Tag: sculpture

Serge Alain Nitegeka’s Ode to Black

With wood, cement and light blue, burnt orange and bright yellow paint Serge Alain Nitegeka subtly pays Ode to Black at the Stevenson gallery in Johannesburg.

Ode to Black speaks to the subconscious way marginalised people live, specifically asylum seekers and refugees, which is a theme that runs through his works.

During his walkabout on Thursday the 25th of May, Nitegeka explained how he enjoys disrupting space, much like blackness. Moreover, he explored how accessing spaces tends to be specifically difficult for black migrants. So the gallery space itself is slightly transformed for us to experience this struggle.

Nitegeka delicately contextualised the space so accessing his work is art itself. For example, the “normal” entrance into the space is disrupted by black wooden planks and instead, we are forced to go through an opening in the wall that is shaped like the quarter of a circle, which almost looks like a mouse hole shaped.

The use of wood is prominent throughout the exhibition. Nitegeka told us how his relationship with wood started with the use of wooden second hand shipping crates. Those crates had a history of movement, which easily made a connection with the crossing of black lives between boarders. Moreover, Nitegeka considers wood a malleable material, a flexible material, with freedom because the shape of wood can be altered, just as a migrant’s identity is forcibly changed. Even though this transformation of wood and identity may be brutal, the end result is a beautiful sculpture and a testament to the resilience of the migrant experience.

Nitegeka’s Ode to Black reads as follows:

Black is the colour of mourning and melancholy. Black epitomises stealth; it is central to clandestine ventures and cool lonesomeness. Black is the colour of executive cars, gadgets, accessories and clothing. Eternally beautiful, Black is the colour of the universe, the infinite deep dark unknown abyss. Black is a wormhole, mysterious and ever-receding, absorbing everything around it and revealing nothing. Black is all colours mixed together, perhaps the sum of the visible. Black is the only colour without light, though full and empty.

Black is a colour reserved unto itself. It is comfortable in its own nature, unruffled and confident. It tries very hard to stay anonymous but inquiring eyes are drawn to it; spectators cannot resist it. It is not popular. It reveals little because it is neither warm nor cold. It is an enigmatic pigment.

The colour black presents itself ambiguously in meaning, like the abstract forms in my practice. Ode to Black explores the multitude of meanings that the colour black invites in my work thus far, in paintings, sculptures and installations.

You can experience ode at the Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg until the 30th of June.

29 May 2017
Blurring the lines between the public and the private, the global and the local

The cultural construction of the “public” and the sayable in turn creates zones of privatised, inadmissible memory and experience that operates as spaces of social amnesia and anaesthesia.

– Nadia Serematakis, in The Senses Still. 1994

Opening on the 25^th of May at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg and running until the 1^st of July 2017, is an exhibition by internationally renowned Moroccan artist, mounir fatmi, titled Fragmented Memory. Not only does the presence of artworks in South Africa by an artist based between Tangier and Paris, speak to the blurring of the global and the local, but fatmi’s own practice revolves around these issues, expanding into other issues such as the fragmentation of cultural memory after colonialism, the complexities of a hybrid identity, the sometimes oppressive weight of religion and language – which are all themes that have resounding parallels for South African artists and others all over the world.

Included in the show will be recent sculptures, reliefs, photographs and installations – including new work making its debut on the African continent. Goodman Gallery’s decision to show fatmi’s work in South Africa is to “facilitate a richer discourse on colonial histories in Africa and challenge the colonial construct of a Sub-Saharan Africa disconnected from its North African neighbours.” fatmi has been exhibited internationally, and to much critical acclaim, having most recently exhibited work at the 57^th Venice Biennale at the NSK State-in-Time Pavilion.

The Blind Man, 2015

Three objects form the basis of Fragmented Memory; a copy of the Koran, a photograph of a Moroccan King, and a calligraphic painting. These are the only cultural objects that mounir fatmi remembers from his childhood home in 1970s Tangier – all of which he was forbidden to touch or were positioned out of reach, but which vividly captured his imagination. fatmi takes these objects as a starting point for his work ‘to show how the few elements of culture I had in my childhood home have shaped my artistic research, my aesthetic choices and my entire career,’ he says. fatmi adds that ‘through these objects, I draw a direct relationship to language, to memory, and to history in this show, because, for me, these three elements depend on one another: without language there is no memory and with no memory there is no history.’

It is interesting to read this body of work in relation to the writings of anthropologist and author C. Nadia Seremetakis, who in her book The Senses Still (1994) highlights the importance of personal memory and narrative as constituting the sphere of potential alternative memory and temporality that combats the singular and encompassing narrative of modernism. Seremetakis says, “The split between public and private memory, the narrated and unnarrated, inadvertently reveals the extent to which everyday experience is organized around the reproduction of inattention, and therefore the extent to which a good deal of historical experience is relegated to forgetfulness.” In Fragmented Memory, mounir fatmi furthers uses his personal journey, in a sense mining his memories and digging past the forgetfulness, to comment on cultural memory and collective history – marking a rare autobiographical approach in his work. I am excited to see fatmi bring out these intimate memories into the public sphere and in turn challenge what we have regarded as defining moments within our own cultures and histories.

Roots 01 – Triptych, 2016

18 May 2017
Taking back control over the black imagination: In conversation with Mary Sibande

It’s a special moment when one is given the opportunity to talk with their heroes. I first met Sophie during her exhibition as the main attraction in Mary Sibande’s solo exhibition ‘The Purple shall Govern’ in the Grahamstown National arts festival. Seeing Sophie, a life sized ebony skinned sculpture in Victorian dress, for the first time reminded me of one of my fond childhood memories of playing dress up. Just like Sophie I too would have a blue dress that would be shielded by a white apron. Like the little protagonist of ‘Alice in wonder land’ I wanted to be “pretty”, I wanted to be a lady and just like Sophie I would love to lather myself in layers of petticoats and puffy sleeves. Such, as I recall the memory, would act as a separation between me and my reality. The bigger the “poof” the closer to my own dreams. I would be able to situate myself fully submerged in my imagination.

Yet it would be through Mary Sibande, the creator of this Sophie character that I would finally be able to engage with her motives for the character of Sophie. So often are we so emerged in our own idealizations that we forget that ideas made home within our minds have their own context from which they sprung. Our interview would be one of a debate about the character of Sophie and Mary’s process of delivering her work.

Motlatsi Khosi (MK): You “blew up” in 2013 as the Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner (SBYAA) and your images were regularly in public space such as billboards in the Johannesburg CBD featuring your work and the tag line “the purple shall govern”. And then you went silent. What have you been up to for the last 3 years? What has your journey been like as an artist moving from working within the private home to public space sensation within the art world and receiving all the international and local recognition?

Mary Sibande (MS): My prize as the Standard Bank Young Artist Award recipient in 2013 was the culmination of a few years of focused work. The acknowledgement of my work in this way presented the opportunity and challenge of finding other sources of inspiration. I have not had a solo exhibition since 2009, but the intensity has not subsided as I have responded to calls for my work to be shown internationally, mostly in group exhibitions, art fairs and residencies.

Due to being a recipient of the award my work titled “the Purple Shall Govern” went on a national tour, gracing some of the leading museums in South Africa. Beginning of course at the Grahamstown National Festival, making stops at Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town, Oliewenhuis Museum in Bloemfontein and making its final stop at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.

I was invited to a residency in Michigan University at the Penny Stamps School of Arts. I was also given the opportunity to present a talk in Detroit. During my stay I was able to visit Toledo art museum in Ohio to witness the inauguration of my work at their Collectors dinner. In the same year, I presented my work in a group exhibition titled ‘My Jo’Burg’ at La Maison Rouge in Paris. The show was an assemblage of work that presented the diverse range of work and modes of visual and cultural productions by South African artists. I was also invited to participate in the prestigious 12^th Lyon Biennale in France. As well as Lagos Photo in Nigeria to exhibit photographic prints from my Sophie series.

MK: Your work has led you across continents and you have lead it forward. It has evolved from a particular context and history yet you yourself are growing in both your skills and ideas. The travels to unfamiliar places must have offered new contexts to influence your work. How did they influence your work?

As the show progressed I had to re-curate it according to space and context, this meant that elements of the show were added on and taken at different stages. My visit to La Maison Rouge coincided with my residency at the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC VAL Museum) also in Paris. This was an incredibly rich residency where I conceptualized and made work using the hosts of resources made available to me there. I worked with talented textile and Fashion Students to create the work. I worked with a seamstress who was able to translate my ideas even though our different languages would be an obstacle to our work. I was assigned a foundry that was able to make my fiberglass figure. I eventually constructed an installation piece in one of the spaces in the museum and was met with great approval. The museum also commissioned some of the previous body of works to be made into billboard posters, making the little town of Vitry-Sur-Seine (outside of Paris) into a giant ‘Sophie’ gallery.

The body of work ‘The Purple Shall Govern’ has been seen in a few manifestations. The body of work seems to build its own momentum as it seems to attract the attention of curators from leading museums. One such invitation came from the Swedish sculpture park called ‘Wanas’. This was an exciting proposition for me as I was asked to create work that would be installed in a forest. The works durability had to be taken in consideration and so the installation was made entirely of fiberglass sculpture. It was here that my visual language would be thoroughly tested.

I have also participated in the Winter Sculpture Show entitled ‘A Place in Time’ at Nirox in Johannesburg, responding to an annual call for artists at their exhibition space. The commission made it possible for me to create a four meter steel sculpture titled the “Mechanism”, the work was a larger than life presser foot and needle of a sewing machine. The work was paying homage to one of my greatest tools that I use to make my work.

MK: Who is your character Sophie that features so prominently in your work? She has your face yet her image speaks to the South African story of woman, of black lives and a stolen collective humanity.

MS: Sophie is an ambiguous hybridized figure from my imagination. She is also supplemented by family histories or stories from my matriarchal lineage. To begin with, her naming is derived from the process of naming black women by their employers who considered their ‘given names’ too difficult to pronounce. This is one of many reasons for why I gave her that name.

I considered that naming is equally a process of de-historicizing, removing, obliterating, and or defacing and individual. I regard this being a violent process. My Great Grandmother was named “Fanedi” at birth. This tongue twister of a name was removed from her birth certificate and she would then be referred to by the Christian name ‘Elsie’.

The other source that Sophie stems from is the fiction that furnishes dreams or aspirations of this matriarchal lineage. I attempted to take the place of each woman and project what may be available to them as ways of escaping servitude. The fiction is informed by both my ideas and reflections given to me by these women.

Sophie is the embodiment of the maid, the ubiquitous domesticated body described by W.E.B Du Bois in the book ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ who served as a warning within itself and the context that nourishes these personal/political but omnipresent battles. Sophie is me, my mother, my grandmother and great grandmother working to re-engineer our history.

MK: I personally see two concepts in your Sophie character. The being of a woman in domestic garb reimagined in Victorian dress. Her agency, her dreams, a corporealized visualization in statuesque beauty. A black body one step closer to her mistress. Her story reminds me of Fanon’s Black skin white mask chapter ‘The Woman of Color and the White Man’ where for the character of Capecia her ascension into white society could be achieved through a white husband. For the character of Sophie it is being attained through clothing as a means of getting closer to white society. Both characters could be unfairly judged as suffering from an inferiority complex but I would argue that both show the contradictions of agency in what it means to be a black woman under a colonial maze.

MS: Sophie’s aspirations do not lie in wanting to be anything (i.e. white woman) other than what she is. She is a black woman and a mother. Sophie’s desires are located in an elsewhere space or dream space, the material objects of her desires are illusive and can only remain as dream objects. Closing her eyes is the only way to concretize them. Perhaps her desires can be described as ‘envious’, an adjective which is committed to attaining freedom in response to a context wherein freedom is denied materially. The dresses hybridize a different identity by forging the blue fabric that usually makes workers overalls with the suggested form of a Victorian dress. With this combination an alternative maid’s uniform is created, and symbolically attempting to transcend beyond the dichotomy set up by the racial ideology of the colonial and apartheid gaze. The women in my family have not responded to describing themselves as inferior, but present to me the possibility of multiplicity. Sophie attempts to disempower that constructed dichotomy.

MK: The second Sophie is woman overwhelmed by her once emancipatory garb. What was once Victorian luster depicted by the previous Sophie has transformed itself into malignant colonial nightmare? She is overwhelmed. Her face now overshadowed, her features fighting to make themselves seen or has she just give up to that fact that she will forever be locked in her own materiality. Does this work serve as a warning to choose our tools well lest they end up oppressing our own selves?

MS: With the body of work ‘The Purple shall Govern’, I push and strive towards an abstract space of emotions. I engage with contemporary fears and desires referencing as a starting point a historical event. The Purple shall govern was a slogan coined by the people in 1989 after they had been sprayed by the apartheid police, who laced their water cannons with purple dye to identify them after the teargas, gun smoke and dust had settled. This opens up ideas that are less representational and more abstract. The work engages with anger, violent reactions and a response to the bewildering apartheid and colonial after taste.

MK: I am also seeing two major themes in your work, domestic work and Victorian aspirations. Two opposing worlds which for South Africa has a major significance especially in relation to what it means to be both female and situated within the (continued) Apartheid. Within such a white supremacist space where Victorian dress still has major symbolism to those who would still revere a colonial past. The Victorian dress crudely representing white woman and the domestic dress crudely representing the black woman. In your works do you see these two words as cohabitating under the white supremacist masculine with Sophie being able to perform such heroisms as in your work depicting her on a life size horse or with arms flayed with staffing “putting a spell on the you”. Do you see the relationship as one that is toxic with one feeding on the other or is the story not as simple as “black and white”.

I find inspiration in women who work hard, juggling between being objects of servitude and being women. I find there is little room left to celebrate them and Sophie’s complexities become an aperture to contrast, contradict and challenge a mono-narrative. I recently listened to Chimanmanda Ngozi Adichie issue a warning which she called ‘the danger of the single story’, what I found valuable about this is that in navigating through their lives these women had agency and they expressed it outside their context of being exploited and used. They raised kids, had husbands and lived.

MK: Do South Africans who engage with your work respond to it differently to your viewers abroad? Has your work, instead, taken on a common understanding in how it has been received? One of the biggest contradictions can stem from the artists intention which can act in contradiction with how their audiences read their work. Are artist ethically responsible for work that speaks to their viewer, if so, does this mean that they have to carefully curate their work to suite their viewers?

MS: I find that the open-endedness of art allows viewers to engage with the work from any direction. The audience comes to the work with baggage and the combination of that visual and sensory experience can be fruitful. I do not try to fit the work to cater for an audience for I believe that the processes of making have their own integrity. The audiences have not determined what I make.

I have been on various residencies and with each one I have found suitable shifts in my work; the contexts have nurtured experimentation which I have welcomed. What has been interesting is the universal image of the black female which tends to be based on stereotypes, but with these images there are slight shifts and difference. I made a work titled ‘a conversation with Madame C.J Walker’, wherein I found an overlap of her story with my mother’s. I had been on a residency in New York during Black History Month in the US. Ms. Walker had found her wealth after slavery by making hair straightening cream. The concoction made her the first black female millionaire in the 1920’s. Although my mother is not a millionaire, she worked in a hair salon as a teenager which encouraged her to open up various small businesses when she left for Johannesburg. Their entrepreneurial ventures became the door to actualizing a freedom.

There is a universal relating to the work as the institutions of apartheid, colonialism or slavery where centered on limiting the black female body in all the possible forms. The work often opens imaginative possibilities of how to think of this body.

MK: My understanding of Sophie and what she represents would often be in conflict with Mary’s understandings but such, I ask the reader, should not be shied away from but rather fully engaged with. My discussion with Mary reflects the various interpretations on what it means to experience art, experience blackness as art and also the image of black in art. Such difference represented the diversity in what it means to engage with black thought and those who inspire its ideas.

Keep up to date with Mary’s work through her Instagram. You can also follow her on Facebook.

Editorial image credits

Photography: Brett Rubin

Styling: Jamal Nxedlana

Hair & Make up: Orli Meiri

Image 1:

Mary wears a gillet by Black Coffee, accessories from The Source and a Khanga head wrap.

Image 2:

Mary wears dress by Black Coffee, headpiece by Qba Nkosi, boots & accessories from The Source.

10 August 2016
Joshua Williams – Space, Movement, Memory

Joshua Williams is a young Cape Town artist who works in painting, photography and sculpture. His focus on space and walls has a subtle, but potent, political relevance to contemporary South Africa. The following conversation with Bubblegum Club is accompanied with an exclusive photo-essay provided by Williams.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself- how you became an artist, and what creators and experiences have influenced you?

I have always had an interest in the visual which carried me through my school days and extended to studying at Michaelis School of Fine Art. Art allows me to explore and attempt to understand my surroundings. All my accumulated experiences influenced me to this point of exploration and understanding.

Creators that influence me would be firstly God, then my parents and my family members and those that came before me. They are my true inspiration. The image and object makers who explore, engage, interrogate and play should be an influence to all of us.

Your work focuses a lot on texture and detail. What is it about close details of surfaces that captures your imagination?

In order to answer the question I will provide a brief background of my process. Most of the surfaces I photograph, and the close details, are part of larger surfaces. I either use pre-existing walls as a visual reference or construct my own. I always work large when producing these surfaces. I find this to be natural way of working with cement as a material.

Walls themselves encapsulate people within spaces or exclude them. They act as markers of space and power by demarcating a group, a class, a culture. I find myself reproducing them realistically as I experience them. But as I look closer at the surfaces, particular parts of the surfaces have specific movements embedded in them. It is this movement of the surfaces which captures my imagination, as it eludes to other things embedded within the wall. Like residues, scars, wounds and traces. The subtle nuances in walls- parts that are smooth, rough, decayed, painted or raw. By extracting them from a larger whole, I convey an abstract impression of my engagement with the surface.

Spaces evoke different feelings and different experiences for everyone. My interest in the spaces is to do with the memory that is embedded in the surfaces. As we move through spaces we leave a trace behind. When occupying a space there is always evidence of movement in the spaces. If the walls are kept in good condition it says something. And if the walls are not kept it says something.

Another theme seems to be waste and abandoned spaces. How did you come to be interested in these types of spaces, and what do you think their artistic significance is?

I find that to be a particular reading of my work, as I have not considered it as specific interest before. Rather, it’s something that is always there. It is not something which I engage with by choice but much rather am confronted with. These abandoned spaces exist in the periphery. They have either been abandoned by choice or are not engaged with. For example, District Six. This site has been vacant for some time. Its condition says something about our current time. To me the vacant land itself becomes its own monument for District Six. The memory site of District Six has become a monument of waste and abandonment.

What is wasted and what is abandoned reveals something about the current condition. As we consume we discard. As we focus on our consumption we neglect the discarded. Something is discarded by choice. It is deemed by the person or by a group of people to be of no use or no value, and therefore becomes abandoned.

Do you see your visual themes of waste and abandonment as having a wider social or political meaning?

I think there is social and political meaning in most things. For example, another symptom of our condition is the Rhodes Must Fall movement. As an Arts practitioner, I must engage with the movement. But this engagement doesn’t mean only focusing on the politics of institutional violence, systemic oppression and marginalised voices. It also means engaging with how events have impacted on art. And the reality is that art has suffered. This movement was initiated through art. A statue at the University of Cape Town had human faeces thrown at. Already within this dialogue, we are alerted to human waste used as a tool. Subsequently the statue was removed, and has become waste. It was treated with the same regard as it was initially engaged with.

Fast track to two months ago… as the student movement has progressed Shackville emerged. This protest or demonstration consisted of a shack being erected close to where the statue was removed, in response to a student housing crisis. Shackville was a way to confront the periphery and situate it in the centre of RMF and UCT. Certain events transpired which resulted in the shack being demolished and removed. Paintings were burnt. So it is clear that not only has art itself become wasted and abandoned but monuments, protests and demonstrations were abandoned. My understanding is that of the strategy of the protesters was to use waste as a tactic to abandon monuments. Later protestation and demonstration itself wasted art. While Shackville itself was abandoned through force, violence and criminalization.

Currently UCT is in the process of cleansing and sanitizing its Arts collection. This is a response to the student movement. The students decided the art was waste and now the committee is in the process of abandoning more art.

Waste and abandonment are not so much themes as they are realities we currently faced with in the South African context.

What projects and work do you have planned for the future?

I am studying towards my Masters at the University of Cape Town. Therefore I will be continuing to engage with ideas of traces, residues, scars,wounds,cleansing, sanitizing of surfaces, walls, spaces, memory, images, objects, textures, details, waste, abandonment and the realities of spaces, memory, demonstrations, protests, institutional systemic and symbolic violence.

I hope that in future the pre-1994 generation and the post 1994 generation will understand each other. The pre 1994 generation should engage with why my current “colour-blind”, “born-free” and “RMF” generation is destroying art and monuments without simply criminalizing them.

Ultimately we should understand the role of art, expectations of art and its functions in spaces. As we move further away from 1994 as a marker in space and time we need to understand the present and further re-evaluate what is useful and functional for the current moment.

14 April 2016