Tag: Turbine Art Fair

Chris Soal’s First Solo Exhibition – ‘Orbits of Relating’ Opens at NO END Contemporary

“We think we are liberated by individualism, but in reality we’ve given up so much power. People are so caught up in the nuances of their own personal realm that they’ve lost real civic relationships with one another. We’ve lost that collective power.” – Andrea Zittel

Recent PPC Imaginarium winner Chris Soal is back from his residency and presents to Johannesburg art lovers his latest body of work in the form of a solo exhibition. Orbits of Relating is Chris’s first solo exhibition as well as his first participation in a show since graduating with an Honours degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand.

‘Climb into someone else’s skin and walk around in it’

His journey with NO END Contemporary began early in 2017 when the gallery invited him to be a part of the group show, What’s In It For You. Since this initial opportunity Chris has exhibited in three other group shows by the gallery and was one of their featured artist at the 2017 Turbine Art Fair.

Orbits of Relating has been in stages of development for over a year and a half, the artist shares with me. The show’s artworks which consists in its near entirety of thousands of toothpicks strategically packed to morph into shape, texture and sculptural works were all born from an initial idea that was formulated in a restaurant.

‘To know that one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep’

“I was sitting at a restaurant with some friends and picked up the toothpick container at the end of the meal, and the pattern in which the toothpicks had arranged themselves, fascinated me and I took a photo.” Albeit his initial fascination by the pattern the toothpicks fell into that day in the restaurant, Chris dismissed toothpicks as a material to create art with. This early dismissal stemmed from the disposable life of a toothpick, usually serving one purpose in our society and thereafter immediately discarded – “…that little voice said, “no one cares about toothpicks.”

Using the group show 2K with NO END, as a platform for early experimentation with the medium he created two small toothpick based works. Impressed by what the medium had to offer, Chris continued creating with toothpicks.

“It’s ironic because my initial intention was to replicate the specific pattern which I saw that day in the restaurant, however I failed. I couldn’t get the toothpicks to sit the way I wanted and in that failure something spectacular emerged.”

The works in the exhibition were created during Chris’ recent residency hosted by the Southern African Foundation For Contemporary Art (SAFFCA) held in Knysna.

‘If only we could suspend disbelief’

Chris’ words to eager art supporters wanting to attend the exhibition is that they should not come with expectations because “If they come expecting grandeur they’ll leave disappointed. My work utilises debris and objects on the margins of our society, and it hinges on the fact that these objects have become invisible to our eyes once they serve their purpose.”

Chris’ work relies on audience engagements, conceptual and methodological cornerstones to his practise. In a world of much superficiality and impersonal interaction he saw an opportunity to create work that was visceral, engaging and acts to affirm his viewer’s presence and existence.

On the topic of the titles for his artworks Chris explains that his aim was to give the abstract or formal work that he creates a relatable nature. He regards his titles as windows and/or entry points into his work. It acts as an opening for his viewer into something more than what the eye can perceive.

‘Awkward moments in a potentially romantic encounter’

Chris’ work which has been called political in nature can be regarded as such as it addresses “polis” derived from politics and meaning citizenry. His work acts as an affirmation to his viewers that they exist and have value. This is communicated through the use of materials and titles in particular, that they exist in relation to others. Chris explains this as being a part of a complex system of aesthetic producers and consumers.

Aesthetic and political value for the works are derived from Chris’ deliberate use of capitalism driven debris. The point of relation that is encouraged with his work exists between his viewers and themselves to the work of art, and through material transcendence that goes beyond its singular shape. “These are simply inroads for further critical contemplation, not a message which can be written down in literary form…”.

Orbits of Relating will be on display at NO END Contemporary from 24 May – 23 June 2018.

Have a look at the Facebook event for more info.

‘The Viscosity of Light’

23 May 2018
Turbine Art Fair 2017 // The Red Edifice of Cultural Display

An iconic red roof rests on brick and mortar in the midst of the bustling city. A mammoth giant. The glass and steel structure extends into lofty space. Flooded with light. The refurbished 1920s power station is a vessel of display for burgeoning young artists, waiting for works to be catapulted into contemporary collections. The concrete floor lays way for the labyrinth of exhibits.

The fifth annual fair took place from the 13^th-16^th of July at the historic Turbine Hall in Newtown. In excess of 50 galleries and exhibits from around South Africa participated in the show. The agenda of the fair is twofold; first, to provide a platform for young artist and galleries to showcase their work in the competitive art market and second, to foster a culture of investing in art and cultural production. TAF aims to appeal to a broad art market – the ceiling of sales for each artwork was set at R50 000 and bellow to ensure that investment in art is more easily accessible.

Screenshot from trailer of ‘Falling’ by Sethembile Msezane

A personal highlight was the affecting video installation Falling by Sethembile Msezane – who was awarded the 2016 TAF & Sylt Emerging Artist Residency Award (TASA). The piece was situated in the cavernous basement space. Pixels projected into an alcove depicted the artist’s body engaged in a restless sleep of ritual practice. Falling explores notions of constructed mythology on the continent and iconographic ties to political unrest. An overtone of her practice is the absence of monumentalisation regarding the black female body in public space.

The curated site-specificity of this work created an interesting juxtaposition to the monumental scale of the building it was hosted within. Throughout the fair, the edifice seemed to have an enlivened character of its own. Spaces like TAF aid in creating cultural value through constructing platforms for young artists like Sethembile and her contemporaries.

Bambo Sibiya, ‘Boy 2’

Muntu-Vilakazi, ‘Untitled 4’

Sheekha Kalan, ‘Untitled I’

20 July 2017
The unfiltered confessional and emotive resistance of Banele Khoza’s Temporary Feelings

Banele Khoza is undoubtedly an emerging South African artist to watch; before he had even left university, the Tate panel in Africa had begun to acquire his work and at the age of 22 he holds multiple accolades, including being selected for Lizamore & Associates’ Johannes Stegmann Mentorship Programme, where he is currently under the guidance of Colbert Mashile. Khoza has just completed exhibiting work at the Turbine Art Fair and recently opened up his first solo-exhibition titled Temporary Feelings.

Temporary Feelings is a personal confessional, a diary left open to the audience, containing unfiltered observations of all the messy, confused, and distracted surges of desire and fear that humans emit between themselves. This exhibition pries open all the awkward dissonance of a hyper media-ted existence through a brazenly disproportioned and unedited amalgamation of digital-traditional techniques, refracting multiple ‘inappropriate’ colour associations and lines that cannot contain. We all get lonely but we’re not supposed to talk about it… this work offers up a body you can touch and lovingly unhinges these taboos of emotion and of vulnerable masculinity, in order to open a door that the complexity of a person could actually appear through. Unspectacular isolation is rendered remarkable through a subversion of superficial, representational humanity- with the collected articulations blushing in the gap between the immensity of what people feel and the constraints of what they’re ‘supposed to’ exhibit.

What happens to all the ambivalent, contradictory or non-cathartic emotions that accumulate and reverberate inside of someone intuitive? Temporary Feelings seems to scrawl a suggestion through all of the smudged and spectral recollections of subtle interactions, played-out through multiple gazes, simultaneously harbouring and rejecting clichés like ‘love at first sight’. Desire, as it relates to the lost or the unobtainable, seems to haunt Khoza’s work but this also seems to manifest in a palpable tenderness towards the carefully-unspoken longing of strangers. The audience is intimately submersed in the narrative as another removed observer, bustling between all the isolated darlings, and this radically dizzies the possibilities for clean perspectives, throws into question all the politics of inclusion and exclusion, of looking and being looked at; can it cut like a knife… can it burn… can you recognise?

If human interactions are replete with complex tensions, so is this exhibition; the empowering affirmation of fleeting emotions pulls against the way the work permanently archives and against the skeleton that remains long after it was meant to be buried… even ‘naïve cuteness’ stares out a question of what that regard could reveal in terms of interactive power dynamics. This terrain is an honest and emotive resistance to regulative impositions and it unembarrassedly logs-in a thousand times, in order to channel multiple influences through an entirely idiosyncratic aesthetic. Even if you’ve got your brave-face on, you’ll want to develop a relationship with this work.

You can stalk Banele Khoza on Instagram, Tumblr or Facebook. Temporary Feelings runs until 4 September at the Pretoria Art Museum.

2 August 2016