South African contemporary art

Editor: Katy Deepwell with contributors Fatma Ismail Afifi, David Koloane, Murray McCartney, Tony Mhonda, Barbara Murray, Everlyn Nicodemus, Olu Oguibe, Chika Okeke, Ola Oloidi, John Picton, Colin Richards, George Shire and Ola Bisi Silva. African Art and Society Series [ISSN 1740-3111] Editor, commissioning editor and general editor: Sajid Rizvi. Published 1 December 1997 by Saffron Books, London, ISBN-13 9781872843131, ISBN-10 1872843131. See links for table of contents, additional information

In this essay, I discuss a selection of artworks produced by South African artists in the period 1999–2009: New Identity (1999) by Langa Magwa, Portrait Series (2001) by Zama Dunywa, Emabutfo (2009) by Nandipha Mntambo and Umthubi (2008) by Nicholas Hlobo.

This essay describes the conceptual and thematic frameworks that informed the 2009 exhibition 'Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance', presented at the Iziko South African National Gallery (2009/2010).  The exhibition assembled over 400 works, including loans of authentic Dada art and publications from such institutions as Kunsthaus Zürich, Centre Pompidou, Berlinische Galerie and Akademie der Künste Berlin, curated alongside a broad selection of South African art, performance and publications produced between 1960 and 2009. For many of the European lenders, it was the first time that they had agreed to loan works to a South African (or African) institution.

Positioning itself contrary to dominant Western art historical narratives which frame homogenous notions of 'Africa' as the Primitive Exotic periphery against which theories of avant-garde(s) and modernist innovation continue to maintain a European centre, the exhibition presented new links & connections between artists from the African south and European north working from 1960-2009, opening up a rich vein of questions about the relationship of Dada to Africa, particularly sensitised by post apartheid and post colonial attitudes. As such, it presented alternative histories to the ‘Resistance Art’ narrative that has long dominated South African art of the last several decades.

This catalogue essay for Gallerie Noko's participation in the 2016 Cape Town Art Fair questions the geopolitics of art in commercial art fairs. Challenging the notion of 'South African exceptionalism' in the arts it argues for a 'cosmolocal' perspective that opens up elitist cosmopolitan spaces of contemporary art.

South African performance artist Lerato Shadi's meticulous acts of production and erasure mirror the ways in which she attempts to reconcile the separation she feels from what is on the historical record—all that is valorised in official archives, university classrooms, and holdings of museums—from that of her lived experience. Her performances highlight the violence of past erasures and continuing reminders that one does not belong. Shadi’s work attempts to call our attention to the hypocrisies of empire, and the violent erasures required to maintain its superior status. Is it possible, on frontlines of conquest --where the descendants of empire are even more invested in shoring up the myth of their superiority -- can Black subjectivity assert its presence? For artists who live on the coalface of historical erasure, their artistic practice becomes an obligation: to write, to record, archive what happens when one’s history and the record of one’s people’s existence is being erased. Shadi captures her compulsion to record, assiduously writing on the walls, despite the hand that will inevitably come to erase her efforts. In performatively erasing her own valiant attempts, she performs the ways in which imperial machinery is driven to erase the history of civilisations it believes it vanquished. She also hints at the more insidious forgetting that happens within any civilisation under attack—the loss of cultural memory in the face of the pressures of day-to-day survival.

... with what he has referred to as the dangerous etymological coincidence between amnesty and amnesia ... and forwards between the metamorphoses of the charcoal image and the movie camera that tracks ... In another sequence, the camera action is reversed so that what at first ...

Calligraphy, maps, roots, mazes, tapestries—in their work, El Anatsui from Ghana and Igshaan Adams and Gerhard Marx, both from South Africa, explore arcane, semi-abstract languages of sign and code. Employing immersive tactics of collapsibility and fluidity of form, they interrogate the primacy of omniscient, objective, or imperial perspective. Each artist uses discarded materials—prosaic articles that come with their own familiar, sometimes toxic, clutch of correspondences. These matter-of-fact materials are then broken down into unrecognisable matter and reconstituted to create intriguing forms that propose provisional, contradictory, shifting modes and logics. Drawing on the mutually forged philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I read the work of these three artists as actively de-mapping the fixed codes mapped into the substances, surfaces, and textures of their everyday worlds. Their practice involves embodied, conscious rituals of sourcing discarded materials and forging them into imaginative, open-ended calligraphic tapestries, collage drawings, and aluminium assemblages. This actively transformative practice presents a model for what it looks like to undo the ideological structures through which the world is filtered. These artists are unmaking the imprints and violent co-options of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “Oedipal”, by working through its physical imprints in the inherited material of the world. In this article, I argue that their abstracting, metamorphic treatment of materials and inherited symbolic codes counters the literalism, binarism, and political expediency that inform dominant discourses around the removal, destruction, commissioning, or making of monuments, memorials, or public artworks in decolonising contexts.

... with what he has referred to as the dangerous etymological coincidence between amnesty and amnesia ... and forwards between the metamorphoses of the charcoal image and the movie camera that tracks ... In another sequence, the camera action is reversed so that what at first ...

Mia Thom is an interdisciplinary artist inspired by the ways in which sound can alter the perspectives we hold of objects, spaces and experiences. The essay written for this exhibition reflects on how processes of vision, musical disciplines and photographic forms are re-orientated by her meticulous interrogation of the fundamental principles of each artistic form.

The principle performance piece of Invisible Motifs culminates Thom’s interests in ‘sonic possible worlds’ and exists as an imaginative challenge to conventions of performance, audience and musical score. The work conceives the performance space as an instrument in and of itself. The resonant frequencies of the room have been incorporated into the score, developed with composer Lucy Strauss, such that a continuum of sound is consciously exploited to provide a sonic experience. Performed live by Mia Thom (violin) and Jess Scott (cello) the work is a remarkably intimate encounter with voice, invisibility and sonic knowledge.

This paper is about the relation of history to memory in the process of radical political change. Looking at the work of William Kentridge in the context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it probes the ways that the language of nation-building fails to account for the experience of trauma as it resists absorption into the structures of historical time and the “talking cure.” In particular, it considers how Kentridge’s unique graphic techniques of film animation contest the logic of closure, recovery and renewal that the political and psychic imperatives of “new” nationhood seem to demand.

Alan Alborough uses industrial materials like cable ties, plastic bottles, clothes pegs and fishing gut to create intricate installations that explore art-making processes and challenge the conventions of display and spectatorship in the field of exhibition. As a result, Alborough is regarded as a leading contemporary South African conceptual artist. Despite Alborough's deliberate use of specific materials and the close attention he pays to the construction of his installations, much of the writing on Alborough fails to explore the apparent disjuncture between the material and conceptual in his work.

... with what he has referred to as the dangerous etymological coincidence between amnesty and amnesia ... and forwards between the metamorphoses of the charcoal image and the movie camera that tracks ... In another sequence, the camera action is reversed so that what at first ...