Bubblegum Club

Tag: sound

  • Theatrum Botanicum // the botanical world as a stage for politics

    Theatrum Botanicum // the botanical world as a stage for politics

    In a moment where debates about land are at their peak in South Africa, Uriel Orlow‘s Theatrum Botanicum on show at Pool Space in Johannesburg fertilizes ideas around the botanical world as a stage for politics through film, photography, installation and sound. This ongoing project follows the trajectory of most of his work; research-based contemplations with collaborative methodologies, focusing on specific locations and histories, combining various visual evocations with layered narratives.

    The beginning of the project was inspired by an accidental visit to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. Struck by the fact that most of the plant labels were in English and Latin, Orlow began to question what this means in South Africa where there are 11 official languages. This connects to a colonial history of exploration and conquest. Through this process botanists from Europe “discovered” new plants, and proceeded to name and classify them according to European systems of organisation. Through forcefully exporting this methodology for categorization and understanding, it displaced indigenous knowledge systems and views on the world. Orlow seeks to question this forced application of taxonomic methods, and in so doing unearths issues around assumed universality, colonialism and its legacies, plant migration, and how examining the botanical offers insight into labour, race relations, pleasures and sustenance within South Africa’s history.

    The significance of the work is twofold. Firstly, framing plants as databases, organic stores of information. Juicy, fleshy memory banks that can testify to South Africa’s political past and present, and offer alternative entry points from which we can assess and think about history and politics. Secondly, Orlow’s work ascribes plants a form of agency, presenting them as active participants in the link between nature and humans.

    Photography by Austin Malema

    The project offers encounters and observations that are gateways to meditations on the above. Grey, Green, Gold forms part of Theatrum Botanicum, and is up in Gallery 1989 at Market Photo Workshop. The Fairest Heritage, a single channel video piece within the exhibition, perfectly exemplifies the larger aims of the project. Here Orlow, through his extensive research in the library of the botanical garden, found films that were commissioned in 1963 to commemorate the anniversary of founding Kirstenbosch by documenting its history.

    The film’s main characters – scientists and visitors – are all white, with the only people of colour featured being those who worked on the gardens. Orlow collaborated with artist and performer Lindiwe Matshikiza, who inserts herself in front of these film, viscerally speaking back to their contents. A performative contestation to this archive, placing herself into the frame as a protagonist existing outside of the frameworks of passivity and labour for people of colour created within the archival footage. This work also highlights that plants are not neutral and passive, with flowers attached to ideas around nationhood, segregation and liberation.

    To accompany the work, Orlow teamed up with editor Shela Sheikh on a book that catalogues the different works, but also connects with the research that is the seed from which project continues to grow. Writers were invited to contribute essays that do not necessarily respond to the works directly, but contemplate the thematics that come to the fore through their presence. Other artists with work relating to art, nature and history were also invited to share their work in the book.

    Both exhibition spaces are pollinated with works that share the entanglements between plants and us across time and space. Go inhale the fragrance of latent histories until 21 October at Gallery 1989, and 3 November at Pool Space.

  • anticlockwise Ingwembe – on the hunt for languages that question space and text

    anticlockwise Ingwembe – on the hunt for languages that question space and text

    Tsholofelo Seleke, Siyanda Marrengane and Refiloe Namise are the young, female artists who make up the collective anticlockwise INGWEMBE. The collective has an interest in “cultural objects”, including the wooden spoon (ingwembe). This is an object that is central to their creative and artistic practice, made clear from its presence in their collective name. When asked to unpack their name, the collective presented me with an explanation that resembles the format of a dictionary definition that combined the various associations attributed to the wooden spoon:

    *ingwembe/lesokwane: a woman’s tool, a tool that instills discipline, a signifier of power- of an ‘invisible’ power, a symbol of inferiority, of domestication, mixing and re-mixing.

    There is an immediate link between the word anticlockwise and ingwembe. Anticlockwise brings to mind the idea of movement, flow and direction. Combined with ingwembe, one is able to imagine the rhythmic movement made when using a wooden spoon for cooking. The prefix ‘anti’ makes those who encounter their work aware of the fact that they are working against the flow and rhythm of institutions, texts and spaces that deny the presence of people of colour, particularly women of colour. Their work is what they refer to as “coll[activism]”; a recognition of the importance of collaborative creation and activism. This is also a concise way to present the operation of their art practice.

    “We are questioning the use of space- how a space is used, can be used, how it was previously used, imagined, how far it can be occupied, in various ways. This interest is often sparked by contexts, and how we read objects in different spaces. We explore these interrogations through sound, visual imagery, objects, texts and performance (performance-based installations/installation-based performance). Anything that can be experienced (seen, read, smelt, heard, felt, touched) can be a text. We enjoy the possibilities of being more…and see the importance of learning, teaching, sharing knowledges in ways that can be read differently.”

    In this exploration they are also on the hunt for a language that exists outside of the art world, one which is more “public”. This language can be seen, heard, felt, smelt and spoken, and is more fluid. When asked how they would recognise this language, anticlockwise expressed that “You will know it when you see it” stating that “this language is continuously being recreated.”

    Their first event Noma Yini: Round 1 was the closing of an event that was held at NGO (Nothing Gets Organised) in March 2016. The project was a collaboration with Eastside Projects (based in Birmingham) and facilitated by Gabi Ngcobo. It was based on the idea of a circuit, as well as the exchange and sourcing of materials around Nugget Square in Jeppestown. Participation took the form of a workshop and the making of portable chairs.

    Having tasted the stress and excitement of creating an event, anticlockwise took on another – OK’salayo. It began as the celebration of a friend’s recent job, and then transformed into a full on party, with a ‘silent’ landlord offering them a space at a former panel beaters. There is a OK’salayo 2.0 in the making.

    At the moment the collective is working on the idea of an experimental school called ama-fly-by-nights. “It is everywhere, yet nowhere, and it exists within us”. This school focuses on forms of knowledge production that are open and allows for narratives to be expressed in various languages (oral, visual, sonic, etc.)

    Follow anticlockwise INGWEMBE on Instagram to keep up with their work.

  • Artist Wanja Kimani’s interrogations of private and public power

    Artist Wanja Kimani’s interrogations of private and public power

    Kenyan-born artist Wanja Kimani has a visual practice that strings together stories and visual histories which comment on the idea of home, displacement, trauma, memories and imaginations.

    While imposing elements of her own life in public spaces, she occupies the positions of both narrator and character. This is evident in the various media she uses to construct her work, including installation, performances, text, film, textiles and sound.

    One of her recent works Expectations, a collaboration with Annabel McCourt, is a performance that was presented at Dak’Art 2018 – Biennale of Contemporary African Art. It was performed in response to Annabel McCourt’s Electric Fence. The work dives into the complexities surrounding borders, immigration, race, as well as private and public power, and how these forms of power are constructed. These larger themes are interwoven with explorations of mortality as well as personal and physical boundaries.

    In the video of the performance online, the first few seconds create the impression of eyes opening after a long sleep, with shots of lights hanging from the ceiling and wire fencing coming in and out of focus. The voice of the narrator recalls memories from a childhood, presumably the childhood of the character (played by Kimani) that appears on screen. As the narrator goes on to explain how walls will come separate the children mentioned in the recollection of memories, the viewer sees Kimani maneuvering between wire fences and throwing rocks and bricks on top of each other, as if intending to build a wall or to examine what remains of the structure these bricks once constituted.

    The poetic narration speaks of silencing, leaving home, crossing borders, and the traumas that accompany this. The interaction between the words and what the viewer sees create a heaviness, the relevance of which becomes apparent as the story of Charles Wootton is told. The narrator shares how Wootton has died as a result of a racially motivated crime in Liverpool in 1919. He was thrown into the water at Kings Dock, and as he swam, trying to lift himself out of the water, he was pelted by bricks until he sank. Kimani writes his name on a blackboard during the performance. She then goes on to write down the names of many other victims of hate crimes. In this way the victims are mourned and celebrated at the same time.

  • FAKA // intersectional body politics and the collapsing of creative boundaries

    FAKA // intersectional body politics and the collapsing of creative boundaries

    FAKA, the duo made up of Desire Marea and Fela Gucci explores a combination of mediums including sound, performance, video and photography. These are the tools they use to unpack themes central to their own experiences, resulting in the construction of a low-fi, eclectic aesthetic that communicates the liberation and reimagination of queer bodies.

    Their collective name FAKA is descriptive of the impact of their work. Their presence is not a faint permeation or seeping into the consciousness of audiences. Instead, it is a direct insertion into ones frame of reference.

    Inviting audiences into their ritualistic, celebratory performances with seductive looks and welcoming hand gestures, their aim is to humanise all faces whose presence signify underrepresented realities. Their work moves beyond that of a performance duo, and shifts into the realm of a cultural movement. Their existence lives beyond gallery spaces and stages, penetrating coded environments with their online presence through sound, video and social media. FAKA have created their own hybridised language to express intersectional body politics. Their work engenders the creation of safe spaces for black, queer, gender non-conforming or trans people to reflect on their own experiences and grow in community.

    As a duo FAKA commemorates and contributes to “third world aesthetics”, making a demand for this to receive large scale validation in local and international creative cultures. European audiences, and more recently Australian audiences, have been drawn to their ancestral gqom sounds as well as the unapologetic lyrical and performative transmission of their own stories and that of Black Queer Culture in South Africa.

    Disrupting cis-heteronormative notions of existence, their work is an amalgamation of music and art, collapsing the idea that artists need to focus on and be recognized within one specific discipline.

    Their collective manifesto can be summarised by words from a Facebook post about their 2016 song ‘Isifundo Sokuqala’ – “Izitabane zaziwe ukuthi zibuya ebukhosini” (Let it be known, that queerness is a thing of the Gods), paired with the statement that the song is an “ode to all the powerful dolls who risk their lives every day by being visible in an unsafe world. This is a celebration of those who have fearlessly embraced themselves. Because when your identity is the cause of your suffering in the world, you begin to fear the very source of your greatness in the world.”