul Biennale did not come out of nowhere. Art was being made in these places, and to critique the ‘biennialisation’ of the art world seems to imply these places had no business staging art events, and reveals a hidden, unthinking provincialism.

What we saw was a space that was being created, forged in the euphoria of the late 1990s. However, this particular moment didn’t last forever. From David to Enwezor, there was a certain rigour that I don’t see in large-scale international exhibitions today. There is an academisation of the way biennales are being written about. In New York, where we are discussing this, there is a huge resistance to the displacement of New York as the most important place to view art, and make art. There is a European and American provincialism at play in biennales today by young curators, a reactive position. You can pick up New Left Review, and what you read about biennales is nonsense.

Prints from Isaac Julien’s Fantôme Créole Series were included on Trade Routes Over Time (pp 110-11).

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2012

Raphael Chikukwa Reflections [Volunteer guide] Notes from an interview by Joost Bosland

My role during the second Johannesburg Biennale was to take viewers around the exhibitions and educate them about the works on show. When I look back, I can say that the biennale played its part in bringing the world to South Africa and providing a platform for international artists and curators. For its successes and failures, the Johannesburg Biennale will remain our old friend that we can refer to, and its narratives will live forever. After 1997 South Africa became a destination for international curators, and we started seeing many South African artists exhibiting in international venues and on blockbuster exhibitions, outnumbering other African artists.

I recently attended the World Biennale Forum No 1 – ‘Shifting Gravity’ – in Korea. The forum brought together many players from around the world and it was an eye-opener to see how serious the Asians are as far as biennials and triennials are concerned.

It was interesting to note that the first edition of the Gwangju Biennale was in 1995, the same year the Johannesburg Biennale had its first edition. In 2011 the Johannesburg Biennale could have celebrated

its ninth edition, but its death remains contentious and another forum would be needed to see if it can be resurrected from the dead. The sad thing is that most of the star curators of the second Johannesburg Biennale have moved on, while the biennale itself has not been able to come back to life. I can only say that there are those who benefited from the Johannesburg Biennale and those who did not.

For my part the biennale was a free university for me to get to know about the global contemporary art world. It provided me with an opportunity to meet high-profile artists and curators including Okwui Enwezor, Hou Hanru, Colin Richards, Coco Fusco, Bili Bidjocka, Marian Baviera and many others. I learnt a lot during my voluntary work as a guide in 1997. Today South Africa is different and the struggle is different, and I also have a new life.

Raphael Chikukwa is curator of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe and organised the first Zimbabwean pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

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1997

Manthia Diawara Moving Company

© Artforum, March 1998, ‘Moving Company’,

by Manthia Diawara

It was with a certain feeling of vindication that I boarded the plane to attend the second Johannesburg Biennale last October. Visiting Nelson Mandela’s homeland for the first time can confirm one’s belief in the victory of democracy over dictatorship, of open societies over closed systems. It means that finally I too, a West African, am free to go to South Africa, and am free to give my opinion on directions in contemporary art there. For this biennale is tied to the end of apartheid, and it owes its specificity to what Deputy President Thabo Mbeki calls the African Renaissance.

My first surprise upon arrival was that I was lodged not in a downtown hotel amid skyscrapers and lots of traffic, the Johannesburg I was used to seeing in the movies, but in the suburbs, in a three-storey colonial-style building, with a courtyard and indoor swimming pool, surrounded by leafy trees. All the visitors were given accommodations in the same area, even though the headquarters of the biennale was located a 30-minute ride away in Johannesburg proper, at the Africus Institute of Contemporary Art (AICA), near the Market Theatre and the Diamond Building. I soon realized that we were put up in the suburbs for security reasons. In downtown Johannesburg, near the AICA, the only people I saw walking the streets were poor blacks. The affluent whites and the new black bourgeoisie passed by, wellensconced, in their cars.

My second surprise came while waiting in front of my hotel for a taxi to the biennale. In the distance, I saw a woman walking at a measured pace toward me.

She wore a black beret and a washed-out blue sweater over a white T-shirt, and her long blue wool skirt went all the way down to her ankles to meet her thick rolled

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socks and flat tennis shoes. As she approached, I tried in vain to make eye contact, ready to greet her in the friendly manner of West Africans. But she passed by without seeming to see me. I couldn’t figure her age: her style of dress and rhythmic way of walking, like that of African Americans in the United States, made her seem young, modern, and free from tradition, while her large size and long, tired face made her seem an older victim of the violence of that same modernity that had enabled her to conceal her age.

I felt threatened by her appearance because I could see that she had passed through what Richard Wright called the fire of modernization, the scars from which were still visible on her face.

But there was something else in this woman’s look that seemed oddly familiar. The long wool skirts and sweaters worn inside out with the threads showing have become the fashion statement of Xuly Bët, a West African couturier based in Paris. In fact, when I saw a show of his recently at Pier 59 in Chelsea, the models seemed to be parodying the look of Soweto women, their individualistic and defiant disposition forged in the struggle against apartheid. During the show, Xuly Bët alternated between a Jimi Hendrix soundtrack and simply letting the models march by in silence, as if they were performing some world-transforming ritual. In his diasporic attempt to bring together Soweto and the music of the late ’60s and early ’70s, the designer has succeeded in creating an attitude in fashion that appeals to a downtown Manhattan multicultural and artistic sensibility.

To say that the second Johannesburg Biennale is tied to post-apartheid is to acknowledge South Africa’s new position in Africa and in the world. The theme of the biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor

“In the context of post-apartheid nationalism, the internationalist focus was viewed as an instance of cultural imperialism, and as justifiable ground for South African audiences to isolate themselves from the biennale.”

and an international team and featuring some 160 artists from 63 countries, was Trade Routes: History and Geography, and some of the subthemes in the show, such as Alternating Currents and Transversions, reveal the show’s preoccupation with hybridity, métissage, and globalization. The Electric Workshop, home of the core exhibition, was a haven for video-, computer-, and other technology-based installations that left the door wide open to artists residing in America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America (to the detriment, according to many, of African artists working with sculpture, painting, and other traditional media).

In the context of post-apartheid nationalism, the internationalist focus was viewed as an instance of cultural imperialism, and as justifiable ground for South African audiences to isolate themselves from the biennale.

The themes of the show were investigated in any number of ways. There were installations of home environments with furniture, photographs hanging on the walls, and old passports and suitcases that referenced movement, exile, and fragmentary diasporic identities. British artist Yinka Shonibare’s

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Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlour, 1996-97, with its motifs of African prints and ivory busts, ironizes the use of such objects as the embodiment of original identity by casting them as trophies and repressed fantasies of the colonizer. At the other end, the motif of trade routes and geography is literally rendered by South African artist Wayne Barker in an installation titled The World Is Flat, 1995. Barker’s recycled military uniforms and green bottles seem to celebrate a peaceful world at the same time as it makes palpable the trade routes of the Dutch and other Europeans. Lucy Orta, too, takes this global interconnectedness as her theme in Collective Wear, 1997, a performance in which participants wear jumpsuits that are attached to each other umbilicalstyle with various African fabrics. The piece, which took place in front of the Electric Workshop, offers a primal lesson for post-apartheid South Africa.

The biennale predictably came under attack in the Johannesburg press. It was argued that the show was alienating to South Africans both on the grounds of content (the preoccupation with hybridity) and form (abstract video installations and neo-Conceptualism).

Veteran South African filmmaker Lionel Ngakane, for example, told me he felt the biennale served outsiders more than South Africans. The relative paucity of South African art made it even easier for local commentators to reach the same conclusion.

Nonetheless, for me, the question of the relevance of the biennale to post-apartheid society remained pertinent. I kept wondering how to reconcile the image of the woman I had seen with the work being exhibited. Certainly I could picture her in Food for Work II, 1997, by Zambian artist William Miko, a crowded realist tableau whose rhythm is marked by the contrast between the white paint and the other colours. The

single-mindedness with which the women, with their headscarves and their babies tied to their backs, are moving in different directions, together and yet alone, is an expression of the onset of modernity. One can also observe a lyrical statement of this arrival in Cho Duck-Hyun’s installation Our Memory of the 20th Century, 1997, or in the ironic gestures in Carrie Mae Weems’ Untitled (Sea Island Series), 1991-93. In Cho Duck-Hyun’s piece, drawings of two generations of Koreans are superimposed. One picture depicts the persistence of tradition in modernity through the dash of a soldier’s simple uniform, the hats worn by the men, and the distinctly aristocratic and religious signifiers in the rest of the image. In a smaller background picture, the women depicted, perhaps immigrants from the traditional setting implied in the first image, are homogenized by their working-class attire. In Weems’ installation, the ethnographic photographs of African subjects, overlaid with texts (‘you became a scientific profile’/‘& a photographic subject’/‘an anthropological debate’/‘a negroid type’), reveal a poetics of irony and a deconstruction of the scars of modernity on the bodies and minds of black people.

I was also struck by the flâneur-style individualism on display in Beat Streuli’s snapshot of a Japanese woman in Tokyo Shibuya 97, 1997. Streuli captures a certain heroism in his subject – expressed through her corduroy coat, with its strong shoulders and collar, and the tragic demeanour with which she looks past the viewer toward an uncertain future – that reminds me not only of the South African passerby but also of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel in Godard’s Breathless.

In his keynote speech, Judge AL (Albie) Sachs, an ANC member who lost an arm in a car bomb during the struggle against apartheid and is now a drafter of the

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new South African Constitution, called for a biennale that addressed Johannesburg in all its specificity.

He spoke in favor of globalization but against homogenization – he did not want Johannesburg to be like New York or London or Hong Kong. He invited the new South African bourgeoisie to invest in such art, and to take lessons from the Fords and the Rockefellers of the world that the new bourgeoisie could outcompete the old. He also called on artists to ground their work in their communities, and to turn to democracy and openness as guiding principles.

The judge’s sentiments were echoed by many of the participants I spoke with. Most artists from subSaharan Africa worried about the homogenizing and totalizing tendencies in contemporary Conceptual art and video. And Viye Diba, an artist from Senegal, pointed out that artists who had no access to video technology were at a disadvantage. On the other hand, I was fascinated by a statement by Isaac Julien, director of Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996),

that, with the homogenization of film by Hollywood and commercial pressure, one had to go to museums to see innovation in film language. Another film and video-maker included in the show, Steve McQueen, agreed. Both implicitly endorsed the value of film and video in venues such as the biennale, as occasions to mine the visual movement offered by the medium.

For McQueen and Julien, video provides a unique opportunity for diasporic expressions effectively barred from commercial cinema. The relative strength of the video work on display at the biennale supports their claim. McQueen added that he hoped black visual artists could achieve in film what Tricky, WuTang Clan, and the Pharcyde did in music.

Everyone I spoke to at the biennale told me to go to Soweto, as it was there I would see the real South Africa, poverty and all. The area has become nostalgically identified with Nelson and Winnie Mandela before their split, the scene of the romance of the ANC and the horror of apartheid. The identification with oppression and resistance to change has ironically made Soweto a perfect candidate for tourism, and to that end the place is on its way to becoming a living museum for visitors. In the end, it wasn’t hard to be more attracted to the transformative narratives in the show than to the petrified suffering in Soweto. I saw the image of the new Soweto in Renee Green’s Vogue par Nelson Mandela (Taste Venue), 1994, as well as in her unfinished video installation, Chasing Lusethenia, in which subjects are shown discussing censorship, restrictions on people’s movements, and disempowerment. The video images of exportable goods (cotton, coffee, indigo) in Martinique artist Marc Latamie’s installation cunningly refer to Degas’ The Office of the Cotton Merchant in New Orleans and,

“In his keynote speech, Judge Albie Sachs called for a biennale that addressed Johannesburg in all its specificity. He spoke in favor of globalization but against homogenization – he did not want Johannesburg to be like New York or London or Hong Kong ... The judge’s sentiments were echoed by many of the participants I spoke with.”

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echoing Judge Sachs’ call to take inspiration in the raw materials of Africa, evoke economic transformation.

Finally, there was the transfigurative magic in Malian artist Abdoulaye Konate’s installation La Menace (Threat), 1997, a large tray of eggs atop another lying in sand. Referencing traditional West African altars, the installation constitutes a perfect place of reflection in the show.

Now that the Johannesburg Biennale is closed and the city has announced that it lacks the fiscal resources to finance a third installment, it’s time to reflect on the merit of the second and perhaps final edition. Clearly, those of us who attended must feel disappointed on some level: the show failed to engage South Africans in a dialogue with contemporary art and theoretical reflections. It is no small measure of nationalism in the new South Africa that what Okwui Enwezor has so elegantly and expertly proposed has been resisted so vehemently.

Yinka Shonibare, The Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlour, 1996-97, installation view, Alternating Currents. Photo: Werner Maschmann

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2012

Colin Richards Reflections [Curator, Graft] Notes from an interview by Joost Bosland

About a year before the second Johannesburg Biennale I was approached by Okwui Enwezor to curate one of the six shows on the biennale. This was to be a ‘South African’ exhibition, although I cannot remember how Okwui framed this at the time. It could not in any ordinary sense have been a ‘national’ show, which would be counterintuitive given Okwui’s particular conception of Trade Routes: History and Geography. Yet nation-building, its prospective social re-engineering and rhetoric clearly gripped South Africa in those immediate post-liberation years. Ideas of the ‘new’ South Africa liberated intense creative energy amongst local artists and commentators, energy that included critical scrutiny of the very idea of newness and nation, as well as the plethora of metaphors used to describe and mobilise ideas and acts of nation-building.

Why me? I think Okwui and Octavio Zaya (a cocurator) had been reading material I had written, including an article published in the journal Atlantica (No 11, October 1995) which focused on a relationship between an installation by Kendell Geers and one by Durant Sihlali from the first (Africus) Johannesburg

Biennale in 1995. Geers sought to ‘evacuate’ the institutional space (Johannesburg Art Gallery) while Sihlali sought to occupy it. I had also had some curating experience with the first biennale, with an exhibition titled Taking Liberties: The Body Politic, and from another exhibition called Siyawela: Love, Loss and Liberation held in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, England, also in 1995.

At the time I thought it was either courageous or foolhardy for Okwui to choose a non-black, university-based curator. There were other options.

At any rate taking on such a project would be risky, critically challenging and creatively exciting in probably equal measure. And so it proved to be. We were in the thick of working through aesthetic, ethical and political values after political liberation. It seemed as if just about everything important in art was being navigated and negotiated in the moment. In 1997 many (well, some … a few) really imagined a new art world in the making.

An ambitious conceit perhaps, but political apartheid had just been brought down (something unimaginable just a few years before) and our different worlds were opening up internally and internationally.

The biennale offered a singular opportunity to activate art-world transformation as well as capture what was happening artistically in that historic decade – here and beyond. The globalising, professionalising and networking imperatives of the 1990s disturbed the tenacious, sometimes smug ‘exceptionalism’ characterising certain tendencies in our local discourse. This exceptionalism was deeply stained by the isolationist thinking that apartheid bequeathed to us, and left almost nothing untouched, whatever the politics.

On a more personal level I thought about Okwui’s

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invitation for a while, working through what it meant to have a ‘South African’ exhibition in an explicitly international or even ‘global’ event like a biennale.

And then there was the actual location in the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, a long way from the ‘core’ shows in Johannesburg, which risked simply reworking a form of marginalisation. There, at a different level, the very idea of a biennale was hardly uncontroversial.

Elation and suspicion characterised the late 1990s. The National Gallery, like many institutions, was contested terrain. Amongst other things the blood was still drying and dust still settling on, for example, a boycott ‘mentality’ which still held sway as part of cultural resistance to the apartheid state.

1997 was itself haunted by the spectre of very present history which stalked the controversial activities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Then there was the second democratic election, the third force, fifth columns, invisible hands, continuing violence and an almost overwhelming sense of being more an object than a participant in a rapidly globalising world. The biennale moment in 1997 compressed our torrid history and global pressures into what felt like a singular, shape-changing opportunity. At the time and in hindsight the biennale certainly opened up much more than it closed off, notwithstanding the whimpering bang of its end.

I thought the prospect of curating a show gave us – artists, curators, viewers – a chance to do something spirited and exciting, even if it turned out to be an exciting flop. In our diverse ways, we could produce a real moment – within and beyond our locality – to connect, become less insular and work through the sometimes deadweight of our rigidly self-identified pasts.

At a press conference given by Okwui in Johannesburg, pressing questions were posed about involving a South African audience hitherto alienated and marginalised from the art world. My intuition was that there was more interest in articulating and shaping the interface between our small, fractious and fragile art constituencies and the wider art world than in the local audiences as such. The contradictions and pressure points within the biennale in fact cumulatively produced a volatile and discontinuous set of interfaces. This was sharpened for me simply by doing Graft in a city infinitely stranger to me than I ever anticipated.

Put differently, perhaps the ‘publics’ Okwui and his team sought to engage were the institutional, art-world circuits, cosmopolitan Africa(s) and Africa’s artistic and intellectual diasporas. I valued this engagement myself, but it did often militate against building a popular local art-world base. Some commitments, if followed through, would have helped matters. One regret was that the transport arranged for visitors between the Johannesburg and Cape Town localities never materialised, losing the value of interaction not only between these two very distant cities but between each and their surrounds.

The choice of a New York-based, Nigerian-born art critic for director of the biennale resulted in some pushback and resistance. Within the country this tapped into the often toxic discourse of ‘belonging’ and ‘foreignness’ which is our burden. Again, the challenge was to recognise local histories without collapsing into some sort of radical (but actually deeply conservative) ‘nativism’ on the one hand, or collapsing difference for assimilation into the circuits of consumption of a rapacious global art world on the other.

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I personally valued Okwui’s confidence and rigor as a curator, in spite of other differences we had. I was deeply impressed with the other curators he invited. Two years before, the 1995 biennale jumped around excitedly every which way (10 South African exhibitions, some 62 countries with exhibitions) in a sort of electrical storm of stunned, post-liberation hyperactivity. The energy embodied in those long serpentine rows of voters in 1994 had flowed and filtered into ordinary life, and this energy lingered.

Trade Routes: History and Geography, the overall theme of the biennale, gave me an open hand. I had good discussions with Okwui as director and his team about what I had in mind, and his ideas about what might work. He had hoped for a show of young artists.

Initially I thought there were exceptional artists who were marginalised and invisible and not young. But the idea of younger artists eventually grew on me and the result was the youthful group on Graft.

I developed the curatorial frame of Graft, which was pre-eminently about contact and exchange within shifting layers and undertows of cultural and political violence. Through the idea of graft I sought to capture three sensibilities, three registers of meaning as it were, all underpinned by violence and negotiating ‘difference’. The first was biological, as in grafting two plants to produce something new, for good or ill. The second was bodily, as in grafting skin onto a bodily wound or injury. The third was to treat ‘graft’ as a dark zone of parallel economies, mirroring the licit and legitimate economies of which we are all a public part. In varying degrees and ways, all the artworks could be seen to shed light on some dimension of the core notion. This was a mixture of intention and happenstance. I knew many of the artists, but all,

without exception, were doing very interesting work.

For some I considered only new work, for others work already made and even exhibited in some form. This combination allowed me some curatorial stability but also left open space for curatorial responsiveness, flexibility and artistic accident.

I structured the narrative and spacing of the show quite carefully. Space proved a real challenge. We had to get institutional permission for the things we wanted to do, and struggle for what rooms we could use. Okwui’s support here proved invaluable.

Given the historical moment and the venue, I selected quite a significant number of works which overtly engaged institutional routines and practices.

I enjoyed the extraordinary privilege of working quite intensively and intimately with some very imaginative and engaged minds. And, as it happened, many on the exhibition produced career-making work; Ângela Ferreira, Moshekwa Langa, Sandile Zulu, Tracey Rose, Siemon Allen, Alan Alborough, Candice Breitz, Johannes Phokela all come to mind here. A separate catalogue for Graft was originally on the cards, but became a casualty of the failure of nerve and vision which brought about the premature end of the biennale.

When all is said and done (is it ever?), I think the artists on Graft enjoyed their experience as much as I did. What was so valuable in prospect and in retrospect was that critique in the best and widest sense of the word was part of that enjoyment.

Colin Richards’ False Wall was included on If A Tree... (pp 152-53).

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2012

Ângela Ferreira Reflections [Artist] Notes from an interview by Joost Bosland

My work Double Sided was included in Colin Richards’ exhibition Graft. It was a work that I did between Marfa, Texas, and Nieu-Bethesda in South Africa. It was a very theoretical piece, influenced by the writings on cultural displacement by Homi Bhaba et al. After having made work that referred to Donald Judd, I went to his studio compound in Marfa, and I absolutely hated it. I was this simple girl who had grown up in apartheid South Africa, and I did not realise the power artists could have, and the opulence in which they could live. The whole place reeked of Judd’s power. ‘How indulgent,’ I thought.

When they invited me to do a residency I said no. (The art world, and my perception of it, has since changed, and it all looks very modest now in relation to the wealth in the art world at the turn of the millennium.)

A few months later I went on holiday to NieuBethesda and saw Helen Martins’ Owl House. I immediately wrote to the people in Marfa and told them I wanted to do the residency after all. There, I took an old building that hadn’t been restored and turned it into Helen’s Owl House. Her natural, opulent aesthetic was quite a contrast with Judd’s

modern, clean look. A few months later I went to Nieu-Bethesda and recreated his studio there.

It was a very important project in my life. It took over a year to make and nobody ever saw it in its entirety, except for me. But some interesting people saw one or the other. Ten people came down to NieuBethesda from Johannesburg; the only other people at the opening there were my family and some farmers.

In an odd twist of fate, Judd died during that year, between my first and second visits to Marfa.

1997 was an incredibly important moment for me for a variety of reasons. I was included in what Okwui conceived of as a South African-curated show of South African artists. For most South African artists it was problematic, but for me it was very nice. I was living in Portugal, and had worked for a long time with this double identity thing. Not everybody is happy to grant you that.

I had felt quite rejected by South Africa for having chosen to work somewhere else, and it was affirmative to be included as a South African. In 1995 I was in the Portuguese pavilion, so to me it was an upgrade.

In effect what happened with Graft being down in Cape Town is that the South African leg of the show was not taken as seriously as the main core of the show in Jo’burg. The basic concept of what Okwui was doing was brilliant – we are not going to centralise this, we’re going to branch it out – but it didn’t quite work as intended. There were hierarchical structures, real or perceived, that were unintentionally emphasised by the geography of the shows. I never got to meet Okwui properly. He might have come to the opening, but he didn’t spend time with the artists. There was no hype, no glamour to be found around Graft. There was excitement in Johannesburg, and there were lots of visiting curators who never left that city.

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That said, there was a quantum leap of conceptual thought from the first to the second biennale, mainly due to Okwui himself. The very fact that, from a conventional, one might even say boring biennale, we got to this new model in 1997 was a triumph. The 1997 biennale was one of the first experiments anywhere in the world with a new model without direct national representations, and this in a country that had just come out of an incredibly difficult political situation, where debates about nationalism were quite tenuous.

That development was quite unique. How does that happen? The art world at the time might have seemed tame, but someone had the idea to hire Okwui. (For the record, let’s not forget that the first biennale was quite formative as well. Portugal came with a young curator who is now the director of the Serralves museum. There are stories there which we should not omit entirely.)

To me it was a very marking experience, as it was the first time that postcolonial discourse in contemporary art became visible, and took physical form. But it was also the first time it showed its cracks. I sensed that the postcolonial would be absorbed into the glamour of the international art world, and neutered as a result. Originally, the discourse was wanting to achieve something, wanting to gain ground. The first moment where the ground was gained, ironically, was also the first moment it revealed its limitations.

And Okwui did achieve very, very much. People don’t like to give him the credit, but he was a visionary. But almost incidentally, the discourse essentially ran its course with him.

This is not a criticism of 1997 – it is a compliment.

It is nobody’s fault that a discourse has limits. The gains were incredible, but perhaps it happened too quickly.

The whole biennale circuit is a symptom of this.

A different aspect of the biennale was the parallel universe of on-the-ground politics. On that count, it failed miserably: it closed early, the local audience didn’t know what it was looking at … That was also a sign of something. The biennale had landed like a spaceship.

It was perhaps too quick, too soon … There was no sustainable on-the-ground structure. It marked a lot of careers, but it wasn’t a peaceful project. I remember the discussion about the closing down of the biennale. The city council decided to pull funding because nobody went to see it. A lot of interesting signals came out, but they weren’t decipherable. How culpable was Okwui for the biennale’s failure in this respect? Was it his responsibility to figure out the local politics, or was that the responsibility of the South Africans who hired him, or the South Africans whom he in turn hired? Okwui had empowered the National Gallery as a venue, but do you think this was easy? If we asked for a screwdriver, we were told that the biennale people did not bring screwdrivers. The resistance was real.

Part of the problem was a certain local resistance to foreigners coming here and having any opinions, or asserting themselves in any way. This predated the biennale, and comes from the long period of isolation, the boycott, and feeling like distant, unwanted cousins; the trauma of not being liked because apartheid was so horrible … whether you were perceived as a ‘baddie’ or a ‘victim’, you came from a place with a stigma. This exists in other colonies, but not as markedly as here. Ângela Ferreira showed a new version of Double Sided on Trade Routes Over Time (pp 112-13) and a publication envisaged in 1997 was finally realised as part of the exhibition; new work was also included on Fiction as Fiction (p177).

Ângela Ferreira, Double Sided, 1997, installation detail, Graft. Photo: Werner Maschmann

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2012

Paul Edmunds Reflections [Technical assistant]

My participation in the second Johannesburg Biennale was limited to technical assistance during the installation of the two shows in Cape Town. In the end, I didn’t even make it to Jo’burg.

We were a motley crew, assembled to hang the show for a very modest fee by Jill Goldschmidt, a lecturer in History of Art from the Cape Technikon.

Amongst us were some aspirant artists like me, but many of us had never handled art before, and some had no interest whatsoever.

The first artist I encountered was Alan Alborough.

He and I spent some time hunting around for steel tables he wanted for his work which was to be installed at the National Gallery where Colin Richards had curated Graft. Alan wouldn’t, though, say anything about the rest of the work. Describing it, he told me, would detract from an experience of what it really was.

That was the last I had to do with the National Gallery show as more help was needed at the Castle of Good Hope, where curator Kellie Jones was putting together Life’s Little Necessities.

We assembled at the Castle for a few successive days only to be told that the artworks were still in

customs. We couldn’t quite leave but there wasn’t really anything for most of us to do. Luckiest were a few who got to work with Glenda Heyliger on the piece she had begun constructing in one of the basements of the Castle’s B-Block. Morale amongst the crew and the artists was low.

Silvia Gruner was awaiting a large delivery of foam for part of her installation, and growing tenser as opening night approached. By the time it arrived she had quit. A team of assistants loaded up a few bakkies and we guiltily dropped the foam off at The Haven night shelter in Green Point.

As the work arrived, assistants were assigned to artists, and the installation began. Melanie Smith was producing a work from her Orange Lush series, comprising all manner of lurid orange tat bought mostly from markets in Mexico. Occasionally assistants were dispatched to local Chinese stores to buy more.

These were systematically stapled and nailed to a drywall constructed for the purpose. I remember talking to her about the work, and she saying to me that curators were perpetually asking her to produce such works, while she felt she had moved on from that series.

Fatimah Tuggar was younger than many of us, and a lot of good fun. She didn’t need much assistance, and she introduced me to the joys of self-adhesive Velcro, something I wouldn’t see in Cape Town for a few years yet.

I have a propensity to take on responsibility, and somehow I found myself in some sort of role which was not quite regular assistant and not quite Jill Goldschmidt. I had some experience installing art, and much of this had been done hanging previous shows at the Castle, so I knew, for instance, how to hang on to the B-Block keys in order to work late.

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At this stage the Castle was run entirely by the army, which meant that the doors shut at 4pm, and work wound down even before that. My ploy involved telling one person that I would be returning the key to another, and telling the same to that person. A couple of times I came home with a bunch of enormous keys that really looked like they came from a castle.

As our deadline approached we had to solve some niggling problems. One of these was the projection surface for Jocelyn Taylor’s piece. We had been supplied with fabric and some sort of superstructure, but, as we weren’t allowed to drill into the Castle’s 400-year-old walls, this presented a challenge. I came up with a solution involving sash clamps fixed to some existing columns, and someone was despatched to buy these. Alan Alborough, meanwhile, got wind of this and objected. Since he was going to be using such clamps as an integral part of his installation, he felt that their use elsewhere would affect the reading of his work. I see what he meant now, but at the time it seemed unreasonable.

Eventually the biennale agreed to construct a drywall for the projection. While I was in a meeting with the foreman, Kellie Jones and others discussing the placement and dimensions of this wall, Zarina Bhimji kept interrupting, demanding my attention.

Her work had arrived and she wanted it installed immediately. I gave up on the meeting eventually and accompanied her up the stairs where I was to hang two lightboxes for her. As I bent down to pick up the first she objected loudly because I wasn’t wearing gloves.

That was a bridge too far for me, and I let rip with some foul language, leaving her to do it herself. I’m told she took Kellie Jones out to lunch to complain about me but I never heard anything more, apart from

a few thumbs-ups from some others.

This screen and Lorna Simpson’s both had to be ready early as two technicians from De Appel in the Netherlands had been dispatched to Cape Town to set up the video projectors. Here, we weren’t yet familiar with the technology. Simpson’s Call Waiting, in fact, was a little anomalous in subject matter too, since that sort of telephony was not commonplace here either. The Dutch crew duly arrived and set up the projectors in the wonky boxes we had constructed and hung from the ceiling for the purpose.

Once the show was hung and open, to make up, I guess, for the poor pay and the generally appalling working conditions, the assistants were given a copy of the catalogue and were all taken out to lunch where I hope I drank too much.

During the course of the biennale, rumours persisted that R1-million had been spent on drywalls in Johannesburg, and that video projectors were constantly being stolen and replaced. This, coupled with the fact that Olafur Eliasson had left the tap on in a water-scarce country, affronted my delicate liberal sensibility. When we were tasked with striking the show, destroying the temporary drywall structures in the National Gallery was not the cathartic release apparently promised by a four-pound hammer. A staff member from the gallery secreted away usable sections of plasterboard. My angle grinder, borrowed by someone at the National Gallery, was returned broken. Typically it was cheaper to replace than fix, but I ignored that and took pleasure instead in the two unused sash clamps which had been ceded to me.

Paul Edmunds exhibited on and wrote this text as part of If A Tree... (pp 134-35).

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1997

Dan Cameron Glocal Warming Extracts from a ‘travelogue’ ...

© Artforum December 1997, ‘Glocal Warming’,

by Dan Cameron

It’s hard to add more to the Documenta legend than has already been published, but my persistent feeling here is that, despite the presentation of a rigorously intellectual environment in which remarkable discoveries from the 1960s and 1970s can be made, almost everything dating from the last few years seems stilted and decontextualized.

My greatest personal disappointment comes from the fact that Catherine David is one of the few European curators who has actually logged in significant time in Latin America and other less-mainstream locations, yet she has produced a relentlessly Eurocentric exhibition. It’s virtually impossible, looking at her distanced and alienating installation of Helio Oiticica’s work (and the disorganized and fragmentary documentation that accompanies it), to guess how he intended for his parangole capes to be worn by dancers. Here it looks like a cargo cult in reverse, with the objects being ‘misappropriated’ through the need of the ‘natives’ to gaze on them in the form of a museological display. Also, I’m a bit offended by her antimarket rhetoric, as well as by her rabid antiAmericanism, which feels too much like the nostalgic projections of yet another French intellectual whose politics have not budged an inch since 1968.

June 20-21, Kassel:

Everyone is calling Kasper König’s Skulptur Projekte Münster the antidote to Documenta X, and there is a definite sense that the art looks vital and inventive under his tutelage, as opposed to the bland retreads of Broodthaers and Pistoletto that David seems to prefer. In addition, König seems to have selected the majority of his artists well in advance (in some cases, years before), which means that the works benefit from long preparation June 22-23, Münster:

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and production – none of which is evident in Kassel.

Still, despite remarkable projects by Douglas Gordon, Hans Haacke, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ilya Kabakov, Jorge Pardo, Allen Ruppersberg, and Diana Thater, among others, one comes away with a sense of things having been made a bit too pleasant and easygoing for the viewer, who is constantly being seduced and repelled by the city’s storybook quaintness. After Kassel and Münster, one is forced to wonder whether there are only two possibilities for art today: a fingerwagging lecture or a stroll in the park.

can be imagined. Entitled Islas, Portuguese for ‘islands’, the show, organized by Orlando Brito, brings together two dozen artists from islands around the world (Manhattan is represented by Barbara Ess and Toland Grinnell), offering a peculiar, margins-first aesthetic that uncovers a few surprises in its sweep. Jacqueline Fraser of New Zealand has created a beautiful, closetlike environment of cloth deities that remind one of shadow puppetry and child’s fantasy, while Santiago Rodriguez Olazabal of Cuba has produced a smallish wooden standing figure, equal parts defiant warrior and introspective muse, surrounded by crushed glass.

Although the exhibition is definitely a mixed bag – Grinnell, Willie Doherty (Ireland), and Marcos Lora Read (Dominican Republic) are the other standouts – the show demonstrates that even a narrow thematic focus can sometimes lead to broad artistic results.

July 19, Santa Fe: The SITE Santa Fe Biennial may not

have the prestige of the Carnegie International – the only other regular international show in the US – but it more than makes up for it this year in freshness of selection and design. Curator Francesco Bonami has called his production TRUCE, and focused his attention on artists who are little known in New York, much less the Southwest. Jaan Toomik, Maurizio Cattelan, Miguel Rio Branco, Tracey Moffatt (how quickly things change), Suchan Kinoshita, Eulalia Valldosera, Kevin Hanley, and Olafur Eliasson (to name a handful) may not be household names yet, but for this reason the audience here seems more inclined to remain open to their work. In addition, Bonami has created a tight but fluid installation that allows each artist to create a stimulating dialogue with his or her neighbours, while maintaining enough visual autonomy to give a clear sense of what the work is about. One can only dream that the next Carnegie will be less starstruck than its 1995 version.

I’m here in the Canary Islands to view a miniglobal exhibition, if such a thing September 19, Las Palmas:

It’s the third day after the opening of the second Johannesburg Biennale, and it’s a profound relief to be able to report that this is the artistic payoff that everyone who’s been traipsing the globe this year has been waiting for. Realized under extraordinary conditions – support from the cultural authorities seems more symbolic than real, the skeletal support staff is more overworked than any I’ve encountered before, and conditions surrounding the downtown site lend the whole proceedings a bunkerlike mentality – Trade Routes: History and Geography is the first global exhibition to transform the promise of postcolonial theory into a tangible reality, thereby almost completely exorcising the ghost of 1989’s Magiciens de la terre from the curatorial lexicon. New York-based curator Okwui Enwezor has wisely spread the work out among a team of six additional curators, October 15, Johannesburg:

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“The scale and breadth of this exhibition enables the most intrepid viewers to immerse themselves for an entire week in what may turn out to be the most important exhibition of the 1990s.”

synchronized video monitors, and a work like William Kentridge’s hair-raising Ubu Tells the Truth, an animated film about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, stem not from political issues per se but from the rawness of human expression at the heart of all identity-driven debates. There are any number of memorable projects; from Alternating Currents alone came stunning works by Mario Benjamin (from Haiti); Andries Botha, Malcolm Payne, Kendell Geers, Sue Williamson, and Pat Mautloa (from South Africa); Sergio Vega (Argentina); Stan Douglas (Canada); Isaac Julien (UK); Marko Peljhan (Slovenia); Touhami Ennadre (Morocco); Salem Mekouria (Ethiopia); Bili Bidjocka (Cameroon); Shirin Neshat (Iran); Rivane Neuenschwander (Brazil); Teresa Serrano (Mexico); and Beat Streuli (Switzerland). As one makes one’s way through these and other works, it’s impossible to deny the growing awareness that global art has finally passed from pipe dream to the paradigm of our times. If it seems at all strange for a New York curator to glimpse the future of contemporary art at the southern tip of Africa, perhaps that is because no seismic changes can be registered at the centre anymore. Rather, the kinds of artistic change promised over the past decade must take place through a slow process of assimilation, by which the centre learns of its own peripheral status through the gradual shock of a more equitable system of universal recognition.

each with his or her own site. The sprawling core exhibition, Alternating Currents, with over 65 artists from every part of the world, has been organized by Enwezor and New York-based curator Octavio Zaya.

Satellite exhibitions including another 70 artists in Johannesburg and Cape Town have been organized by the Paris-based Chinese curator Hou Hanru; the Walker Art Center’s Kellie Jones; PLEXUS founder Yu Yeon Kim, who is based in New York and Seoul; Gerardo Mosquera (my colleague at the New Museum), and Colin Richards, the sole South African on the team. The scale and breadth of this exhibition enables the most intrepid viewers to immerse themselves for an entire week in what may turn out to be the most important exhibition of the 1990s.

Why is Johannesburg II such a triumph? Part of it has to do with the fact that Enwezor, originally from Nigeria, is thoroughly immersed in both scholarly issues and the art of the African diaspora. Unlike comparable projects in the US and Europe, however, race becomes more subtext than excuse, reflecting the fact that the hotbeds of intersecting cultural drives in the most vital artistic centres today (London, New York) are producing innumerable hybrid positions.

Thus, the links between, for example, Pepon Osorio’s deeply moving Badge of Honor installation, in which an incarcerated father ‘talks’ to his teenage son via

Rivane Neuenschwander, Untitled, 1997, installation view, Alternating Currents. Photo: Werner Maschmann

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2012

Olafur Eliasson Reflections [Artist]

In 1997, I participated in the second Johannesburg Biennale, where I had been invited to show a photo series inside the biennale building (Looking for hot water on Gunnar’s land, 1995). Johannesburg had just undergone, and was still undergoing, incredible changes due to the crumbling of apartheid. The building was right in the city centre, in a very politically charged environment.

I made an additional work (Erosion, 1997), partisan-like and without the knowledge of the exhibition curators, to forge a stronger relationship with the surroundings, with this city ripe with recent history. Across from the biennale building there was a smallish, shallow water reservoir. I rented a pump and emptied the reservoir water into the street to create a little stream. It meandered through the city for about 1.5km, carrying dirt, leaves and litter with it before disappearing into a sewer.

Doing a site-specific intervention with existing materials would probably not have been an obvious choice for me, had I not come across the early work of Hans Haacke and other similarly minded artists. While sitting outside the biennale building in 1997, thinking

about my intervention, I met Haacke, who was also participating in the biennale. We talked about his flags, about the fact that we exhibited mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, about Iceland, and whether the flags billow in the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere. I remember suggesting that he make a work about the sun rising in the west and setting in the east in the Southern Hemisphere, as we were, in fact, sitting upside down from the point of view of the Northern Hemisphere.

A version of this text was originally published in With Reference to Hans Haacke, 2011.

In 2012, Olafur Eliasson showed his video Innen Stadt AuĂ&#x;en (2010) at Trade Routes Over Time (pp 120-21). His artist’s book Erosion, documenting his intervention in urban space at the 1997 Johannesburg biennale, was reprinted in an edition of 200 as part of Trade Routes Over Time.

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Olafur Eliasson, Erosion, 1997, site-specific intervention, second Johannesburg Biennale. Photos: Olafur Eliasson Courtesy of Private collection, Bozen, Italy

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2012

Jo Ractliffe Reflections [Artist] Notes from an interview by Joost Bosland

I was part of Alternating Currents curated by Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya. My participation was quite unexpected and came about rather circuitously. I met Okwui during his first visit; Lorna Ferguson hosted a dinner for him, with a group of young curators. All men incidentally – I was there simply by virtue of my relationship with Stephen Hobbs who was the curator of the Market Gallery at the time. Anyway, Okwui and I immediately got into an intense discussion about [Pippa Skotnes’] Miscast, and our interactions over the following months followed in that vein: good conversations, mainly about other people’s work, and shoes (he’s a really natty dresser!). But he never asked me about my work and I didn’t volunteer anything.

Around this time Octavio Zaya saw reShooting Diana on Don’t Mess with Mister In-between at Culturgest in Lisbon and was rather taken by it. The next time I saw Okwui he commented: ‘So you’re a photographer?’ We both laughed and so it began.

I showed him the beginnings of something from a recent trip through the Karoo. I had taken photographs along the N1 every hundred kilometres,

from Johannesburg to Cape Town and back. It was an experiment with landscape, inspired partly by John Baldessari, but one that had been interrupted by the discovery of three dead donkeys alongside the road – they had been shot. These images later became End of Time. In retrospect I should have simply shown the photographs, but at the time I was unsure of the material and thought my ideas about a forensic journey through landscape would work better in video. What I was thinking now escapes me; I’d never really worked with video before! Looking back, it’s clear I was out of my depth in that context and I’m amazed that Okwui didn’t throw it out. But in its defence, that work helped me find a language for the Vita work, Love, Death, Sacrifice and so forth, and also the video version of Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting), both of which I’m still quite proud of. So I’m glad of the experience even if I cringe whenever someone asks about that work!

I remember the mid-late 1990s as an extraordinary time, in all its fragile euphoria and contradictory complexity. It seemed that with democracy, the world opened and it was on our doorstop … But I think as much as we were opening up to the world, we were also opening up to ourselves; things were expanded and it was invigorating to feel the possibility that that moment offered us – as people and as artists. There was a new complexity to image-making, investigations into other themes, modes and languages, as well as more self-reflexivity in the work of that time, all of which previously had not seemed possible. And in particular, the biennale coincided with or heralded – I don’t know which – a surge of photography and video. Maybe it was simply that we became more aware of what people were making elsewhere, but suddenly,

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“As much as we were opening up to the world, we were also opening up to ourselves; things were expanded and it was invigorating to feel the possibility that that moment offered us – as people and as artists.“ or so it seemed, photography had entered the realm of art here in South Africa. I think that moment had quite a profound affect on photography here. And then there was Johannesburg, seeing it anew, and all the city projects that followed … Everything was colliding at that time; it was incredible.

And there were also tensions … I thought some of the questions raised at the time were real and valid – particularly developing local interest in the biennale and sustaining this into the future. Of course, whose responsibility this was is another question … There were many issues I thought had less to do with the biennale than they did local art-world politics, and to be honest, that stuff didn’t interest me. But whatever those tensions were, whatever arguments you might bring to legitimate or contest them, they have had real consequences. My feeling is we kind of blew it; we got mired in the squabble and lost sight of what the biennale actually meant, the opportunities it offered us.

Looking back is always somewhat dangerous, especially when you get older – it’s hard to ward off nostalgia, but when I think back, I remember it a bit like the summer of love!

Jo Ractliffe showed End of Time alongside new photographs on Trade Routes Over Time (pp 114-17).

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1997

Christian Haye Spin City Survey: The Istanbul, Johannesburg and Kwangju Biennales

© Frieze, January-February 1998 http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/spin_city/

spin: n. A fairly rapid ride or run; a brief drive in a motor vehicle, aircraft, etc., now esp. For pleasure.

As I write this I notice out of the corner of my eye a copy of USA Today I bought for the particularly compelling photos on the front page: faces of stockbrokers around the world in despair, panic and euphoria the day after the global stock market crash and recovery. Why debate the existence of globalisation, post-nationalism or hybridity when it’s already here? When this global beast reveals its nature, feelings of nationalism are renewed, responding to the fear such a swing engenders. Likewise in professional sports, we all want our teams to win but not at the cost of too many foreign players and losing our sense of who we are. Such claims for cultural classification sometimes seem beyond our control: are you truly associating with a frontier cowboy spirit while inhaling a Marlboro? Or as the billows of smoke are liberated from your lungs do you taste the Indian-born CEO of Philip Morris, the Swiss stockbroker who purchased the company’s shares or the tobacco farmers from countries you’ve never visited? Where in fact did you purchase the pack and whence came the merchant who sold it?

Thousands refuse to watch the Oscars in protest against a misguided sense of American hegemony, but Japanese, European and American money all produce Hollywood’s cultural cotton candy, and for global audiences. While the idea of First World multinationals versus the rest of us would seem an appealing conflict, more often than not the ideology is subsumed by questions of power. If you could remake the world in your image who would end up with that power? spin n. 9 Chiefly US Polit. A bias or slant on information, intended to create a favourable impression when it is

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presented to the public; an interpretation, a viewpoint.

Biennales have existed as survey exhibitions of contemporary art for almost a century. Optimistically their first function has always been to educate and inform the local audience: more pessimistically, they facilitate schmoozing and plumage-stroking for the art world. Cynically, especially in offbeat locales, they serve to foster a false impression of a freethinking democracy engaged with transnational ideas. While Venice, then São Paolo have been around the longest, over the last decade multitudinous events have been birthed around the world, most attempting the traditional structure of the national pavilion. Last year the Kwangju, Istanbul and Johannesburg Biennales all shed this format in favour of an arguably more cohesive, thematic exhibition.

Like the politician, the curator performs a delicate balancing act between governments, foundations, patrons, artists, critics and a general audience. While in many places freedom of expression can be taken for granted, in Kwangju, Istanbul and Johannesburg this freedom is, for varying reasons, precarious. The signs are there for all to see. In Kwangju, passengers from Brazil were warned that they may be subjected to Aids tests. Throughout the Istanbul exhibition, plaques read: ‘Önemli Uyari: Yapitlara zarar verenler hakkinda yasal islem yapilacaktir.’ (Legal action will be taken against those who violate the works of art.)

In Johannesburg, barbed wire was the construction material of choice.

Perhaps these circumstances were why the artistic directors chose such amorphous themes. Kwangju’s Unmapping the Earth was broken down into five sections each with a correlative element and corresponding curator: Speed/Water by Harald Szeeman, Becoming/ Earth by Bernard Marcadé, Hybrid/Wood by Richard

‘Frankly speaking, there is no such thing as a single curator. Even when one person is working, “a multiplicity of anonymous people” are constantly working together in him or her. Collaborators, interferers, opposers, memories, accidental happenings … infinitely numerous elements incessantly affect the work. Who can claim a single “I” in this circumstance?’ ~ Lee Young-chul, Artistic Director, 97 Kwangju Biennale ‘Buildings grow, collapse and rise up again, more as a part of ongoing, anonymous process of do-ityourself than as part of global, architectural and urban planning. Identities mix in synchronic, endless effervescence. Life develops with a forcefulness that defies difficulties.’ ~ Rosa Martínez, Artistic Director, 5th International Istanbul Biennial ‘Ours is a fascinating world of plentiful material comfort and economic triumphs, yet many countries and their inhabitants are so beggared that their very existence makes mockery of the idea of sovereign national states and subjects. By what right then do people practice art under such clearly traumatic situations? Perhaps a more apt question ought to be: by what right must people cease to find critical expression in the troubling narratives and celebrations of their milieus? Might we also add that the boundary of modernity is not just a sight of translation but, more clearly, one of trauma?’ ~ Okwui Enwezor, Artistic Director, 2nd Johannesburg Biennale 1997

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Kolashek, Power/Metal by Sung Wan-kyung and Space/ Fire by Kyong Park. In Istanbul, the biennale consisted of a single exhibition entitled On life, beauty, translations and other difficulties. Trade Routes: History and Geography in Johannesburg consisted of six exhibitions: Alternating Currents curated by Enwezor and Octavio Zaya, Graft

by Colin Richards, Important and Exportant by Gerardo Mosquera, Life’s Little Necessities by Kellie Jones, Hong Kong Etc by Hou Hanru and Transversions by Yu Yeon Kim. Try to keep up. Perhaps the viscosity of the language can be attributed to the fear of constricting art through language, but it could also be interpreted as a signal that curators, like politicians, know that the only way to win votes and keep their constituencies pacified is to say nothing at all with as much passion as humanly possible. But like voters, the biennale public occasionally saw this hollow language as an affront to their sensibilities. One longed for someone with the cojones to actually say something substantial.

Da Vinci – a rather drastic choice to illustrate historicity – at the other, Kyong Park’s architectural photo exhibit depicting cities in a state of anguish, ennui or futuristic bliss. Installations such as Park’s seem de rigeur at grand exhibitions lately, and while a counterpoint to touristic images of gleaming skyscrapers, lush hotels and precious vistas is a righteous cause, the salve invariably brings us pictures of ‘the city in decay’. There’s the physical decay of New York and the creative decay of Seoul’s cookie cutter architecture; neither seem to have given Shanghai adequate warning as it rushes into the future head first, ignoring the signs of the spiritual void ahead.

The exhibition spaces of the Istanbul Biennale included the ethereal grace of the Hagia Eireni Museum, a former church rebuilt in the fifth century, and the Yerebatan Cistern, a 900-year-old water storage facility now visited by hordes of tourists who sped their time getting wet from the ceiling’s constant dripping. These loaded spaces occasionally worked in favour of the art, but more often against it. One artist to benefit was Soo Ja Kim, who filled the crevices of the Hagia Ereini’s apse with multihued pieces of cloth, transforming the space into a Mondrian boogie-woogie. Although none of Istanbul’s advertised performances – by Mariko Mori and Tracey Emin, amongst others – took place, and certain Johannesburg installations were either incomplete or missing entirely, the biennales’ settings more than compensated. South Africa’s recent political history infused the proceedings with a sense of marvel, and the exhibitions’ backdrops of Johannesburg, with its newfound reputation as a crime capital, and Cape Town, still a global playground, contrasted beautifully.

spin v. II6b Of the brain or head: be dizzy, dazed, or confused through excitement, astonishment, etc.

Reacting to the multi-culti mess of the preceding Kwangju Biennale, Lee Young-chul ‘distanc[ed] it from the interest in the “Other”.’ While in egalitarian terms this was meant to eradicate the subjectivity linked to identity theory, in practical terms this meant that there were four black artists in the show.

Unmapping the Earth was, in essence, an attempt to match the grander exhibits in Europe by presenting an unabashedly European show with perhaps a few more Korean artists than might otherwise be displayed, a strategy that, since Magiciens de la Terre, most European shows actively try to avoid. At one entrance hung a

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“South Africa’s recent political history infused the proceedings with a sense of marvel, and the exhibitions’ backdrops of Johannesburg, with its newfound reputation as a crime capital, and Cape Town, still a global playground, contrasted beautifully.”

Johannesburg’s art ghetto, one found a stream of running water, making the transition between sister exhibitions accessible only via a leap, lest your feet get wet. This aquatic intervention, also by Eliasson, was titled Erosion (1997). Like a child on an inquisition, one found oneself following the trail of water outside, past some picturesque houses and finally into a gutter.

Also participating in these two biennales was Shirin Neshat, whose transition into the moving image is stunning. While her photographs were, well, flat and two-dimensional, the body in motion expands her work tremendously. In Istanbul she appeared as an avatar in head-to-toe black veil, running around the markets of Istanbul, walking into a mosque, roaming a steppe hillside dotted with ruins or sprinting down a deserted alleyway. Each video was projected onto a wall surrounding the viewer and in turn bringing into question the viewer’s central position. In Johannesburg we found the avatar again, this time set against a field of black so deep that only a face, hand or gun is visible. A split second after you see the weapon, she fires.

The politics of the body, while perhaps rather passé for the art world, is still the major point of contention for the powers that be. In Kwangju Uri Tzaig presented two videos on a bare wooden platform buffered by a staircase that descended into glass marbles. The first video, Piano (1997), showed someone’s hands playing a fugue on a naked body; the second, Ahava – Soap Balls (1996) (Ahava is the Hebrew word for desert and also the name of an Israeli scientific manufacturer) offered a faceless body washing itself with a new product, a pliable soap ball. Tzaig’s work, even though placed opposite Paul McCarthy’s Spaghetti Man (1993) and Bear and Rabbit (1991) sculptures, was too provocative for the Korean government censor, and had to be withdrawn.

With advs. In specialised senses: spin down (a) (Biol.) centrifuge so as to cause the separation of components.

The Utopian idea of the melting pot now seems a long way away. When once the phrase was used to suggest that different constituents would meld into a heterogenous whole, now our melting pots are more like mosaics: as much as we try, the components just don’t merge. It’s a similar story with biennales, but this doesn’t mean that interesting alliances and juxtapositions aren’t made. For Hong Kong Etc, Zhu Jia twirled a video camera through 360 degrees, turning her surroundings into anystreet anywhere; similarly, Igor and Sveltana Kopystinsky’s video in Alternating Currents choreographed trash dancing on a gusty street.

Louise Bourgeois was one of several artists to feature in two biennales; in Korea she carved her harrowing space out of a white cube setting, and in Istanbul her work stood up to the overwhelming historicity of the Hagia Eireni. On a platform in the Yerebatan Cistern, the visitor came to an arch cradling a sheet of mist with a rainbow dancing on its surface, only to identify it as Olafur Eliasson’s Beauty (1993). In Newtown,

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Some old works changed dramatically in their new, biennale locations. I had seen Pepon Osorio’s Badge of Honor (1995) before, a video projection of a father’s grey prison cell juxtaposed with a projection of his son’s home bedroom, showing video letters being sent back and forth. In Johannesburg the installation attained fresh meaning from the fact that the country’s president had lived in a cell that was not much larger than the father’s. Similarly poignant was South African artist Kay Hassan’s rendering of the township vibe, in contrast to fellow citizen Zwelethu Mthethwa’s photos which distanced that same feeling with flat photos of residents in their homes. Bülent Sangar also showed photographs with local references – this time, to himself. On a window ledge, Sangar darts on and off the precipice holding various objects, such as a blanket or a gun. Delightfully bratty, the images turn a Rear Window paranoia into a dance of urban ennui.

In Istanbul a women came up to me in Pipilotti Rist’s Shooting Divas (1996) installation and said: ‘Do you know whether that woman is Turkish?’ ‘She looks Turkish,’ I said. ‘She’s singing in perfect Turkish but she’s too dark skinned to be Turkish, she must be Arabic or Indian or something.’ ‘Hmm,’ I said. In Cape Town’s Life’s Little Necessities, two artists explored the theme of cultural plurality with deft grace. Fatimah Tuggar imploded the Africanistic cliché by juxtaposing traditional images with modern conveniences – a plug and wire, for example, were nonchalantly attached

to a broom. Similarly in Call Waiting, Lorna Simpson posed a multilingual meditation on cross-wired communication, exposing a one world tangled by technology that doesn’t hurt or heal but simply exposes human fallibility, leaving it raw.

Institutional critique remains ever popular with institutions. Xu Bing’s installation Classroom Calligraphy (1995-96) was included in both Kwangju and Johannesburg. One was supposed to sit down and practice Chinese calligraphy in a classroom setting, but unbeknownst to those who didn’t read Chinese, the participant was copying ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’.

The joke came across as puerile. Over in Istanbul, New Slovenian Kunst’s visual arts branch, IRWIN, tripped on the museum gaze by hanging kitschy oil paintings on the ceiling and then suspending themselves horizontally to look. Tracey Rose’s contribution to Cape Town’s Graft was a diva stint in a vitrine, endlessly sewing a wig. In Kwangju, Mo Bahc’s fragmentary UN Tower had all the inelegance of a Jason Rhoades installation but here his DIY amalgamation mocking the architecture of the famous site was also used to mirror the ineffectiveness of the mega-exhibit in general. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work dealt with the logistics of viewing art and the institution’s role in this process with a lightness and elegance that still leaves one breathless. His sheets of giveaways, in both Johannesburg and Istanbul, are as timeless as the pages are endless. spin II3 v.i. Of blood etc.: issue in a rapid stream; gush, spurt. Freq. foll. by out.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Memorial Day Weekend) and Untitled (Veterans Day Sale), both 1989, offset print on paper, endless copies, installation view, 1997, Alternating Currents.

Photo: Werner Maschmann

Cultural exchange is simultaneously a myth, ideal and reality. Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Le Big Mac’ dialogue

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from Pulp Fiction was an enquiry into this arena at its most banal extreme – of course McDonald’s is everywhere. (As the corporation abandoned South Africa in the apartheid era, homegrown versions took hold. When McDonald’s finally did return, after sampling this taste of democracy, many muttered: ‘Gee, these things are small’.) The myth is that this is an example of cultural exchange; the ideal province of intercultural colloquy would be a state where equals can reformulate ideas. This almost happens with popular music: in Korea, for example, Puff Daddy boomed from car speakers while hipsters in expensive labels cruised overcrowded streets; in Istanbul, Puff Daddy thumped from bars in Taksim while hipsters in designer jeans searched for a light from potential companions; in South Africa, Puff Daddy pulsed and people danced. Usually, however, these questions of cultural provenance are riddled with subtexts that deal with the acquisition of power.

Coco Fusco’s performance at Johannesburg’s Electric Workshop, Rights of Passage (1997), entailed that in the opening days of the exhibition visitors were issued a passbook (photo included – 5 rand) and required that they state to the uniformed Fusco and assistants the purpose of their visit, ethnicity and occupation. This time-consuming process ended up bottlenecking people at the entrance, and of course this was the point. Interestingly, white people were the most vocal in expressing their distaste with the inconvenience. Blacks, while annoyed, enjoyed the joke. But so soon into a post-apartheid era, does South Africa need Fusco to reiterate the terms of apartheid to them? Not to mention the fact that like most performances at these events, the intervention is pointed at the elite who attend openings and

“While in Europe, Brazil and the States each mega-exhibit is greeted with collective griping and with massive attendance, the fresher biennales are still greeted with a spectre of hope.”

therefore becomes an elitist gesture in and of itself. In a similar vein, Hans Haacke’s contribution, originally an apartheid era flag tied in a knot with an ANC flag unfurled above it, now includes a post-apartheid flag placed above that. While a crisp and surprisingly beautiful installation, the argument is fairly reductive, and one wonders whether the contemporary history of South Africa was simply grist for the artist’s mill.

Similar activities were underfoot in Istanbul, where at the Marmara Hotel, a five-star establishment in the tourist centre, Richard Hoeck presented a video installation in the rooftop bar. A belly dancer dances against a blue backdrop. That’s it. While that banality is normally part of Hoeck’s appeal, in this context it simply reduced a rich and vast culture into a cheap touristic cliché. Of course this was the point, but manifestos of abjection and kitsch appeal aside, many people who these events are supposed to be for don’t need a simple reduction of a culture regurgitated in the guise of art.

For art is a sly enough creature to both critique and propel culture. Take for example Buy One Get One: this offer will self destruct in 5 seconds by Shu Lea Cheang with Lawrence Chua. Originally a project for the NTT Biennial in Tokyo, Cheang created a website for

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which she creates content on the go during her travels through 12 countries over a three-month period, from Johannesburg back to Tokyo. The performance I saw had Cheang situated in the middle of Alternating Currents at a card table with a suitcase containing a laptop, phone and rice. Several children came up and started to play with the digital camera and were thus added to the content. Those visiting the NCC Biennial in Tokyo could monitor Cheang’s site on the web utilising the same suitcase setup she had in Johannesburg. It is one thing to say the possibilities are endless, but sometimes, art has the capacity to prove it.

One should note that there is no continuous ongoing survey of contemporary art in either Kwangju, Istanbul or Johannesburg. While in Europe, Brazil and the States each mega-exhibit is greeted with collective griping and with massive attendance, the fresher biennales are still greeted with a spectre of hope. The effects of having so many enormous shows will inevitably produce a discourse of its own; for example one can already see, in addition to the gallery/ museum structure, a ‘biennale art’ developing, with its own artists and work which only seem to surface at such events. While it is not a requirement that biennales challenge the structures within which art and ideas are traditionally circulated, their existence inevitably modifies them. The next couple of years will see biennales in Berlin, China and a theatre near you.

This ubiquity may simply affirm a hunch we already had: that art is happening elsewhere and ideas are happening everywhere.

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2012

Sue Williamson Reflections [Artist] Notes from an interview by Joost Bosland

My first involvement with the second Johannesburg Biennale came in the form of an invitation from Okwui Enwezor to co-curate a show for the biennale, together with Ashraf Jamal. Ashraf and I were working on writing the book Art in South Africa: The Future Present at the time. I refused this invitation, because I wanted to be considered for inclusion as an artist rather than as a curator. Subsequently, I was selected for the Alternating Currents show in the Electric Workshop.

I showed Messages from the Moat, an installation of 1 400 bottles hand-engraved with the names and transaction details of slaves sold in the first 50 years of Dutch colonial rule in South Africa. These bottles were contained in an enormous net above a channel of water, and water dripped constantly from the net into the channel below. It was as if each bottle represented one person who had been swept up into this net, like a fish caught at sea.

The work seemed to be favourably received. I was invited by Atlantica magazine to do a six-page project for an issue on ‘water’. The work was invited onto shows in Sweden and Holland; my favourite venue was

the old Archive Building in The Hague. Most recently, Messages from the Moat has been featured in a new book by Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King Publishing), and is in the collection of the Iziko South African National Gallery.

For me, an artist who had been involved in activism for a number of years, it was a very exciting time of opportunity and change. I am by nature an optimist but also a realist, and I never expected transition to be easy, but the fact that everyone was now equal under the law was enormously significant.

I was sorry that some local artists took the attitude – at a time when life was very hard for local artists, even to the extent of being able to buy materials – that it was wrong to spend money on bringing international artists to this country. My regret lay in the fact that they did not see the enormous benefit of the Johannesburg Biennales in focusing attention on the South African art scene, and how that attention would have a trickledown effect which would eventually benefit those very artists who were complaining about money badly spent. One understood their attitude, but it was a pity

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that this negativity was so loudly aired. I am sure this was in part the reason the City of Johannesburg felt justified in their actions of ending the biennale.

What I took away was an enormous pleasure that South Africa was at last taking its place on the international circuit. I thought the staging and the shows were remarkable. Of course, with the cutting short of the exhibition time and the subsequent closing down of Africus, the organising institution, this pleasure was short-lived. A candle that burned brightly but was blown out.

Sue Williamson is the founding editor of ArtThrob.co.za, and her reviews of the 1997 biennale can still be found online at www.artthrob.co.za/ Archive/Archive-List.aspx

Sue Williamson, Messages from the Moat, 1997, installation view, Alternating Currents. Photo: Werner Maschmann

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2012

Wangechi Mutu Reflections [Artist]

The making of Trade Routes: History and Geography was such a pronounced moment for me as a young artist living in New York. I’d just completed my Bachelors degree at the Cooper Union School for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences, and was preparing to apply for graduate school at Yale University in the sculpture department. It was a watershed moment filled with the emotionally saturated, intellectually heightened and dense experiences only found in a mega-city of this kind. This was around the time of Thelma Golden’s controversial Black Male exhibition and her time at the Whitney Museum of American Art, my discovery of bell hooks, Robert Farris Thompson, Michelle Wallace, Gayatri Spivak, Coco Fusco, Trinh T Minh-ha, Charles Burnett films, Greg Tate’s griotstyle writing and street ‘conversating’. You could walk around and find David Hammons’ work on the streets in the East Village and at Steve Cannon’s lair, but you could also find many other artists’ work on the street, including Curtis, the slightly crazy assemblage genius who worked and insulted select passersby around and about the Cooper Square. I’d also just come out of many semesters of listening to Professor Wiley’s

lectures. He managed to weave history, cultural theory and juju lessons into his uninterrupted soliloquy-style talks in our Cooper Union Humanities Department.

Fred Wilson’s soft-spoken seminars, Doug Ashford’s electric critical theory classes, Laura Cottingham’s remarkable and rather fascist feminist classes and all manner of impassioned instructors and dedicated young thinkers and creators flittered around me, talking about rewriting the canon and remaking the institutions that we’d all been taught or forced to believe and trust.

But right after graduation, New York conjured me up a full-time job. Instead of babysitting, restaurant work, cleaning jobs, chronic money-borrowing and my usual selection of exhausting full-time-hustle activities, I was finally working at a place where I received a full salary and basic benefits. But it was also a place that provided me very little time to create or have a studio practice. So when I received a call from Professor Kellie Jones about a major biennial exhibition that was being mounted in South Africa, led by Okwui Enwezor and a group of other curators, it set my entire clock and mind back into that rich, juicy, think-work-tank that had fueled my multilayered existence as a student. I was absolutely shocked and honoured to hear that I was being asked to participate in an exhibition that encapsulated what I knew to be the dialogue of the moment. This exhibition would be my fourth exhibition ever and didn’t compare one bit to the other ones that I’d previously been invited to. This was where my life as a young, newly relocated immigrant in a land of millions of other relocated beings began to become real. All that outsider doubt and alienation, all those feelings of reality shifts between the ‘me’ raised in Nairobi and the ‘me’ who

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had to constantly explain what I was, could be funneled into something real, something substantive and even public. I had spent so many hours questioning and remaking familiar yet unexamined memories and themes from my childhood, my homeland and my past in Kenya and, now, with the right amount of critical distance, I would get to respond to all those yearnings with an artwork.

These also happened to be (shockingly) the years that I was last able to visit my home country in Nairobi.

Until my very recent homecoming this year, 2012, I’ve been in a complicated and lengthy, exhausting battle with immigration. This very exhibition highlighted these issues of transience and exile, economic disparity and cultural/ethnic isolation in the light of larger social, historical shifts.

At that moment, I was creating a lot of work, both flat (collage and ink drawings) and sculptural, that addressed the idea of a dual identity and split consciousness, nostalgia, personal and historical trauma and a personhood born and bred in a postcolonial environment where the vestiges of enforced ‘Britishisms’ and the imprint of the empire were attempting to fuse together a massive grouping of distinct nations into one country. This place, Kenya, that I’d somewhat expelled myself from, would return to inform my work at this fortuitous moment.

At the age of 23, I took the call very seriously, because it was serious. This enormous exhibit, led by a brilliant set of cultural pioneers and curators and intellectuals, some of whom I’d encountered at art openings, lectures and readings around the city, was my first invitation to dance and I remember feeling slightly nervous but ready. Yes! Ready and armed with my ideas about the body and its transformative

qualities, its abilities to shape-shift and dissolve or reconfigure into those very things that have rejected or mutilated it. My visit to Nairobi the previous year had given me the fuel and the very epic narrative to ponder. The genocide in Rwanda became my singular morbid muse. A very personal story my mother had told about the fish she was serving at dinnertime came back to haunt me. The violence that Rwanda suffered, so unfathomably massive, intimate and geographically close to Kenya, was left for us too now to remember, to ponder and to fear. My hanging sculptural works, nine pillahs, made from old used pillows that friends had given me, were sewn and fashioned to resemble plump and adorned body parts and organs; severed and remade, these soft objects helped me quietly step into my ‘art career’ with a piece I never actually got to see hung in the Castle in Cape Town.

Wangechi Mutu’s Cleaning Earth was included on Trade Routes Over Time (pp 124-25).

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1997

Carol Becker The Second Johannesburg Biennale

First published in Art Journal, Summer 1998, and republished in Becker’s collection of essays, Surpassing

the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art (Lanham, ML: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

Reprinted with kind permission of the author

The first Johannesburg Biennale, ‘Africus’, took place in 1995. It commemorated South Africa’s political and cultural reentry into the world. The exhibition marked the country’s first year of democracy, the election of Nelson Mandela in a fair and open process, and the awakening of a new era in South Africa – ‘The Rainbow Nation at peace with itself’ (as co-curator Lorna Ferguson put it). Unfortunately that biennial was accompanied by a good deal of controversy. Many feared that South Africa was not ready for such an event, while others argued that it might not be the best use of the nation’s modest economic resources. So much general agitation surrounded it that even the New York Times published a piece (written by a South African journalist) describing a fight between co-curators Christopher Till and Lorna Ferguson in which the latter allegedly struck the former and broke his nose.

The planning of the event seemed to dissolve into such a degree of internal strife that the negative perceptions of the event appeared considerably to outweigh the positive outcomes, of which there were many.

Curators from many countries had been invited to participate in the biennale, with the added caveat that they curate South African artists into their national exhibitions. The result was a frenzy of activity in which international curators were whisked from the airport to various artists’ studios throughout South Africa in the hope that they would find local work that might fit within the context of their country’s pavilion. The final show had fabulous moments. On display was astonishing contemporary art from all over Africa that intrigued South Africans and other visitors, and also interesting juxtapositions of African and European, African and Latin American, African and American work. But for the most part the installations seemed to

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lack internal integrity, and the show was hard to grasp both visually and conceptually. Nonetheless, many who had never ventured to the tip of Africa before came to South Africa in 1995 to see art on a grand scale and, in doing so, inevitably observed what was magnificent and what was disastrous within the new South Africa.

The second Johannesburg Biennale, Trade Routes: History and Geography, which opened in October 1997, had an entirely different feel. Under the artistic direction of Nigerian-born curator and art historian Okwui Enwezor, this exhibition was even more ambitious than the first, presenting works by more than 160 artists from 63 countries, including 35 Africans. Six additional curators were asked to curate exhibitions that took place in six sites spread across two cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Artists also created additional ‘projects’, ranging from billboards, performances, web sites, ‘collective-wear’ pieces, and bus-shelter installations. While lacking in economic resources, which created logistical and installation challenges for the participating artists and curators, the exhibition was rich with intellectual sophistication.

The concepts for the show, as the title indicates and the catalogue explains, were structured to examine the ‘history of globalization by exploring how economic imperatives of the last 500 years have produced resilient cultural fusions and disjunctions’. One of Okwui Enwezor’s goals, as articulated in his essay for the show, was to explain ‘how culture and space have been historically displaced through colonization, migration, and technology … and to emphasize how innovative practices have led to redefinitions and inventions of our notions of expression, with shifts in the language and discourses of art’.

“Because of the weight of the discourse, the sophistication of both artists and curators, the quality of speakers invited to the conference, the reputation of curator Enwezor, and the exoticism of the locale, many artists and curators from around the world gladly participated in these events.”

To achieve the breadth of these ambitious goals, the biennial also included a simultaneous conference organized by Nigerian-born, Florida-based art historian Olu Oguibe; a film series centered around independent films from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe curated by New York-based Mahan Bonati; and a well-written, theoretically oriented catalogue with essays by Julia Kristeva, Francesco Bonami, Saskia Sassen, and others, addressing various aspects of these issues, and including statements by all seven curators – Enwezor, Octavio Zaya, Colin Richards, Gerardo Mosquera, Kellie Jones, Hou Hanru, and Yu Yeon Kim. Because of the weight of the discourse, the sophistication of both artists and curators, the quality of speakers invited to the conference, the reputation of curator Enwezor, and the exoticism of the locale, many artists and curators from around the world gladly participated in these events and came in time to celebrate the biennial’s opening and attend the adjoining conference. When performance artist Robyn Orlin – a falling balletic Icarus with an attitude – flew across the space of the Electric Workshop in Johannesburg (the main biennial site), wearing metal harnesses, a motorcycle helmet, pink tutu,

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and 10 pairs of toe shoes, while smashing light bulbs against the cement, an international assemblage of curators, art historians, writers, artists mingled with their South African counterparts to create a sense of international excitement and mass, all gathered for this opening event.

I had personally hoped that President Mandela would open the proceedings, but he did not. Nor did Thabo Mbeki (at that time Deputy President) or anyone else of high governmental stature. For those guests who had never before been to South Africa, it would have been a powerful statement to see Mandela acknowledge the importance of art and culture to the African National Congress (ANC) agenda, and it would have alerted the country to the biennial’s existence and significance in marking how far South Africa has come in lifting its isolation and becoming an international player at all levels. I was hoping for some kind of direct link between the biennial and contemporary South Africa itself, because there were aspects of the exhibition and the conference that already concerned me. I was looking for something dramatic, something monumental to erase the ambivalence I was feeling.

At the core of my ambivalence was a concern that this biennial – brilliant, at times gorgeous, at times moving – was in truth isolated from, perhaps even ultimately irrelevant to, the political and social realities in South Africa at that time. Or, if the issues did overlap, as they did at times, then it was the form or, rather, the accessibility of the form that was problematic. The show and the conference were focused largely on the diasporic citizens of the world and issues of cultural displacement, but the intellectual framework of this focus drew largely on discourses originating in

international urban centers of the West. And many of the artists whose work appeared in the exhibition, although impressively diverse in their points of origin, are now residing in New York, London, or Paris. In many ways the emphasis did not seem to reflect the conversation South Africa was having with itself. As journalist Ivor Powell wrote in the Mail & Guardian during that opening week – the biennial perhaps seemed ‘stuck within the problematics of the colonial’ instead of exploring post-apartheid South Africa. The issues of post-apartheid South Africa are multifarious – economic, political, and social.

South Africa, which had never experienced true nationhood, which is desperately trying to reconstruct a way that its inhabitants can begin to think about themselves in relationship to a totality, was not in the same place as those artists and intellectuals at the biennial, who move around the world relatively freely, responding to their new locales with the ever-evolving language of postcolonialsim and diasporic cultural studies. Those who move through space and time in these ways are, in some sense, postnational, because their efforts are directed to linking local concerns with global issues, through art and art-making in an international arena. And there are certainly South

“Hundreds of visitors, dressed in art-world black and funky chic, wandered around the biennial site, some wondering out loud if it was possible to create a transnational biennial in a country not yet a nation.”

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African artists who are immersed in these questions.

But most of South Africa is not yet there. How could it be, when it is in the process of working through its own desperate emotional and physical problems – attempting to create equality at all levels, perhaps for the first time – as a nation? From working to meet the most basic needs like running water and housing, to the profound interrogation of its past through the nightmarish but hopeful process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa is grappling with the legacy of apartheid. Those who were once in prison as ‘insurrectionists’ are now heading the country, trying to build confidence in the government’s ability to bring stability to relations among all races. In comparison with its more pressing needs, debates around postnationality seemed abstract, remote.

As the biennial proceeded, the tensions in the larger society were everywhere apparent. During the opening days of the biennial, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was meeting only blocks from the Electric Workshop. In a medium-size room in the Sanlam Centre, filled predominantly with journalists but open to the public, South Africa’s apartheid past was on trial. Relof (Pik) Botha (former Minister of Foreign Affairs) and Adriaan Vlok (Minister of Law and Order from 1986 to 1991) were making their amnesty testimonies. Here, those who grotesquely divided the populace, who had given the orders to ‘eliminate’, ‘neutralize’, ‘take out’, and ‘destroy’ individuals thought to be a threat to the apartheid government, were explaining to an incredulous audience and group of commissioners that they never intended these orders to mean ‘murder’. But Bishop Tutu, in a tone of pure sarcasm,

insisted that someone must have thought these words meant ‘to kill’ because, in fact, ‘many had been killed’.

But they each insisted, in their own way, that they were only trying to forestall ‘civil war’, and now they were asking forgiveness and amnesty from those they had imprisoned and tortured. Mandela said about such denials: ‘They claim they don’t know, and expect South Africa and the world to believe them’ (28 April 1997). But no one in the audience did believe them on that day. Photographers snapped pictures as Pik Botha apologized to Bishop Tutu and to God, while many snickered when Vlok did not apologize and instead pronounced to all of us in the hearing room: ‘We are all victims of the conflicts of the past.’

Into this complex process, filled with the pain and seriousness of South Africa’s past, and into Johannesburg – a culturally rich but very different city wrought with crime and uncertainty, suffering from the importation of drugs and a degree of poverty shocking even to those familiar with harsh urban areas – comes the second Johannesburg Biennale, positioned against the nationalistic tone of the first in its attempt to present South Africa as an international player in the arts.

These jarring juxtapositions were made more conspicuous when the international art world arrived.

Hundreds of visitors, dressed in art-world black and funky chic, wandered around the biennial site, some wondering out loud if it was possible to create a transnational biennial in a country not yet a nation.

This group was joined in the second week of October by an impressive array of curators from some of the most important venues in America. Brought to the biennial by the Norton Family Foundation, they were encouraged to step outside their own often Eurocentric

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Hans Haacke, The Vindication of Dulcie September, 1997, installation view outside the Electric Workshop (left) and caption card (right).

Photos: Werner Maschmann

and American worldview to experience Africa, while discussing what that experience might bring to their own curatorial decision making. In many ways this biennial was heavy with the presence of curators and the curatorial hand – the ‘curator’s moment’, as critic Michael Brenson has called it, marking the emergence of the curator as the framer and articulator of art’s meaning in global history at this time.

Added to this group of international and South African artists and curators was an impressive lineup of conference participants – many of whom, like Gayatri Spivak and Andreas Huyssen, came originally from disparate points of origin but are now based in New York. It seemed like the ‘Who’s Who’ of the art and theory world, all taking in the biennial.

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The most dramatic of all six biennial sites was the Electric Workshop. Built in 1929 to house a power generating station, the space was reconfigured for the 1995 biennale. Moveable walls allowed the curators to maximize its gigantic ceiling heights and industrial attributes. South Africa spent millions to transform this building into a multipurpose art building for cultural events, leaving insufficient funds available for the actual biennials themselves.

Outside the site of the Electric Workshop were two very important and successful installations, both of which related directly to the historical situation of South Africa today. Up against the building, Hans Haacke presented the closure of his trilogy, The Vindication of Dulcie September. An ANC member working in the party’s office in France, Dulcie September was murdered in Paris in 1988. (It is sadly ironic that Pik Botha was quizzed about this assassination in his trial taking place only blocks away from Haacke’s piece on the opening day of the biennial.) Haacke saw this piece as the culmination of two previous installations. The first presented the old apartheid flag; the second, the ANC flag and the old apartheid flag tied together. In this, the third, the large post-apartheid flag flies with smaller flags of the previous installation, the ripped flag of apartheid separated from the flag of the ANC. The piece is complete now that there is a flag for the new nation of South Africa.

Across from Haacke’s piece and also in front of the Electric Workshop but facing into the rest of the biennial was a work by South African Andries Botha, titled Home. Here, a small prefabricated wooden shed or house (often used for security guards) had been installed. Its windows were covered with white lace curtains and Astroturf, and a short white picket fence

surrounded it. The open door invited the viewer inside, where the temperature was kept coldly airconditioned. There was no furniture, no place to rest, only hand-engraved metal texts that covered the walls. The texts were excerpts from the testimonies given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by apartheid victims during 1996. The effect was chilling in several ways, the juxtaposition of inside and outside both powerful and devastating. There was no ‘home’ here to be found, only horror; there is probably no safe place in all of South Africa at this time. The piece touches on a very important issue, central to South Africa, which concerns personal security, land, and what Botha refers to as ‘emotional geography’ – the violation of space that once was home. On the wall, among dozens of other quotes from the hearings, was one from Mrs Caroline Sono, mother of Lolo, last seen in the company of Mrs Winnie Mandela.

‘Sometimes I hear a knock on the door and I think Lolo has come home. At night I see him flying and think he is coming home and I open my eyes and say, “Welcome my son, Welcome Home.”’

In keeping with this theme of lost home, disenfranchised home, disturbed home was the installation Saturn’s Table by Cuban-born artist Ernesto Pujol. The walls of the darkened room were covered with cow excrement, the heavy 19th-century Afrikaner table and chairs sat stolidly on the dank earthen floor. A place was set for the worst of all monstrous patriarchs, the one who grotesquely abused his power – Saturn, who ate his own children.

Also in Alternating Currents, the name given to this part of the exhibition, curated by Enwezor and Zaya, which dealt with lost and damaged home movement and migration, was Penny Siopis’ small ‘art theatre’

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installation designed to show her magical film, My Lovely Day, taken from old faded footage of her Greek family’s early life in Cape Town. Showing them arriving from Smyrna, unable to return home because of the Greek Civil War, the archival footage (shot by her mother to which Siopis added her own text) grapples with childhood and the memory of displacement, juxtaposed to the reality of assimilation into the land of the Other.

Across from the Electric Workshop is the famous Market Theatrre, where Barney Simon (now deceased) staged some of the first mixed-racial productions that defied the laws of apartheid. Hundreds of township youth attended his laboratories and were trained as actors. Some of Simon’s close friends, those well-known white activists Joe Slovo, Ruth First, and Nadine Gordimer, first came here to see the original productions of South Africa’s most famous playwright, Athol Fugard. In this space also was to be found the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery, where curator Hu Hanru’s exhibition Hong Kong Etc was mounted.

The whole enclave of space extending from the Electric Workshop to the Market Theatre Complex is filled with the history of the anti-apartheid movement, yet now it is a place to be feared at night. Street violence is a topic with which everyone is concerned and cannot avoid – visitors and Johannesburg residents alike.

None of us could simply roam freely, and it was very frustrating to all biennial visitors that they could not know this city as directly as they would have liked.

I think of curator Catherine David’s statement that audiences come to Documenta in Kassel to shop in extravagant stores; certainly this was not the case in Johannesburg.

The Museum Africa, topped by Stephan Balkenhol’s two African figures from the last biennial, donated to the city by the artist and silhouetted against the Johannesburg sky, exhibited another part of this second biennial – the show titled Transversions, curated by Yu Yeon Kim. Museum Africa was once an old produce market; it has since been renovated to house various collections that reflect the history of both Johannesburg and the region. It also displays exhibitions on the history of the mining industry in Johannesburg and recently hosted a remarkable exhibition about the Treason Trials. It is for certain that nothing as high-tech as the show curated by Yu Yeon Kim had ever appeared in this space. In it were video installations by Dennis Oppenheim; a fabulous piece by Diller + Scofidio, Pageant, comprising dissolving corporate logos – of South African Airlines, Playboy, Exxon, BMW, Shell, GM, Samsung, Honda, VW, Gucci, Mickey Mouse – all morphing together and projected onto a large circle of a dark room, altogether making a clever and terrifying statement about homogenization and globalization.

Here too was a dramatic piece by Alfredo Jaar, The Eyes of Guetete Emerita, about the 10 weeks of genocide that ensued after Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down above Kigali, the capital of Rwanda – a catastrophe Jaar clearly feels the world chose to ignore. There were drawings by William Kentridge from The Trials of Ubu and Ubu and the Truth Commission.

These drawings were used in the animation projected as part of the play Ubu and the Truth Commission, written

Penny Siopis, My Lovely Day, 1997, installation view, Alternating Currents. Photo: Werner Maschmann

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by William Kentridge and Jane Taylor, and performed by a cast of actors as well as the Handspring Puppet Company. This humorous, damning production, based on Ubu Roi, with its eccentric, engaging movements choreographed by Orlin, used real actors as well as animation and puppet theatre to present its complex vision of post-apartheid South Africa. All these pieces were installed in a space that has been traditionally used for exhibitions that one might find in a museum of natural and cultural history.

Steven Pusy, who set up the technological installations for Transversions, said that the young people from Soweto who came to act as facilitators for the exhibition, and who had no prior training in this area, learned quickly how to keep the computers up and running. He speculated that perhaps they were accustomed to an oral and visual culture that allowed them to hold such information easily in their heads.

The fourth Johannesburg site was the Johannesburg Art Gallery, a large museum housing a European collection as well as contemporary African art. Right in the heart of the downtown area, where many small vans moving people from the townships converge, sits the museum, protected like a fortress. Heavy metal gates are juxtaposed to the many sleeping people stretched across the lawns surrounding the building, some of whom are coming from work, others of whom are homeless. The installation Important and Exportant, curated by Gerardo Mosquera, was mounted here.

As part of the exhibition, South African artist Willem Boshoff displayed a piece called The Writing on the Wall.

Boshoff’s statement alludes to ‘14 stations of an imperious cross’, which ‘testify to the failed bid for the soul of South Africa’. Fragments with words like truth, order, destiny, identity, progress, and principle appear

to have fallen off small pillars placed in the gallery space. These words, signifying concepts that have fallen in stature and meaning, are reified here in the languages of the colonizers – French, Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Spanish. It is implied that within their chaotic assortment, resembling words that have fallen out of a Scrabble box, lies the history of Africa and its colonized past. But it would appear that such moral platitudes can no longer be reassembled. Also exhibited were photos of German reconstruction by Sophie Calle documenting places that once housed monuments now removed and vacant – evolved into spaces of memory. Calle has recorded their history, as interpreted by people who have experienced these locations directly.

An installation created by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles consisted of a wooden pier standing across illusory water made of blue-paper-covered books that, together, resembled the sea. It was a pier you could walk out onto, the illusion of water amplified by sound – the word ‘water’ spoken in an infinite number of languages. In my attempt to understand whether the control of the volume of this sound was related to how close one moved to the end of the pier, I nearly fell into the imaginary sea of books, the sea of imaginary books.

In Johannesburg the challenge was to take in the entire breadth of the work while also attending the conference, which competed with the exhibition for the viewer’s time. Olu Oguibe had assembled a remarkable group of scholars and intellectuals for the event. The concept was to put artists in dialogue with critics, to create what James Clifford refers to as a ‘contact zone’, and to reflect the degree to which artists, curators, and theorists are often focusing on the same questions. Panels were structured around

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Cildo Meireles, Marhulo, 1992-97, installation view, Important and Exportant. Photo: Werner Maschmann

topics such as ‘Home and Exile’, ‘Funding and Culture in the 21st Century’, ‘Speaking of Others’, ‘Cultures in Diaspora’, ‘The Politics of Mega-Exhibitions’, ‘Cinema and Globalization’, ‘Culture and Rupture in the Digital Age’. Among the discussions were debates on issues unresolved in the United States being replayed a continent away. Howardina Pindell continued her ongoing criticism of artists like Michael Ray Charles and Kara Walker for what she perceives as their anti-black, racially stereotyped image-making, which, she charges, appeals to the intrinsic racism of the US, capitalizes on it, and then succeeds in the white-dominated art world as a result. Not all African Americans present agreed with her position; many who spoke after her, including art historian Richard Powell, used this forum to clarify their disagreements with her position.

Also evident at the conference were serious tensions surrounding the meanings of racism and sexism in both Africa and the US, which kept manifesting themselves. These points of contention, which would have proven truly interesting if debated, were not addressed directly; however, this resistance to structuring an intercontinental debate might have resulted from the specificity of racism and sexism to each locality, such that each issue needs to be framed and positioned quite particularly within each society in order to be discussed. But it seemed a missed opportunity to avoid exploring these differences in an organized way.

In one glaring instance of a missed opportunity, Salem Mekuria offered a critique of The Sexual Binding of Women, Alice Walker’s film about female genital mutilation in Africa. Clips of the film, shown in this African context, seemed truly lacking in a

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thorough understanding of this practice. Walker’s all-too-eager willingness to draw a parallel between having been blinded in one eye when she was a child and this type of mutilation made the film seem outrageously odd, patronizing, and naïve. In this context, where both African Americans and white Americans are often humbled by how little they, as Westerners, truly understand Africa’s cultural complexities, it often becomes especially painful for African American artists and thinkers to realize that they, too, are in fact dislocated when visiting this continent, with its multifarious cultures to which they are historically connected but from which they are diasporically removed. Walker posed and imposed her own problematic on an African dilemma and then attempted to solve it within the terms she created. The results were disastrous. It would have been wonderful to hear Africans comment on these clips of Walker’s film, but the occasion to do so was not offered.

The intensity of looking and talking moved to Cape Town, where the exhibition continued at the Castle of Good Hope, a structure built in 1666 as a fortress to protect the first colonial settlement in the Cape by the Dutch East India Company (VOC in Afrikaans).

These letters were hauntingly illuminated in Wayne Barker’s The World is Flat, a massive map consisting of 100 green bottles and 3 000 army fatigues. Also in Cape Town, Kellie Jones’ exhibition, Life’s Little Necessities, featured works by women artists, from US artist Pat Ward Williams to Nigerian artist Fatimah Tuggar. Various technological problems seemed to trouble this show, and a rumour was circulating that Jones’ effort had not been sufficiently supported, and that she therefore had been hampered in her attempts to create a successful exhibition.

At the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, Colin Richards had curated Graft – an exhibition of South African artists in which he attempted to intercept the historical moment by using a word with multiple meanings. Graft means ‘hard work’ in South African slang; it also means bribery; and of course it also is used to describe a process that brings disparate elements together in an imperfect fit to create hybridity. The show, an amalgam of these definitions, featured a wonderful piece by Moshekwa Langa, titled Temporal Distance (With Criminal Intent).

You Will Find Us in the Best Places, in which toy cars and large spools of thread situated on the floor created a cartography of distance and a sense of movement – a reflection on the passage of all postnationalists who migrate from city to city. Using name-brand empty whisky bottles to show points of national origin, this clever and strange minaturized map looped across the gallery floor. And between all locations little plastic rats were placed, perhaps to show that there is some commonality among all urban locations.

But almost nothing in Graft had the power of the very first image you saw when entering the National Gallery space – Jane Alexander’s Butcher Boys from 1988. This piece was not part of the biennial, but it is owned by the National Gallery and was not moved for the exhibition. It was made even more dramatic when set in relief by Siemon Allen’s installation La Jetée, which was part of the biennial exhibition. Walls made of recycled VHS tape that cannot be accessed without technology inadvertently lent a dramatic backdrop to the twisted, gnarled souls of the Butcher Boys, a representational piece that reifies the sickness of apartheid. In Alexander’s well-known installation, three life-sized male figures – half-human, half-

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animal – sit on a bench as if waiting for something to happen. Their bodies are muscular and lean, their heads deformed – a combination human and ram with curved horns – their eyes dark and glassy.

Images conjured from dreams and nightmares, they serve as a reminder of the fierceness of so much anti-apartheid art-making that exploded out of the repression experienced during the dark ages of National Party rule.

The conference also continued in Cape Town, where the sun and sea competed with these darkened galleries and lecture halls for attendees’ attention. I was scheduled to speak on the last panel of the day.

By then many tensions had developed from what not been said. South Africa itself, and its issues, seemed to have been largely ignored. Knowing the intensity of South African artists and intellectuals, I should have expected what happened next, but, anxious to give my own paper and hopeful for the discussion that might follow, I did not. We were all frustrated by this point. Everyone had been far too polite. The conversation had been too abstract. Nothing had been said that brought us back to South Africa directly, and no attempt had been made to summarize the ideas presented, to formulate any type of theoretical model around which to think about transnationalism and its multifarious complexities. Ideally the first day of the conference should have been focused entirely around our host country. Perhaps the last day should have been structured to allow some theoretical postulations to be made. In any case, there was a palpable accumulated restlessness that needed to be addressed, as well as internal South African art world debates begging for disclosure. But the conference had not been structured in this way.

“We were all frustrated by this point. Everyone had been far too polite. The conversation had been too abstract. Nothing had been said that brought us back to South Africa directly.”

Andreas Huyssen began the morning of the last day with a fascinating analysis of the dehistoricization of the city of Berlin – the way in which it has lost its relationship to its local inhabitants. Corporate architecture, he demonstrated, colonizing the city into an indistinguishable international centre, has caused an erasure of history. Huyssens visually juxtaposed most of the new and, unfortunately, unsuccessful Berlin building ventures with architect Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum Project, which he finds of great interest. The talk, although specific to place, nonetheless powerfully presented the notion of the global city as ‘progress’ run amok, deflating, for a time, any romance associated with globalization.

It would have made great sense to follow his analysis with a similar one by a South African architect or art historian focusing on the city of Johannesburg.

By the afternoon the hidden agenda for the day started to emerge. My panel was called ‘Speaking of Others’, a reference to the problematization of Otherness; it was to be moderated by Salah Hassan (originally from Sudan but now teaching at Cornell University). The panelists were asked to discuss what constitutes otherness at the end of the century; I had constructed a piece in which I proposed that the US had become ‘other to itself’ – no longer certain of

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its goals or identity. But right before the panel was to begin, I could hear conversations building around me.

Some expressed anger that there had not been enough discussion about South Africa and that this, the very last panel, should therefore devote itself to South Africa.

Unbeknown to those of us on the panel, the moderator had agreed with this suggestion. He announced that all the panelists would speak briefly (although I refused to budge on our agreed-upon allotment of 20 minutes), that we would focus on South Africa, and that we would specifically engage a discussion – already heated in South Africa – that concerned the representation of otherness activated by an essay Okwui Enwezor had written for a show of South African art in Oslo. In this essay he attacked certain South African white women artists (most of whom did not have work in the Oslo show) for appropriating the images of black African women’s bodies in their work. This essay had caused tremendous controversy in South Africa.

When called upon, I began by saying that I had already written an essay about this debate, which was soon to appear in a book published in South Africa called Grey Matters, edited by Brenda Atkinson, and that I had not intended to discuss these issues of representation today, especially because we were also speaking to an international audience unfamiliar with the issues or the work around which the debate was focused. I then read my paper. Francesco Bonami, then editor of Flash Art and writer for the catalogue, spoke next; he was followed by Colin Richards, South African artist, writer, curator. None of us had come prepared to address South Africa specifically or the Enwezor debate. When we had finished speaking the attacks began.

I was criticized for not giving my paper (written

“Only the limits of time put an end to it. The tensions in the South African art world, politely contained all week, had exploded. The argument ended in true South African fashion; after it was over, we all moved to the lobby for tea and biscuits.”

for Grey Matters) on the issue of representation and race at this conference, for not focusing on South Africa, and then for the one allusion I had made to the transformation that had occurred in South Africa. (I had juxtaposed South Africa’s admission of racism to the absence of such admission in America, where those with social consciousness are still feeling isolated, waiting and hoping to see change in their lifetime.) By then I felt myself an honorary South African because I was the only foreigner attacked in an otherwise too-polite conference that had failed to address South Africa’s ongoing debates – an omission for which we were now paying.

Then a young South African addressed Colin Richards. He requested that all artists who had benefited under apartheid please stand up. Colin asked if he meant all white artists; he said yes. Many white artists did stand, including Colin, who then asked something like, ‘Now what do we do?’ Of course, there was nothing to do. The point had been made. Later, when I described this series of events to artist Andries Botha, he remarked, ‘At the point at which Colin was asked to stand, Colin should have

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said, “Will all those South Africans not damaged by apartheid please stand up.”’ But only a South African could have pursued that line of inquiry with another South African.

Then a heated debate between Enwezor, Oguibe, and several women artists, particularly Siopis, ensued. I was somewhat shocked to hear such a sophisticated diasporic man as Oguibe insisting that when white women used images of his ‘sister’s’ naked bodies in their artistic work (‘without his sisters’ consent’), he wanted ‘to strangle’ the white women artists, even if the intent of their work was to expose sexism, pornography, or colonial violence. The paternalism in these statements was astounding, and the scorn for white feminists painfully obvious. It seemed we were only steps away from the type of argument that might lead to a decision, by black African men, that all black African women should wear the chador ‘for their own protection’.

Accusations were flying, and everyone was waiting for the black South African women present to take the lead. When they did not, African-American women and diasporic women from other parts of Africa and now living in New York spoke up only to say that they hoped African women would speak for themselves.

Only the limits of time put an end to it. The tensions in the South African art world, politely contained all week, had exploded. The argument ended in true South African fashion; after it was over, we all moved to the lobby for tea and biscuits. This was something I had also witnessed with amazement at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: certain rituals, colonial ones at that, were used to re-establish civility when there was nowhere else to turn.

Afterwards, it was clear that it was too easy for the Americans present to extrapolate from their own ‘identity politics’ debates of the 1980s and assume that the South Africans were referring to the same issues of appropriation. But when race is discussed in South Africa, so much is still measured by the past, with questions focused on where people stood in the struggle against apartheid. Some of the women artists whom Enwezor questioned about their use of images of black women’s bodies were artists who had been important for the anti-apartheid struggle internationally; they had used their images to build support from foreign countries for the cultural boycott. To attack these white artists now is a complicated matter, especially for a non-South African. But there was neither time nor inclination to fully engage the complexities of these debates – so much by then had been personalized and, in the process, depoliticized.

We were shocked, dismayed, and brought immediately back to the reality principle when, on the first day of the conference, we heard that a soldier had been killed by ETA (the Basque separatist movement) while guarding the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Suddenly all the biennial debates about identity, postnationalism, and postcolonialism could be seen as connected to an intense reality. All of the biennial curators were clearly shaken. But questions about the significance of recontextualizing art at this moment of globalization went largely unanswered. What does it mean in practice to decontextualize our creative work and ourselves, and what would it mean to recontextualize all our efforts, on a global scale, beyond nationhood and personal identity? We had only just begun to imagine. The pitfalls seemed enormous.

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Postscript

International visitors came to South Africa hoping for an entirely new experience. For that to have occurred it would have required a show whose roots went deep into the local dialogue and spread out to touch upon international concerns and South Africa’s position in the international debate, thereby projecting the sense that it could have happened nowhere but South Africa. It might have also required a large parallel exhibition, perhaps at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, offering international viewers a chance to see the diverse spectrum of South African art. But this focus on South African art was never Enwezor’s goal. Still, without such a stated purpose, we are forced to ask, who was this biennial for? If the show was for the international art world, then it was a success – it was smart, sophisticated, conceptually ahead of its time. If the show was also for South Africa, then perhaps it needed to consider its local audience much more closely not with the sense of where South Africa should be but realistic about where it is and where it wants to be.

Without a general audience who will come to see the biennial, any biennial, after the hoopla of the

Upon my return to the US I began receiving frantic e-mail messages that the biennial was in danger. By mid-December it had closed but was soon reopened after Enwezor, Bongi Dhlomo, and other key players in the biennial intervened. The ambivalence on the part of the Johannesburg City Council was apparent: they wanted to close the show because of its considerable daily operating costs and used the low attendance numbers as further justification. Such a shaky outcome to the tremendous efforts of all those who brought this biennial into being was terrifically upsetting, foreboding badly for the future. One is left with some very serious and fundamental questions about how to measure the success of such an event, on both a global and local level, in terms of superstructure and base. How well can anyone, however clever, position a transnational event in a society in turmoil, one still attempting to become a nation?

It is impossible not to speculate what the reception to the show might have been had it been positioned around a topic like truth and reconciliation, and had it featured South African artists and artists from around the globe addressing this issue in terms of historical moment. Had the conference participants positioned South Africa as a leader constructing a transparent process to accomplish reconciliation, perhaps the exhibition might have generated more local interest.

Perhaps its presence might have been more easily justified, its themes more organically contextualized.

But these are speculations. It is true that South Africa is a society in transition, as thousands of immigrants from the rest of Africa fill its cities. If these migratory patterns had been featured, for example, maybe the show would also have been more fully contextualized.

“If the show was for the international art world, then it was a success – it was smart, sophisticated, conceptually ahead of its time. If the show was also for South Africa, then perhaps it needed to consider its local audience much more closely.”

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opening is over, how can one justify the enormous expense of such an event, especially when the pedagogical purpose for the local community is not clear? Perhaps Enwezor would have to admit that the fabulous show he created really did need more mediation, filled as it was with work from artists whose points of origin were vast, whose concerns were complex and often conceptual in execution. He might have to concede that South Africa does not as yet have a critical mass of viewers able, interested in, and prepared to engage with work of this nature. In attempting to bring the world to South Africa, South Africans were inadvertently left out. What seemed most left out of all were the great insights South Africa itself has to offer the international community about postcolonialism and the relationship between art and politics.

I have been travelling to South Africa since 1992 to engage in debates around the place of art in a democratic society. With each visit I have been struck by the sophistication of the debate among artists and art activists (as arts administrators often call themselves in South Africa). The complexity of thinking that South Africa itself has to bring to the world at this time around race, reconciliation, art making in societal contexts felt overlooked in this biennial. To me, this was a great loss.

The debate in the Johannesburg City Council about the importance of the show is significant.

Apartheid ravaged people at so many levels. The healing process will be long and complicated, and there is no doubt that culture can play an essential role. It is unfortunate that the biennial, positioned in concept to help South Africa take its place in the international arena as a major player, was not able effectively to

build greater visual literacy in South Africa quickly enough, or to enchant the local population deeply enough so that large numbers of people came to own the biennial, and therefore to protect it as best they might have, from the exigencies of the politics of transition. The conversations around the second Johannesburg Biennale will continue for some time because they crystallize the issues of what biennials are and could be for the future. It forces us to evaluate such events, especially in nations such as South Africa, whose own immediate problems demand that such exhibitions justify themselves in relationship to the pressing needs of the host country from which they take their sustenance, and ultimately their meaning, as art events within a social and historical context.

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Rory Bester Reflections [Catalogue and conference co-ordinator]

Joost Bosland: In the catalogue you were listed as ‘Co-ordinator: catalogue and conference’. What did this role entail? How did you get involved in the first place?

I had been a junior lecturer at Wits for three years from 1994-96. I resigned, hoping to go and work in a restaurant and become a chef, but that didn’t work out! I took a short contract at the Department of Arts and Culture, working in the communications section, and while I was there I heard about the job at the biennale from Susan Glanville. I applied and got it. I started in May 1997. On the first day of my job, I was given a copy of Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves and told to arrange the copyright clearance for the reproduction of one of her essays in the biennale catalogue. I didn’t have the first clue how to do that, so spent the entire first day reading the Kristeva, pretending to look busy. On the second day Rory Bester:

Iké Udé’s Time Magazine (Man of the Year), 1996, reproduced on a bus shelter as part of the second Johannesburg Biennale, 1997.

Photo: Werner Maschmann

I just jumped in the deep end and thankfully swam.

Essentially my job was to make sure the catalogue and conference happened. I did all the liaising with artists, galleries and writers for the catalogue, as well as long nightly phone calls to the designer in New York.

Everything had to be sent by Fedex – sending large files over the internet was unheard of. I remember going to Wits to look at the gallery adverts in Artforum, just to familiarise myself with the names of galleries I’d never heard of before. I had very little contact with the catalogue’s credited editor, Matthew Debord.

I also put together the ‘Biennale Short Guide’. For the conference I did work more closely with the conference convenor, Olu Oguibe. Here there was slightly more time as the conference only had to be ready for the October opening. But the catalogue had to be designed, then printed in Singapore and shipped back to South Africa. All the material – essays, permissions, bios and images – was sent off to New York and then designed within three-and-a-half months. And we managed to have the catalogue in hand in Johannesburg two weeks before the opening!

1997 was a strange time in South Africa. On the one hand, we were rapidly opening up to the world; on the other the country was turning more inwards as a result of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings, and the process of forging a new national identity. What do you remember of the atmosphere at the time?

I was completely mesmerised by the TRC. There were hearings in Fordsburg and Mayfair, close to where the AICA office was in Newtown. On quite a few occasions I spent my lunch hour going to the hearings. It was such a strange phenomenon to witness. At the

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“In the way Okwui Enwezor had conceptually framed the biennale, in speaking to a history of colonialism and its consequences for the global contemporary, it was actually addressing many of the same issues as the TRC itself.”

Only peripherally. When there was grumbling in the media about the lack of South African artists, I remember us doing a count and comparing it to local representation at other biennales at the time. There were so many more ‘locals’ in our biennale compared to ‘locals’ in other biennales that it made the criticism seem extremely parochial. But I remember Okwui being very upset about it. To this day, having worked on the inside, I still don’t understand why there might have been a local-international tension. Sometimes I wonder whether it wasn’t prompted so much by the prospect of the international art world descending on South Africa as a discomfort with Okwui himself.

He had big ideas, he was a big spender, he was a sharp dresser, he was still thought of as ‘Nigerian’ (at a time when xenophobia was becoming widespread in South Africa, exploding only 12 months later). It wasn’t what the local art world was used to. He didn’t endear himself to the city officials, many of whom didn’t understand the concept of an international biennale, never mind how it might contribute to the profile of the city.

time of the biennale, the TRC was conducting the amnesty hearings. So much of it was procedurally banal, descriptively bland and technical, and full of evasiveness on the part of the amnesty applicants.

And then suddenly there would be an answer that just opened things up or completely shocked the audience.

It was a bit like watching a cricket team bat out on the last day of a test, habitually defensive, until one little mistake resulted in a wicket that made everyone excited again. And in the way Okwui had conceptually framed the biennale, in speaking to a history of colonialism and its consequences for the global contemporary, it was actually addressing many of the same issues as the TRC itself. But whereas for an outsider like him, looking in on South Africa as one of a number of sites of postcolonial struggle, it was easy to see the parallels with other parts of the world, for us as South Africans it was more difficult to get beyond an immersion in the importance and details of our own moment. At the time I don’t know that we were ready to appreciate the reflective mode that Okwui brought to the biennale.

For better or worse, much of the biennale was marked by a tension between the international and the local. Do you remember being confronted with this tension?

Looking back, what did you take away from the biennale? How do you remember the experience?

I think it was a watershed moment. If I were to write a history of South African art from 1980, then 1997, more than 1989, 1990 or 1994, would be the watershed. It was the beginning of the international careers of a number of South African artists. The attention that we as South Africans now pay to the exhibition as a form, from documentation to catalogues to archives, has its origins in the biennale.

What we forget is how much it brought in terms of

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international expertise and standards that were shared with local people, and left behind for us to reflect upon and use, mostly in very invisible ways that have never been properly acknowledged. I’m fairly sure I would never have ventured into curating if the biennale hadn’t happened here.

The conference you organised can still be found online, at www.camwood.org/conference.htm. How do you remember this event? How did you get people like Gayatri Spivak and Francesco Bonami to commit?

Everyone was curious about South Africa at the time.

Any lapse of interest after the 1994 elections was reignited by the TRC. It was a dramatic postcolonial moment in the making. This is probably what drew heavyweights like Spivak. But she only committed on condition that we provided her with a business class ticket to Johannesburg. It was a nightmare to organise, and only came through on the day that she flew out of New York. She made a very sweet joke about it at the start of her keynote address. She was so gracious throughout, although a little disappointed by the turnout for her lecture. What was most impressive about Spivak was she went to every one of the biennale exhibitions in Johannesburg and then prepared an original lecture based on her observations. This was in contrast to the many papers at the conference that were rehashed versions of papers the speakers had given elsewhere.

Rory Bester went on to work with Okwui Enwezor on The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa (2001), and most recently as co-curator of Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life (2012)

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William Kentridge Reflections [Artist]

I was in the Museum Africa [as part of Yu Yeon Kim’s Transversions]. I showed Ubu Tells the Truth, a video piece from the theatre project Ubu and the Truth Commission.

The TRC had started hearings at least a year before, in 1996. That’s when we started on Ubu and the Truth Commission, which related to the material coming out at the time.

There was a huge disconnect between the excitement in the art world, with people taking part in it and all the curators from overseas coming to see the work, and the fact that the exhibition was invisible in the city. All of the resources had gone into making a great exhibition. There was no money left for public relations, and unfortunately there was no money left to wine and dine the city authorities.

If they had left R10 000 in the budget to give a big dinner to the mayor and the people around him, you would still have a Johannesburg Biennale. And because they weren’t made to feel a part of it, they felt that it was very isolated, separate from the city.

It was because of this that they closed the biennale down. This was a source of extreme frustration for me – that the hard part of the exhibition they had

got right, and the easy part of the exhibition they had got wrong; calamitously wrong. On the one hand, yes, it was the starting point for a huge amount of work opening up for South African artists overseas, but it also represented the closing of immense doors in South Africa. There hasn’t been a biennale since then. We’ve reduced from biennales to art fairs, which is a huge reversal. Everybody was ready for the biennale in Johannesburg to continue being this interesting place, and we shot ourselves in the foot – for which I blame the biennale organisers and a lot of South African artists. You usually think it’s the city that closes things down and that they’re the ones who are against art, but it wasn’t them – we did it ourselves.

I was aware of the antagonism toward the biennale of some South African artists. It was a particularly South African short-sighted antagonism: a direct product of the apartheid years, in which we had the sense that we were the most interesting thing in the world, that the only politics in the world was antiapartheid activism, and nowhere else in the world were there any other struggles, or of any interest.

There was a sense of entitlement from South African artists, saying ‘Why should the whole exhibition not just be of South African artists?’, and a blindness to what was in fact offered by artists from outside South Africa; to the understanding that this was a gateway to curators coming to see their work.

So it was a beautiful exhibition and an interesting exhibition, and a tragedy that we stopped everything in its tracks so thoroughly.

I think everybody was astonished by the number of curators from around the world at that second Johannesburg Biennale – writers, critics, one’s work suddenly being seen by so many different people. And

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William Kentridge, Ubu Tells the Truth, 1997, video projection.

Courtesy of the artist

I think in retrospect that Okwui Enwezor really did a fantastic exhibition, on the strength of which he was appointed the artistic director of Documenta 11 – like how Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev did a beautiful Sydney Biennale five years ago, on the strength of which she was appointed the head of Documenta 13. So for Okwui it was a launching pad, but a welldeserved launching pad.

Internationally, art fairs have taken over the air space and I think that’s terrible. It’s not something to celebrate; it is rather something to fight against and to resist. There is something about [biennales as] one of the few spaces where you have a noncommercial, considered essay by someone about the state of what is being made in world art. I don’t think it’s true that they’ve run their course. People who

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have been to many biennales may be jaded by them, but that is them being jaded rather than the form itself being out of touch.

There were so many people coming to visit, not just for the biennale but for studio visits too, around the country. I would have met Catherine David around that time, for the biennale and Documenta immediately before that. There was ongoing work with Lynne Cooke, a curator who did the Sydney Biennale [in 1996]. My memory is that there was a whole body of collectors and curators from New York who came.

For a large-scale non-commercial event to bring that kind of audience to South Africa again, I think it would be a whole lot harder. It was just after the end of apartheid, so South Africa was this exciting new destination for many people in the world to come and see. Let’s not deny that there was a political excitement around South Africa that existed then but does not exist now. We also know that public funding for the arts around the world is going down rather than up.

We’ve lost a lot of corporate sponsors, who now have their headquarters outside of South Africa. And we haven’t yet seen the new bourgeoisie putting a lot of money into culture. Maybe one needs to find a new form, but the art fair is not an adequate alternative.

To understand the biennale, you have to understand the exhibition Art from South Africa which took place at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford seven or so years earlier, in 1990. David Elliott curated it during the period of the selective cultural boycott, and his life as a curator was made a misery by different organisations in South Africa saying, ‘Who is this foreigner from outside deciding what work from South Africa should be seen? We will decide what the exhibition will be and he will be grateful to

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receive any work from South Africa at all’ – which is obviously not how curators are used to working. There was a sense of control of the images, of what could be seen or how anything should be seen. It had to do with a centralised thinking; thinking there was going to be one exhibition and one decision being made. In this case it would be the cultural desk or their proxies that would decide on this. Rather than thinking: over the years there will be many exhibitions and the great virtue will be to have many different curators who will see different things, and with different enthusiasms; that the multiplicity of different judgments is to be celebrated rather than avoided. I think that what happened in 1997 was a hangover from that.

It was an astonishingly rich body of informed, clever, insightful and interesting artists and writers and thinkers that came to Johannesburg for both biennales. Obviously the second was the larger one, but if you look at the artists who came for the first one, there were many people who were not that well-known at the time, but who became very important figures in the subsequent years. They were both very rich events.

I remember the excitement of the exhibition, of wanting to be back in my studio …

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CAPE TOWN

4 April – 19 May 2012

Trade Routes Over Time Diller + Scofidio, Stan Douglas, Olafur Eliasson, Ângela Ferreira, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, Isaac Julien, Wangechi Mutu, Odili Donald Odita, Jo Ractliffe, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Penny Siopis Curated by Joost Bosland

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The first exhibition in the Trade Routes Revisited framework, Trade Routes Over Time investigated different responses over the years, in South Africa and further afield, to the work of selected artists who participated in the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale. Many of these artists were just starting their careers at the time.

Some artists presented the same works that they showed in 1997. These are works that are central to these artists’ development but have not been widely seen.

Other artists showed works that might be familiar to international audiences but are not part of our local consciousness. The three South African artists presented works made especially for this exhibition. Taken together, Trade Routes Over Time explored both how a contextual shift of 15 years affects the way one approaches works of art, and how the development of these artists’ careers over time has affected the way one looks at the second Johannesburg Biennale.

At the 1997 biennale, Yinka Shonibare exhibited his seminal Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlour (1996-97), a room-sized installation with wallpaper, curtains and furniture covered in the Dutch wax print fabrics commonly identified with West Africa. His use of this colourful material juxtaposed with Victorian imagery continues to this day - as in the video shown here - and has made him one of the most visible contemporary artists of African descent in the world.

For filmmaker Isaac Julien, the 1997 biennale was only the second time he had experimented with making work for a contemporary art context. He has subsequently shifted his primary site of activity to the art world, using the tools, techniques and strategies of film to suggest new ways of thinking about history and geography.

Pierre Huyghe’s three-screen video Atlantic, shown in 1997 and again here, is a lesser-known work by a now highly visible artist. Only 35 years old at the time of the biennale, Huyghe has since become a stalwart of the ‘relational aesthetics’ movement, exploring the potential of participatory processes in contemporary art. Perhaps because Atlantic is not illustrative of this part of his practice, it has not often been included in surveys of his work.

For the 1997 biennale, Diller + Scofidio – architects celebrated for the integration of design, visual art and performing arts in their practice – produced Pageant, a video

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work in which instantly recognisable corporate logos morph into one another. The VHS-like video quality dates the work, serving as a reminder that it predates No Logo, Naomi Klein’s classic critique of corporate identity and power, by two years. Many of the biennale’s themes and arguments were new, even radical, at the time.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ seamless integration of minimalist aesthetics and political concerns is a powerful source of inspiration to a new generation of South African artists. In 1997, his ‘stacks’ represented a radical departure from local conceptions of the potential of sculpture. Untitled (Veterans Day Sale), one of the artist’s first stacks, was shown on the biennale alongside two other works.

In 1997, Stan Douglas exhibited Nu•tka•, a video piece that superimposes two films of the Vancouver Island landscape onto one screen, with a soundtrack that overlays narratives by Spanish and English commanders who laid claim to the area. Like Nu•tka•, Douglas’ 2010 project Midcentury Studio, an archive of images from a fictional Vancouver photo studio in the period 1945-1951, uses an interweaving of fiction and history to portray the complex story of Vancouver, Douglas’ city of birth.

Olafur Eliasson was required to make a new work in situ for the 1997 biennale in order to qualify for Dutch funding. His project, Erosion, involved pumping water from a reservoir under the Cool Factory in Newtown onto the street, creating an ephemeral public sculpture. Erosion was documented in an artist’s book produced at a copy shop in Johannesburg (a second edition was published as part of this show). The video shown here documents another intervention in the public space of a major city, this time Berlin. Instead of the reflective surface of water, it is a large mirror affixed to a minivan that offers a way of seeing a city anew.

Double Sided, first exhibited at the biennale and reconfigured here (as it is each time it is shown), brings together Ângela Ferreira’s 1996 installation paying tribute to Helen Martins’ Owl House at Donald Judd’s ranch in Marfa, Texas, and its 1997 counterpart in Nieu-Bethesda, where she evoked Judd’s design and architectural practice at the Ibis Art Centre in the little Karoo town. The folded-sheet publication on the shelf was imagined by the artist in 1996 and finally realised on the occasion of this exhibition.

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Wangechi Mutu had just completed her BFA at Cooper Union (New York) when Kellie Jones invited her to take part in Life’s Little Necessities, a show that featured only women. While Mutu is primarily known for her collages, the video shown here is an appropriate choice in relation to Jones’ exhibition. Like all the work on that show, Cleaning Earth is an installation piece, and its subject matter – a woman, portrayed

by Mutu herself, endlessly scrubbing a floor – speaks to Life’s Little Necessities’ feminist concerns.

It was at Okwui Enwezor’s suggestion that Penny Siopis opened some film canisters that were among the artifacts she had collected to create one of her assemblage installations. This led the artist to explore the medium of old home movies and resulted in My Lovely Day, Siopis’ first video, made for the 1997 biennale.

Since then, she has periodically returned to the medium; the piece presented here is her sixth work using the found moving image and incorporates footage of the attempted assassination of then Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1960.

The video Jo Ractliffe exhibited in 1997, Balaam, formed part of a larger investigation into the plight of the itinerant swerwers, or karretjie mense (cart people), of the Karoo. On a road trip, Ractliffe observed three donkey carcasses on the side of the N1, triggering her interest in the forensic ability of photography to document absence, especially at sites of trauma. Here, alongside a photograph from the original project, Ractliffe exhibits new photographs taken in the town of Pomfret, a former asbestos mine and the site of an SADF army base, where members of 32 Battalion were settled after the border war. While the unit was disbanded in 1993, many of the black Angolan soldiers who fought for South Africa still live there with their families in a precarious relationship with the landscape and country they now call home.

Odili Donald Odita participated in the 1997 biennale with designs for billboards and bus shelters. Subsequently, Odita has become known as an abstract painter, and in recent years his painting practice has increasingly involved site-specific wall paintings. Merging past and present, Odita decided to recreate his bus-stop design as a wall installation for this exhibition.

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FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES Born 1956, Guáimaro, Cuba; died 1996, Miami Untitled (Veterans Day Sale) | 1989 | Offset print on paper (endless copies) Courtesy of Milwaukee Art Museum, Layton Art Collection

STAN DOUGLAS Born 1960 in Vancouver; lives in Vancouver Malabar People, 1951 | 2010 | Gelatin silver prints | 101.6 x 76.2cm each Top row: Longshoreman, West-Side Lady, Single Woman I, Single Woman II, Cab Driver, Logger, Student, Construction Worker Bottom row: Owner/Bartender, Bouncer, Dancer, Female Impersonator, Bandleader, Musician, Waitress I, Waitress II Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York

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ODILI DONALD ODITA Born 1966 in Enugu, Nigeria; lives in Philadelphia End-Fin | 1995-97 | Inkjet prints, wall installation | Each print 91 x 61cm

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DILLER + SCOFIDIO Founded 1979; based in New York Pageant | 1997 | Video projection, sound | Duration 3 min 40 sec Courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York

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ISAAC JULIEN Born 1962 in London; lives in London Fantôme Créole Series (Cinema Cinema) | 2005 | Diptych of Lambda prints on gloss paper | 119.5 x 119.5cm each Fantôme Créole Series (Papillon no. 1) | 2005 | Diptych of Lambda prints on gloss paper | 119.5 x 119.5cm each Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London © Isaac Julien

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ÂNGELA FERREIRA Born 1958 in Maputo; lives in Lisbon Double Sided | 1996-97/2012 1 shelf, superwood; 2 prints on wallpaper; 2 books (Anne Emslie, A Journey through the Owl House; David Raskin, Donald Judd); printed and folded sheets of paper

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JO RACTLIFFE Born 1961 in Cape Town; lives in Johannesburg Pomfret series | 2011 | Hand-printed silver gelatin prints | 45 x 56cm each Left to right: Entrance, Pomfret; ‘Die Gat’, Pomfret III; Donkey, Pomfret; Mineshaft, Pomfret

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JO RACTLIFFE Left: Buffalo Ave, Pomfret | 2011 | Hand-printed silver gelatin print | 45 x 56cm Right: End of Time | 1999 | Hand-printed silver gelatin print | 100 x 100cm

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PIERRE HUYGHE Born 1962 in Paris; lives in New York and Paris Atlantic | 1997 | Triple-screen video projection of Ewald André Dupont’s Atlantic (1929) | Duration French 85 min, English 90 min, German 100 min Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris

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OLAFUR ELIASSON Born 1967 in Copenhagen; lives in Berlin and Copenhagen Innen Stadt Außen | 2010 | Video, HDV 16:9 | Duration 10 min Photos: Studio Olafur Eliasson. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

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PENNY SIOPIS Born 1953 in Vryburg; lives in Cape Town The Master is Drowning | 2012 | Digital video, sound | Duration 9 min

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WANGECHI MUTU Born 1972 in Nairobi; lives in New York Cleaning Earth | 2006 | Single-channel DVD, sound | Duration 25 min 45 sec Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

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YINKA SHONIBARE Born 1962 in London; lives in London Addio del Passato | 2011 | Digital video | Duration 16 min 52 sec Courtsy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

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JOHANNESBURG

5 July – 3 August 2012

If A Tree...

James Beckett, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Heman Chong and Eduardo Cachucho, Yvonne Dröge Wendel, Paul Edmunds, Simon Gush, Nicholas Hlobo, Phillip Raiford Johnson, Antonis Pittas, Colin Richards, Robin Rhode, Lerato Shadi, Kemang Wa Lehulere Curated by Clare Butcher

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‘Trade Routes directs attention away from the issue of origins and towards the vectors of travelling modern culture: cramped bodies, bloody commodities, innocent objects, oppositional signals, broken codes, impure thoughts and hidden information …’

So reads Paul Gilroy’s essay published in the catalogue of the second Johannesburg Biennale, Trade Routes: History and Geography. The exhibition If A Tree… continued along those same trajectories mapped by Gilroy. The vectors of what could be called itinerant art culture today – its visa restrictions, budgetary limitations and the challenges of translating un-innocent objects – have indeed directed us away from the search for an original history or immovable geography. Rather than seeking historical veracity, allowing ourselves to be blindsided by bureaucratic scandals, or presenting an archive in two dimensions, If A Tree… took its cue from that age-old empirical dilemma about forests, echoes and the act of witnessing.

Comprising a mixed group of artistic generations and backgrounds, what resulted was an unorthodox set of connections with the travelling effects of the second Johannesburg Biennale.

The artists’ projects in this exhibition alternated between intimate reflections on direct encounters with the biennale 15 years ago, and broader explorations of art’s situation in the surrounding urban and national context. Many of the works presented were not so ‘new’, and some were revisitations of earlier pieces done in other places and times. None of the contributors were part of that biennial – as artists. Some acted as installation technicians, one as a curator, some were audience members and others still in school.

Colin Richards was able to return to a curatorial intervention made in the context of his show Graft in 1997, which then became a surface for Lerato Shadi’s private 24-hour performance piece, Seipone (2012). Two earlier works were shown

by Paul Edmunds, who produced a number of the original biennial’s installations.

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James Beckett, Simon Gush and Nicholas Hlobo were students in the late 1990s and felt deeply impressed by the biennale’s breadth of possibility. This ‘biennial effect’ was expanded on in the collaboration between Heman Chong and Eduardo Cachucho, and in the cycle of site-specific works by Antonis Pittas, which included the installation of a text on the stairs of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

The second Johannesburg Biennale is rarely linked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: a national process of remembrance, which was actually taking place simultaneously and only blocks away from the biennale’s main venue, the Electric Workshop. Kemang Wa Lehulere’s 30 Minutes of Amnesia: Scene 2 (2012) reinstated that proximity, while the rolling of Yvonne Dröge Wendel’s three-metrediameter Black Ball between the Stevenson gallery and the Newtown precinct, across the Nelson Mandela Bridge, made physical and visible the act of forgetting. More whimsically, the projects of Philip Raiford Johnson, Robin Rhode and Dineo Seshee Bopape each foregrounded the promise of the unforeseen and the immaterial.

In addition to the works conducted in alternative spaces and a residency made with the Sober & Lonely Institute for Contemporary Art during the month of July 2012, the Parking Gallery hosted a biennale archive and discussion programme related to If A Tree... The programme launched with a talk by Pittas and included a discussion forum entitled ‘Biennial Necessities’ (a play on the title of curator Kellie Jones’ show, Life’s Little Necessities) with former Africus director Bongi Dhlomo, Vansa director Joseph Gaylard, artist and organiser Lester Adams and Melissa Goba, gallerist and art historian. The archive grew with a number of contributions from various individuals and all contents were processed by fax: a mode of communication heavily relied upon in lieu of high-speed internet and cellphones in the making of the 1997 biennale.

Offering a series of provocative insights and indiscretions, these artistic proposals lead us along impure, broken, hidden routes through the forest of art’s socio-political economy – compelling us to see the wood for the trees and vice versa.

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HEMAN CHONG AND EDUARDO CACHUCHO Born 1977 in Muar, Malaysia; lives in Singapore | Born 1985 in Vanderbijlpark; lives in Johannesburg and Brussels ‘A beautiful mess’ by Sean O’Toole | 2012 | Commissioned text, accessible online, with vinyl wall text | 200 x 40cm

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PAUL EDMUNDS Born 1970 in Johannesburg; lives in Cape Town Cumulate | 1998 | Shredded National Geographic magazines, cold glue | 22cm diameter Cardinal | 1999 | Pins, urethane foam | 13.5cm diameter Text on the artist’s experiences as a technical assistant for the second Johannesburg Biennale (see pp 56-57)

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I A T  . . .

DINEO SESHEE BOPAPE Born 1981 in Polokwane; lives in Johannesburg L.L.T.I. | 2012 | Mixed-media installation | Dimensions variable

J  

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JAMES BECKETT Born 1977 in Harare; lives in Amsterdam Berea in Soap | 2003 | 3 soap cylinders, phonograph, text Installation dimensions variable

SIMON GUSH Born 1981 in Pietermaritzburg; lives in Johannesburg Perfect Lovers (Tripartite) | 2012 | Three ceiling fans Installation dimensions variable ROBIN RHODE Born 1976 in Cape Town; lives in Berlin The Star, 23 February 2011 | Newspaper (diptych) | 56.5 x 80.5cm NICHOLAS HLOBO Born 1975 in Cape Town; lives in Johannesburg Sit-on or stand up and be counted | 2001 Chair of average size, ceramic objects Sit-on or stand up and be counted | 2001 12 small penis-like ceramic objects and 8 gland or bum-like ceramic objects | Installation dimensions variable

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J  

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ROBIN RHODE Born 1976 in Cape Town; lives in Berlin The Star, 23 February 2011 | Detail | Newspaper (diptych) | 56.5 x 80.5cm

KEMANG WA LEHULERE Born 1984 in Cape Town; lives in Johannesburg 30 Minutes of Amnesia: Scene 2 | 2012 | Mixed-media installation Dimensions variable

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PHILLIP RAIFORD JOHNSON Born 1986 in Pretoria; lives in Johannesburg and London Aperture installation view | 2011 | Installation: two digital video projections, sound, slide projection | Dimensions variable

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ANTONIS PITTAS Born 1973 in Athens; lives in Amsterdam Where to go from here | 2012 | Graphite | Installation view, Johannesburg Art Gallery τ (Tough) | 2012 | Multiplex wood, fluorescent tubes | Installation dimensions variable

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ANTONIS PITTAS Out of care and fear | 2012 | Graphite | Installation dimensions variable

J  

COLIN RICHARDS Born 1954 in Cape Town; lives in Cape Town False Wall | 2012 | Drywall, skirting, paint | 210 x 700 x 12cm

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LERATO SHADI Born 1979 in Mafikeng; lives in Berlin Seipone | 2012 | Performance, graphite, rubber | Duration 24 hours Photo: Erik Dettwiler

50 g | 2011 | Digital video | Duration 28 min 14 sec

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I A T  . . .

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YVONNE DRÖGE WENDEL Born 1961 in Karlsruhe, Germany; lives in Amsterdam Black Ball | 2012 | Performance in Newtown, Johannesburg; latex, felt | Ball 350cm diameter Photos: Eduardo Cachucho

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CAPE TOWN

29 November 2012 – 12 January 2013

Fiction as Fiction (Or, A Ninth Johannesburg Biennale) Yto Barrada, Yael Bartana, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Peter Clarke, Ângela Ferreira, Yang Fudong, Nicholas Hlobo, Robin Rhode, Penny Siopis, Frohawk Two Feathers, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curated by Joost Bosland

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The idea of a fictional biennale is a rewarding one when examining the history of the Johannesburg Biennale. Its second edition, organised by Okwui Enwezor in 1997, was also its last. How would (local) art history have been altered if the Johannesburg Biennale had not ceased to exist? What if we imagine there was a third incarnation in 1999? A fourth in 2001? A fifth, after some delay, in 2004? A ninth in 2012?

Jacques Lacan famously said that truth has the structure of fiction. In this exhibition, 12 artists from Africa and elsewhere allow us to imagine the boundaries of that structure. Where does fiction begin, and where does it end?

The historical tradition of fiction illustrated by Peter Clarke is made up of stories and characters. But do characters require a story? Lynette Yiadom-Boakye invents characters and simply lets them be; nothing else is provided. The opposite question is posed by Robin Rhode in his work Yard: does a story require a character?

While the sequence of images and words in Penny Siopis’ new paintings suggests a story, inner life is privileged over traditional narration. Narrative is altogether absent from the work of Dineo Seshee Bopape. Instead, she turns her attention to the special effects that inevitably embellish and distort narrative. The detritus of ideas and objects in Kemang Wa Lehulere’s work suggests a story, yet the storyline proves elusive. Ângela Ferreira freezes a frame in an imaginary film, played on an imaginary projector. Meaning comes from the juxtaposition of ideas and forms.

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When memory – by nature flawed, fragmented, incomplete – is turned into narrative, it cannot avoid fictionalising lived experience, as Yto Barrada does in her collage of home movies. History as a category is possibly even more tenuous than memory: when reading history, in most cases we are not able personally to ascertain the facts.

We rely on authority to differentiate between history and fable. Where does that leave Frohawk Two Feathers’ account of the life and times of 18th-century Caribbean soldier Titus Andronicus?* To the extent that mythology and metaphor illuminate reality, they cannot be said to be fictional in any straightforward sense. The reliance of Nicholas Hlobo on the content and structure of Xhosa mythology allows him to speak of South Africa today. Yang Fudong uses Chinese mythology and cinematic history to create a haunting atmosphere in The Nightman Cometh. Neither artist provides a clear narrative – rather, they let the symbolism of mythology speak for itself.

Yael Bartana shows how fiction also allows the exploration of real, pressing moral questions. This capacity is especially important when dealing with historical events of which the sheer magnitude eclipses reality, such as the Holocaust or the bombing of Hiroshima.

Ultimately, the structures of fiction presented in this ‘ninth Johannesburg Biennale’ collapse into themselves (much as the original biennale did). Fiction might be a fiction. * In true biennale style, Fiction as Fiction was subject to the vagaries of international shipping. Frohawk Two Feathers’ work remained lost in transit as this publication went to print.

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KEMANG WA LEHULERE Exit permit 1, 2 and 3 and I can't laugh anymore, when I can't laugh I can't...

2012 | Mixed-media installations | Dimensions variable

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LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE Born 1977 in London; lives in London Scripture of the Watchful | 2012 | Oil on canvas | 60 x 55cm Observance 2 | 2012 | Oil on canvas | 60 x 55cm Observance 1 | 2012 | Oil on canvas | 85 x 75cm

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PENNY SIOPIS Born 1953 in Vryburg; lives in Cape Town Skirmish: Crackdown | 2012 | Oil on canvas Series of 5 paintings, approx 30 x 121cm

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PENNY SIOPIS Skirmishes | 2012 | Oil, ink and glue on canvas or board

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DINEO SESHEE BOPAPE Born 1981 in Polokwane; lives in Johannesburg special effects part i | 2012 | Mixed-media installation | Dimensions variable special effects part ii | 2012 | Installation of 7 drawings, watercolour on paper, wood, notice board | Dimensions variable special effects part iii | 2012 | Installation of 13 drawings, watercolour on paper, wood, sand bag | Dimensions variable

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PETER CLARKE Born 1929 in Cape Town; lives in Cape Town Fanfare series, left to right: Sei Shonagon, Jack and the Beanstalk, The President’s Lady, Miss Haversham Published 2004 | Mixed media on paper | 50 x 35cm each

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YAEL BARTANA Born 1970 in Kfar Yehezkel, Israel; lives in Amsterdam and Tel Aviv And Europe Will Be Stunned (trilogy) Mary Koszmary | 2007 | 16mm film transferred to DVD, sound Duration 10min 50sec Produced with support from Hermès and Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw.

Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam

Mur i Wie˙za | 2009 | RED transferred to HD, sound | Duration 15 min Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer Contemporary, Tel Aviv

Zamach | 2011 | RED transferred to HD, sound | Duration 35min Commissioned by Artangel, Outset Contemporary Art Fund, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, The Netherlands Filmfunds, Zachta National Gallery of Art

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YTO BARRADA Born 1971 in Paris; lives in Tangier Hand-Me-Downs | 2011 | Single-channel video, sound | Duration 14 min Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg and Beirut

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ÂNGELA FERREIRA Born 1958 in Maputo; lives in Lisbon Study for Hendrix/Cullinan Shaft and Underground Cinema (After R Smithson) 2012 | Aluminium, torch, C-print on dibond | Installation dimensions variable

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YANG FUDONG Born 1971 in Beijing; lives in Shanghai Ye Jiang (The Nightman Cometh) | 2011 | Single-channel video, sound | Duration 19 min 21 sec Courtesy of Marian Goodman, New York and Paris

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ROBIN RHODE Born 1976 in Cape Town; lives in Berlin Yard | 2011 | Digital animation | Duration 2 min 40 sec

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NICHOLAS HLOBO Born 1975 in Cape Town; lives in Johannesburg Tyaphaka | 2012 | Rubber, ribbon, hosepipe, packaging material | Dimensions variable Continued overleaf

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2012

Reports & Reviews

186

Frieze 149, September 2012 Review Trade Routes Over Time Sean O’Toole

The second Johannesburg Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor in 1997 and titled Trade Routes: History and Geography, serves as the leitmotif for Joost Bosland’s three-part exhibition series at Stevenson gallery, the Trade Routes Project. At a public lecture, Bosland described Enwezor’s now somewhat folkloric biennial as ‘the most important exhibition of the 1990s’.

More revealing, however, was Bosland’s likening of gathering testimonies and documents related to the original exhibition – arguably a key moment in the globalisation of contemporary African art – to ‘an archaeological dig’. Fifteen years after the premature

closure of the second Johannesburg Biennale, which was also the city’s last, hard evidence of its existence remains scarce. His metaphor nonetheless offered an insight. Johannesburg, a sprawling metropolis founded during a period of colonial adventurism prompted by the discovery of gold in 1886, is a kind of ghost town. Its ruins, though, are psychic rather than actual.

In the first instalment of the exhibition series, Trade Routes Over Time at Stevenson gallery in Cape Town, a new film by Penny Siopis – who, like all 12 invited artists in this quasi-retrospective, participated in the original biennial – explored this idea. Composed from homemade movies and newsreel footage, The Master is Drowning (2012) describes the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd by farmer David Pratt at an agricultural fair in 1960. The Johannesburg in Siopis’s film is fleshy and antique, its white male subjects all sporting haircuts modelled after Norman Rockwell characters. The decisive moment shows Verwoerd, an unlikeable ideologue, incredulously staunching the flow of blood from his face after being shot at point-blank range. Verwoerd survived, but six years later a knife decisively and fatally punctured his swollen pride. It took another three decades to off his grand idea.

Staged in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet empire, the transfer of Hong Kong to China, and the successful transition of South Africa to a nonracial democracy, Enwezor’s biennial set out to map the ‘epistemological closures’ marking the end of the Enlightenment’s game run. It also aimed to essay the awkward rise of its dubious successor, economic globalization. Diller + Scofidio’s contribution to that exhibition, Pageant (1997), was a graphically simple

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R : T  R  O T 

black-and-white floor projection archiving wellknown corporate logos. Profitably reshown here, it pithily describes globalisation as a regime of brands.

Bosland included only four works from the 1997 biennial, pushing his pseudo-historical commemorative show into the category of remix or adaptation. So, alongside Pierre Hughe’s Atlantic (1997), a three-screen projection of the three versions of Ewald André Dupont’s eponymous 1929 disaster movie, Trade Routes Over Time included recent works by other mid-career artists first featured in Enwezor’s show, like Stan Douglas (in his role as a fictional midcentury studio photographer) and Yinka Shonibare (whose costumed critique of empire in his film Addio Del Passato, 2012, is sumptuous but laboured).

While the filmic bias was true to the original event, dealer gamesmanship stymied the potential of this exhibition. More than a few people noted that it should have been staged by one of the country’s two national museums. A marked lack of vision amongst museum programmers, however, who disingenuously blame budgetary constraints, created the obvious gap for this dealer-based interpretation of an important moment in the country’s art history. Ângela Ferreira, one of three South Africans in the show (all of them Stevenson artists), presented an updated version of Double Sided (199697/2012), a bookshelf-like installation that included documentation of works made at two remote artist sites – Helen Martins’ spooky ‘Owl House’ in NieuBethesda, South Africa, and Donald Judd’s ranch in Marfa, Texas. Like many of Ferreira’s works, this physical structure was less about the contingent sculptural form than the information it housed. It seemed oddly lost, however, next to Jo Ractliffe’s

ongoing series of black-and-white documentary photographs of ravaged architectural structures in Pomfret, a border village given to Angolan soldiers who fought for the apartheid military.

When he was appointed artistic director of the Johannesburg Biennale, Enwezor moved to Johannesburg for a year, where he authored some devastating reviews (notably for this publication) that pierced the hubristic bubble of the city’s provincial art scene. Curator Colin Richards recently recalled the strong ‘nativist paradigm’ marking local responses to Enwezor’s project. This ‘locked position,’ as he described it, reified ‘strangeness and familiarity’ – a kind of ‘us and them’ attitude mirrored in the critical silence around Bosland’s exhibition, which received no mainstream media coverage in South Africa. A pity, since this timely exhibition deserved argument.

Possibly the most interesting thing about the Johannesburg Biennale was not that it heralded a new generation of artists – or prompted established artists like Siopis and Isaac Julien to embrace new media and contexts – but the site of the exhibition itself. ‘We fancy she matters,’ wrote Johannesburg poet and editor Lionel Abrahams of his hometown nearly a half-century ago. But Johannesburg is also a parochial frontier town where arrogance and ambition mingle with a kind of xenophobic loneliness. It is a generative proposition politely avoided in this ahistorical archive show. To be fair, 1997 was a period of optimism; Johannesburg did momentarily matter.

A second exhibition in the Trade Routes Project, featuring emerging artists and held in Johannesburg, takes on the challenge of what came after.

Reprinted with kind permission of the author

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Art South Africa 10.4, Winter 2012 Review Trade Routes Over Time Anthea Buys

In the emerging history of biennials and other serial exhibitions, the second Johannesburg Biennale is a touchstone. The first Johannesburg Biennale, which took place in 1995, was one of the first international mega-exhibitions outside of Europe to proclaim itself serial. Unlike the present day, where even Lubumbashi has a biennale, a city’s commitment to a serial megaexhibition signified a degree of cultural sophistication and power. When it was announced in 1996 that Okwui Enwezor would curate the second edition of the biennale in 1997, the world took notice. Newly democratised, South Africa was the art world’s fresh

meat. We were novel, righteous and African, and, to boot, we had Okwui Enwezor.

Trade Routes Over Time, Stevenson’s first installment in a trilogy of exhibitions that revisit the second Johannesburg Biennale, tries to express, in artistic rather than political terms, the importance of the second Johannesburg Biennale for South African art and for the rest of the world. Named with reference to Enwezor’s title for the biennale, Trade Routes: History and Geography, the exhibition is a reminder of how exceptional it was that Enwezor’s Trade Routes took place in South Africa when it did. The exhibitions saw artists of such international renown as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Olafur Eliasson and Pierre Huyghe showing alongside South Africans Penny Siopis and Jo Ractliffe. Today it is hard to imagine circumstances that would make sense of showing these five artists in the same exhibition.

Some works in Trade Routes Over Time, such as Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Veterans Day Sale) (1989), are the same pieces as those shown in the biennale itself.

In other cases, works originally presented on the biennale are elaborated or remade, and in most cases, altogether different works are presented. The effect of this is a strange temporal mash-up. No work represents the polyphony of time in this exhibition better than Stan Douglas’ Malabar People (2010), a photographic series set in 1951 but shot in 2010. The work is a series of staged portraits of citizens of Malabar in Florida, a creolised community living between the aspirations of capitalist America in the 1950s and the indolent glamour of a southern coastal town. Douglas, born in 1960, missed the era that he purports to photograph, and its representation through his portraits has an air of a nostalgic reinvention of the past. The printing

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and presentation of the portraits anchor the piece in the present, and it is difficult to look at the work without the melancholy twinge that comes with being stuck in today and hankering after yesterday.

The visible dating of medium and technology in Diller + Scofidio’s video installation Pageant, produced in 1997 for the biennale, gives a clearer sense of the passage of time since 1997, and particularly the exponential refinement of digital media since then.

To a droning, synthesised soundtrack reminiscent of parts of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Bladerunner, corporate and political logos morph into one another in a projection thrown onto the floor. The reduction of these logos to monochromatic emblems, and their clunky digital animation, distance the piece from the seamlessness that today’s digital media allows in a video or animation work, with the result that the imperfection of the forms seems almost organic. This is a piece that has aged well. The work’s suggestion of the complicity of these branded powers is reinforced by its seeming to defy the conventions of its medium, like a living organism defies the industrial or mechanical logic of progress and precision.

Trade Routes Over Time is as much about the act of recollection as it is about the 1997 biennale, and at a time in which revisiting exhibitions of the past is a curatorial obsession around the world, this is a strong conceptual position.

Reprinted with kind permission of the author

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Frieze 151, November/December 2012 Highs and Lows The rise and fall of biennials in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal and South Africa Sean O’Toole

In August, two months before the opening of the 2012 Rencontres Picha – the third edition of the Biennale de Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – the event was unexpectedly suspended ‘for financial reasons alone’, according to the organizers, Sammy Baloji, Patrick Mudekereza and Elvira Dyangani Ose. In Cape Town, a port city once connected by rail to Lubumbashi’s copper mines, a colleague of mine groaned with disappointment. A few days earlier she had proudly shown me her bruised

arm, the result of mandatory inoculations against yellow fever and other tropical viruses. Her encounter with central Africa’s mosquitoes will have to wait until 2013, the new launch date for Rencontres Picha.

Speaking at the Joburg Art Fair in September, Ose – who is from Equatorial Guinea – mooted plans to stretch the event over the entire year. Given the participatory collective practice she likes, it may be a viable plan. ‘There has been a dramatic increase in artistic and cultural production that challenges the definition of urban space and the public sphere in the past decades,’ she explained. ‘These initiatives blur the boundaries between art and everyday life, between art and non-art audiences.’

In her contribution to Rogue Urbanisms, a forthcoming edited volume compiled by two prominent theorists of African urbanity, Edgar Pieterse and AbdouMaliq Simone, Ose mentions how artist organisations and collectives ‘have gone a step further in their attempts to open up critical debate on the issue of public space and a reformulation of audience participation’.

Amongst the groupings that excite her: the Centre for Contemporary Art of East Africa in Kenya; Muv’art in Mozambique; curator Gabi Ngcobo’s Center for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg; and the work of choreographers Faustin Linyekula of Studios Kabako in the DRC and Sello Pesa of the Johannesburg-based Ntsoana Contemporary Dance Theatre. They are all championing a ‘new social imaginary of urban space,’ said Ose during her talk.

In many instances, the informal groupings listed

by Ose are far more agile, durable and adaptable than the organisations piloting the continent’s handful of single-city biennials. As it is, biennials are a difficult idea, conceptually as well as financially, to implement

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and sustain in Africa. In South Africa, for instance, where European models of art practice have become deeply rooted, these large-scale spectacles are typically pitched at miniscule audiences; historically, they have tended to pop and fizzle by their third iteration.

Launched within six months of each other in Cape Town in 2007, both the CAPE Biennale and Spier Contemporary, a privately funded regional biennial art competition and exhibition, were terminated after their second instalments. A decade earlier, the Johannesburg Biennale similarly lasted only two rounds, Okwui Enwezor’s audacious second instalment, held in 1997, closing prematurely following poor attendance and an ambivalent attitude to its existence by city managers.

The legacy of Enwezor’s biennial, which in many respects formed the closing bracket to the strange and creative fluorescence prompted by Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990, was the subject of an intriguing trilogy of exhibitions at Stevenson gallery. The first exhibition, Trade Routes Over Time, held at its Cape Town headquarters earlier this year, offered the historical context, showing a mix of new and old works by the likes of Stan Douglas, Olafur Eliasson, Pierre Huyghe, Isaac Julien, Wangechi Mutu, Yinka Shonibare and Penny Siopis – who, in 1997, were all young and largely unheralded participants in Enwezor’s movingimage-rich biennial. This opening show was followed, in Johannesburg, by If A Tree…, a kind of belated third instalment of the city’s biennial, if you will. Curated

by Clare Butcher, the show included an installation of sculptural objects and chalk drawings, 30 Minutes of Amnesia: Scene 2 (2012), by Kemang Wa Lehulere.

Wa Lehulere, who is due to show with New York’s Lombard Freid Projects in 2013, is a former

member – with Gabi Ngcobo – of Gugulective, a multi-headed artist collective equal in ambition and maybe even achievement to the Wu-Tang Clan. In 2010, their name appeared in the title of curator Riason Naidoo’s 1910-2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective, a sprawling, conceptually inelegant if visually intriguing survey exhibition of South African art originated and hosted by the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. Earlier this year, Naidoo, the museum’s director, co-curated the tenth edition of Dak’Art, launched in 1992 and Africa’s longest running contemporary art biennial, held in the Senegalese capital of Dakar.

Naidoo also oversaw a monograph show at Dak’Art devoted to octogenarian South African painter and man of letters, Peter Clarke. Like 87-year-old Lebanese artist Etel Adnan – whose Documenta chapbook The Cost For Love We Are Not Willing To Pay is an absolute treat – Clarke is too old to hide from speaking simple truths. Like Adnan, he also paints in a kind of late-Modernist style that defies easy pigeonholing.

A former dockworker who studied art part-time – notably under John Coplans in 1947 – Clarke became a full-time artist at age 27. He is now 83. ‘The unfortunate thing about being older is that so often people expect you to be dead,’ he told me a while ago, before Naidoo’s smart plan to introduce him to West Africa. ‘Therefore they don’t ask you about the future.

What are you going to do in the future? It is a difficult question. The artist doesn’t retire.’

Reprinted with kind permission of the author

Acknowledgments Stevenson would like to thank all the artists and all those who contributed to this publication, as well as Rose Lord, Agnes Fierobe, Angela Choon, David Allin, Allison Hemler, Joanna Stella-Sawicka, Studio Olafur Eliasson, Carole Billy, Molly Taylor, Rachel Assaf, Erin Manns, Jin Sun, Tamsen Greene, Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, Karen Del Aguila, Alexandra Giniger, Katie Rashid, John Connelly, Brady Roberts, Glenn Scott-Wright, Andree Sfeir-Semler, Floor Wullems, Saskia Wendland, Bob and Renee Drake, Werner Maschmann, Nina Mücke, Stefan Senger, Clive Kellner, Bisi Silva, Sabine Marschall, Anne McIlleron, Hedwig Barry, Emilio Moreno, Sewela Mamphiswana, Sober & Lonely Institute for Contemporary Art, the Parking Gallery and all those who participated in the If A Tree… programme.

Diller + Scofidio courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York.

Stan Douglas courtesy of David Zwirner, New York. Olafur Eliasson courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Felix Gonzalez-Torres courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Pierre Huyghe courtesy of Marian Goodman, New York and Paris. Isaac Julien courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. Wangechi Mutu courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Yinka Shonibare, MBE, courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York.

Yto Barrada courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg and Beirut.

Yael Bartana courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam.

Yang Fudong courtesy of Marian Goodman, New York and Paris.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

If A Tree... was supported by

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 JOHANNESBURG 62 Juta Street Braamfontein 2001 Postnet Suite 281 Private Bag x9 Melville 2109 T +27 (0)11 403 1055/1908 F +27 (0)86 275 1918 info@stevenson.info www.stevenson.info Catalogue 68 December 2012 ISBN 978-0-620-55483-1 © 2012 For texts: the authors (unless otherwise noted) © 2012 For works: the artists Editors Joost Bosland, Sophie Perryer Research & production Marc Barben, Kabelo Malatsie Design Gabrielle Guy Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town Front cover Hans Haacke, The Vindication of Dulcie September, 1997, installation view outside the Electric Workshop. Photo: Werner Maschmann Photo credits Trade Routes Over Time and Fiction as Fiction installation views: Mario Todeschini If A Tree... installation views: Anthea Pokroy