Bubblegum Club

Tag: video

  • Russell Bruns – Shane Malone and The Art World Hustle

    Russell Bruns – Shane Malone and The Art World Hustle

    The Instagram of Shane Malone is a portrait of a delusional hustler. Permanently dressed in a suit, shades and a gold chain, Malone presents himself as a well-connected European art agent- always on the move, always making deals. But the evidence on his own timeline suggests a very different story. He awkwardly exhibits photographs in subways and in front of bemused passengers on cramped economy class flights. A picture of him with a poster of Cristiano Ronaldo and Robert Lewandowski makes the outrageous claim that the soccer superstars “requested a private viewing before the World Cup and I managed to squeeze them in”. And yet in the midst of all these fantastical boasts, he only lists one actual client in his illustrious stable- the South African visual artist Russell Bruns.

    Fortunately, rather than a real person living a clearly fabricated life in public, this gaudy character is a creation of Bruns himself. Trained as a lens-based artist, his practice to date has used photography and video to, as he puts it, “defamilarise everyday life”. Projects like Candyland, an exploration of the unspoken prejudices of South African academia, revealed the hidden ideological structures we take for granted as we go about our days.

    But with Shane Malone, he has inverted his usual practice, using his everyday life as the character to defamiliarise photography itself. The crass salesman persona was inspired by past personal experience. “As long as I can remember I’ve been involved with some kind of selling, from door to door sales when I was a kid, to being heavily involved with an evangelical church in my teens selling the gospel to anyone and everyone”.

    The mixed emotions produced by such experience has been a fertile creative ground to explore. “Initially the roles would terrify me. However, I eventually grew to learn from them as they provided me with this strange, almost half-speed, way of seeing and engaging with my surroundings. These observations would feed into my photographic practice, but I never considered engaging with the performative nature of sales as a device up until now”. More specifically he’s found himself inspired by the often uncomfortable experience of having to sell himself as an artist, and the cocktail of entitlement and self-loathing this inspires.

    In the spirit of defamiliarisation, I also “interviewed” Shane himself.

    Shane, do you feel like you are the art equivalent of influencers and disrupters like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk?

    No, I think Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are the tech equivalents of Shane Malone.

    What is the Shane Malone philosophy?

    Sell or be Sold.

    How do you choose your exclusive client list?

    By looking at their financial statements.

     

    Through this gauche mouthpiece, Bruns shows us how truly bizarre our cultural obsession with selling ourselves has become.

    Keep up with Shane on Instagram.

  • Using allegory as a conceptual and visual device with photographer Nydia Blas

    Using allegory as a conceptual and visual device with photographer Nydia Blas

    Artist Nydia Blas uses photography, collage, books and video in her exploration of lived experience, history and the limits of social constructs – specifically from her point of view as a Black woman and mother. Her work also touches on unpacking sexuality as well as understandings and expressions of intimacy.

    Using allegory as a conceptual and visual device in her photography, Blas webs together signifiers and articulations of value, power and circumstance through the Black feminine lens. She presents counter narratives, destabilizing stereotypes, and her work becomes testimonies of alternative spaces and identities created by the people she photographs. In doing so she delicately maps out the relationship between resilience and resistance.

    She is a recipient of the 2018 Light Work Grant, a photography program that supports artists working in Central New York. Her work is also featured in the book MFON: A Journal of Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, a commemorative publication that is committed to representing a collective voice of women photographers of African descent with the inaugural issue featuring 100 women photographers across the African diaspora.

    Her series The Girls Who Spun Gold was inspired by a number of factors, the most prominent being a group of women she met while working at a community centre before embarking on her MFA degree. Blas feels that their meeting was a serendipitous moment, as at the time she had just become a single mother of two children, and the women she met were at the age when Blas last remembers feeling a child. The decision to photograph these women came from the desire to maintain a connection, but soon into the process she felt the need to include herself in the series. “The result is a series of images that work to complicate the notion of what it means to be a girl, a teenager, and a mother. I want the subjects to reclaim themselves, for themselves. I want the images to speak to this intricate process that is painful, messy, beautiful, joyful, etc,” Blas expressed in an interview with Strange Fire Collective.

    Her latest series, Whatever You Like, sees Blas capture the people she photographs with an honesty that makes the viewer feel connected to each person. The work aims to unfold the ways that young women of colour learn to reclaim themselves for their own gratification, attempting to undo seeing themselves through the eyes of others. The simplicity of the images creates the feeling that these are moments of reflective self engagement that Blas was invited to monumentalize.

    Through the above mentioned series one can see how Blas takes on moments of transition, learning and reclaiming, allowing the people she photographs to take ownership of the image through their strong presence.

  • Multimedia artist Rehema Chachage on rituals of survival and subversion

    Multimedia artist Rehema Chachage on rituals of survival and subversion

    Multimedia artist from Dar es Salaam, Rehema Chachage uses video and sculptural installations as her chosen mediums to communicate her own experiences, and those of other women, casting a light on rituals of survival and subversion.

    After her father passed away she began to interrogate ideas around inheritance in Tanzanian societies, seeing the most valuable inheritance from her father was his intellectual work. Her father, a University of Dar es Salaam sociology professor worked briefly in South Africa and had some struggles which he expressed an extended essay. This resonated with her while she was studying towards her fine art degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT. She felt like a stranger, an outsider while living in Cape Town. Her earlier work channeled these feelings of social alienation, allowing her to critically analyse themes related to identity and (up)rootedness.

    The work she has produced since graduating looks at rituals as valuable tools for reading into social norms and tensions, closely examining those that speak to women’s identities, gender relations and subversion.

    ‘Mshanga’

    A powerful series of works was born out of her time spent in Gorée island in Senegal where she came across a text that explained how pregnant slaves were punished. “They were given 29 lashes but before they were whipped the slave owners would dig a hole for them to rest their pregnant bellies in. So whilst they were delivering their punishment, they were also protecting future slave power. This stood out for me. The 29 lashes is not really a ritual but I see it as an adapted ritual, because it was an everyday reality for these woman,” Chachage explained in an interview with Urban Africans. This, along with the experiences of her mother and grandmother, inspired the idea to explore 29 ways women can use different females rituals rooted in Africa to survive and subvert power in patriarchal societies.

    Mshanga produced in 2012 is an example of this work. Delving into the nuances in gender, generation and poverty, it tells the story of her great grandmother Orupa Mchikirwa. As a woman who had to look after many children and grandchildren, she would often sacrifice her own food, leaving her feeling hungry. To avoid being consumed by her hunger she would tightly wrap a cloth called ‘Mshanga’ around her, squeezing her stomach.

    “…the stomach, for our bodies, is the centre of equilibrium, and normally loosens up when we are hungry. So, in order to retain strength (when hungry), it helps to have it tightly and securely tied. Traditionally, in Tanzania, women tie ‘Mshanga’ (as ritual) around their tummies when they are bereaved. And, historically, in some traditional African societies, the rite of passage from boyhood to manhood, involves a ritual that simulates warfare. Boys enter into the forest through a gate, expected to return through the same gate as men carrying with them ‘the secrets of the forest’ in which one of them is sacrificed. In the meantime, every woman with a son in the forest has to tie a ‘Mshanga’ around their bellies, hoping her son ‘returns’. If their sons return home safe, they will have a celebration with singing and cheering whereby the ‘Mshanga’ is untied. If the forest ‘swallows’ her son, the ‘Mshanga’ continues to prop the mother’s tummy as it helps the forest maintain the silence.”

    This explanation of her work from her website connects the series to her exploration of rituals for survival and subversion used by women. It also highlights the significance of the mshanga being the cloth used by her great grandmother, carrying with it a heaviness as a sign of suffering.

    Chachage’s work PART III: NANKONDO (2017) created in collaboration with her mother, who provides textual responses to her visuals, speaks to her interest in intergenerational conversations, as well as looking at sexuality and gender. “In this work, we explore African spirituality, following a story of my great grandmother, Nankondo, whose mother disappeared a long time ago, and she is believed to have been captured and taken into slavery. The religious fanatics in her village believed that she is to blame for her own capture, her being a woman of ‘low morals’ due to the fact that she used to sell beer to men until late hours,” Chachage explains in her artist statement. The work existed as an installation, a shrine created for Nankondo, made up of a video taken during a prayer session, as well as a projection of a letter written by Chachage’s mother on to a bath filled with water, surrounded by candles. “The work as a whole tries to make sense of the self-loath and spiritual abyss as displayed by modern day religion.”

    Chachage’s choice to explore 29 different rituals performed by women is a subversion of its reference, speaking to the resilience that women embody, making their stories prominent narratives in history (herstory).

    Check out Chachage’s website as well as her Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to keep up with her work.

  • Amarachi Nwosu – Dismantling Stereotypes and Blurring Racial Lines with Cinema and Photography

    Amarachi Nwosu – Dismantling Stereotypes and Blurring Racial Lines with Cinema and Photography

    Amarachi Nwosu is a Nigerian-American artist currently based in Japan. She creates works within a multitude of mediums which include video, photography and text. With her lens, a visual exploration of contemporary African identity and diversity takes place acting as both a representation and celebration of Blackness. “…If women of colour are not behind the lens then we are less likely to see women of colour cast in front of the lens and only through representation can we truly shape change in the spaces that need it so much.”

    Amarachi creates her work in various locations around the world. Her acute awareness of different energies and cultural representations within different regions of the world has led her to make creative choices in her shooting process that highlight the unique qualities of a specific region. Such decisions are discernible through her choice of colours, location, models and even the team she chooses to work with on a project. The artist believes that this approach to her projects results in a visual representation that possesses several dimensions.

    Traversing between art, fashion and documentary photography a human connection between herself and the people she photographs is imperative to her practice. This connection is cherished by the artist as she believes that in photographing people, she is telling their story as much as she is telling her own.

    With an already established name and client list, Amarachi has created work for adidas Tokyo, Vice Japan, Highsnobiety and her most recent show-stopping credit, Black in Tokyo. Black in Tokyo is a short documentary by Amarachi depicting the experiences of five people of colour who have moved to Japan from Eritrea, the United States and Ghana.

    The film explores the challenges of being black in Tokyo while simultaneously taking a closer look at the experiential opportunities that have helped expats of colour build successful businesses, careers and relationships. The documentary forms a part of Melanin Unscripted, a platform Amarachi created to blur racial lines and dismantle stereotypes by revealing complex cultures and identities from around the world.

    Her practice inhibited within the space of fashion takes on a multifaceted approach where Amarachi frequently takes on up to three behind the scenes roles in one project. She often acts as the photographer, creative director and stylist on a shoot, considering every detail of a project instead of just purely focusing on composition.

    Amarachi is a multifaceted creative expressing the lived experiences of contemporary Africans all over the world through her lens. Her work aids in blurring racial lines and dismantling stereotypes through exposing complex identities and cultures all over the world. Amarachi’s work is then a visual manifesto that indicates to her viewer that African identity is not linear or one-sided, and that narratives surrounding Blackness are complex and diverse.

    Watch Black in Tokyo below:

  • 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.”

  • School of Anxiety // Processes of (Un)learning in Collaborative Art Praxis

    School of Anxiety // Processes of (Un)learning in Collaborative Art Praxis

    “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”

    ― Søren Kierkegaard

    The School of Anxiety (SoA) is positioned as a collaborative space of (un)learning. Conceptually derived from psychological notions of ‘anxiety’ and references the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s text The Concept of Dread (1844). However, it extends beyond the space of literary and conceptual theory into artistic practice. The project facilitator and Uganda-based curator and writer, Moses Serubiri believes that ‘subjective anxieties’ relate to the societal notion and process of ‘becoming someone’ He writes, “this project is about how to essentially refuse to take on the guilt of becoming a subject: whether this is a civilized, tribalized, politicized, and radicalized subject.”

    The first iteration of the SoA took place in Johannesburg during September last year. After an immersive experience of exploring spaces like ROOM gallery, Keleketla! and the Hector Pieterson Memorial Museum, a public panel entitled What to do with anxiety? ensued. It manifested as part of the Berlin Biennale’s public program I’m not who you think I’m not. The project positions itself as a space for (un-)learning, centred on the experience of subjective anxieties and the processes of “becoming”.

    Portrait of Nyakallo Maleke by Papa Shabani

    His praxis explores “meta-narratives and scholarly practices” – transcending the perceived boundaries of art. It often probes the activation of a network of people, focusing on forming conversation with those engaged in the process. “I think of my work as trying to engage beyond the field of art and with practices and disciplines that challenge our current understanding of art.” The participating artists include Awuor Onyango, Nyakallo Maleke and Sanyu Kiyimba-Kisaka. Their inter-disciplinary approaches span video, sculpture, theatre and poetry.

    The second event was hosted in Nairobi last month. The workshop was located in Uhuru Park – often a site for national rituals. Moses describes the dynamic tension between opposition and pressure groups as visible in the proximity to Nyayo House – government buildings and a detention centre, notoriously known as the ‘Nyayo House torture chambers’. In 1992, a group of Kenyan mothers staged a hunger strike to resolve the release of their sons who had been detained as political prisoners and protest for the restoration of democratic practice.

    Portrait of Sanyu Kiyimba-Kisaka by Zahara Abdul

    This historical event was the foundation for the public performance and second SoA iteration. Moses reflects that, “it was crucial that no-trace of the performance was left, because we were not aiming at re-authoring the actual space, but rather pursue symbolic gestures that would allow us to deepen our dialogue with historic anxiety.”

    He describes the synchronicities between each workshop as conceptually tied to an exploration of autopoiesis, mourning, and obsessional doubt, as well as, “becoming immersed into a whole new environment. For both iterations we have spent majority of the time visiting places, going to museums, talking to curators, artists, writers, and cooking and shopping. The project is as much about learning as it is about unlearning.” Not being bound to the pressure of giving art in exchange for some kind of financial remuneration, “we have been able to really have meaningful exchanges that avoid the system of regurgitating and reproducing oneself into a brand of some kind. I think that the SoA members have stepped out of their usual practices to engage other ways of ‘doing’ that have emerged through a conversation.”

    A third iteration and extension of SoA will take place in July 2018 during the 10th Berlin Biennale.

  • Medrar for Contemporary Art – A Platform for New Egyptian Artists

    Medrar for Contemporary Art – A Platform for New Egyptian Artists

    A series of summer workshops held at the faculty of Art Education at Helwan University in Egypt set in motion the coming together of art practitioners Dia Hamed and Mohamed Allam. Their collective effort was directed towards creating spaces and opportunities to show their work. This led to the founding of their non-profit independent organisation and gallery, Medrar for Contemporary Art aims to develop the art industry in Cairo by encouraging collaborations between artists locally and internationally. This is directed by the idea to build a form of collective intelligence that allows artists to have creative conversations and gain exposure to the art world. When asked about the importance of joint efforts in producing work, Dia explained that the arts scene in Cairo has been “…infused with individualistic approaches to creation, probably due to skill-based education systems. So we always try to organically encourage emerging artists to seek peers or mutual interests among local artists and others from abroad. Our educational programmes are always implying lateral methods of exchange.”

    Still from video titled “Impromptu: HG Masters on SB 13” on Medrar TV

    Expanding on their interest in documenting their own practice and its surroundings, Medrar started producing content for the web, aspiring to construct a full archive of artistic footage accessible online for researchers and educators. In February 2012 they began to broadcast their web-based channel Medrar TV. Reflecting on the role that documentation through video plays in audience engagement and preserving art, Dia explains that “video documentation enables [a] local audience to search back [to] what they might have missed [exhibitions and other events] and even have a closer insight on the artist himself, and reviews by others. In addition, video documentation gives access to a wide range of audiences that are distant from the events. We also perceive it as an act of conversation for the history of contemporary practices in the region that might get lost or badly archived by the practitioners themselves. Medrar TV also helps promote and highlight certain initiatives and movements locally and abroad by having all the content translated to…the English language.”

    Image from video at Marwan Elgamal’s solo show “A Green House”

    Located in the quiet living neighbourhood Garden City, the Medrar gallery is the headquarters for the organisational teams working on various projects.  With networking and exhibiting new artists being at the core of Medrar’s growth objectives, the organisation curates workshops, festivals and events. Most notably the Open Lab Egypt project which aims to promote the exploratory fusion of digital and electronic technologies to creative artwork that is diverse in form. Additionally, Medrar hosts the Cairo Video Festival: Video Art & Experimental films. A ten day festival that brings video-artists, curators and the public together to enjoy the screening of video art productions, artist talks and discussions about new media production.

    Medrar for Contemporary Art facilitates the creation of original and exciting new artwork through collaboration. It encourages experimental and interdisciplinary co-operation in order to push the contemporary art movement in Egypt forward. Making it more accessible to a worldwide audience. To learn more about these events follow Medrar for Contemporary Art on Facebook and watch Medrar TV here.

    Still from video titled “Impromptu: HG Masters on SB 13” on Medrar TV
  • Multimedia artist Ruth Angel Edwards on tracing and revealing the “sub” in culture.

    Multimedia artist Ruth Angel Edwards on tracing and revealing the “sub” in culture.

    Ruth Angel Edwards is a multimedia artist whose work explores the communication of ideology through pop culture, drawing from mainstream and subcultural youth movements both past and present. Within these, she looks at the ways audio and visual content are used to manipulate an audience and to disseminate information. This is especially apparent in her exhibition High Life/Petrification shown at the À CÔTÉ DU 69, which marked the end of her residency in Los Angeles, CA. In this exhibition, social detritus collected from the location reveals a mythologised Venice Beach as a “ritual site of pilgrimage, a space where diverse subcultural histories continue to make it a mecca for fans of alternative histories as well as touristic voyeurs.”

    Feminism, gender, collectivity and commodification are recurring themes. In particular, this brings to mind Edwards’ exhibition Enema Salvatore, held in Turin at the end of another art residency, showing new work at the Almanac Inn. The work questions the binary structures of western culture, the duality of good and bad. A cycle of ingestion, consumption, digestion, purification – and then finally – release, all explored through and within her own female body, whilst drawing external parallels to the “wellness/feel good” food industry. Hedonism, spectacle and rebellion are deconstructed and re-formed to create communicative and insightful immersive works.

    Edwards has been expanding on these themes in her most recent exhibition Wheel of the Year! EFFLUENT PROFUNDAL ZONE! commissioned by the Bonington Gallery as the first exhibition of 2018. An immersive installation invited the viewer to consider the inescapable cycles of waste and decay, a by-product of all our consumption, personal or material. Drawing clever parallels between overlapping ecologies – “from the futile pursuit of personal purification and ‘clean living’ to the increasingly rapid turnover of cultural content in the media and popular consciousness, to the wider perspective of the waste which is polluting our oceans, and threatening our very existence”– Edward’s makes the observation that the only difference is that of differing scale, and utilises art’s ability to evoke empathy and re-orient our often very narrow-minded subjectivities.

    Using video, audio, sculpture, performance and printed media, subcultures and social debris are historicised, tracing their trajectories and examining the wider socio-economic environments which give rise to them. Edwards traces the complex symbiotic relationship between the underground and the mainstream, while exposing their failures and flaws as well as any under-celebrated histories and latent positive potential. Edwards continues to explore personal cycles of consumption and waste, natural functions that are transformed and inescapably politicised as they connect with global capitalist economies.

    Ruth Angel Edwards studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and currently lives and works in London. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally at Arcadia Missa Auto Italia South East, Tate Modern (London), FACT, Royal Standard (Liverpool), Human Resources, (Los Angeles) and MEYOHAS Gallery, (New York).

    Be sure to check out her website to see more of her work.

  • Robyn Kater: the intersection between history, identity and the city as a living organism

    Robyn Kater is a bold, passionate and multifaceted artist who is deeply inspired by the city of Johannesburg and all those who live within it. She views her home city, Johannesburg as the compelling and rich space that has greatly influenced her personal identity as well as artwork. The 23-year-old freelance artist, who recently graduated from WITS University with her Fine Art degree, relates her journey as that of self-discovery, learning and unlearning as well as one of trial and error.

    The use of Johannesburg as Robyn’s leading inspiration has motivated her to produce a powerful body of work titled, ‘Toxic Playground’. Robyn describes ‘Toxic Playground’ as a mixed media installation that comprises of photography, video and found objects through which she examines how the Johannesburg mine dumps become palimpsests of personal memory and toxicity. The ‘Toxic Playground’ installation consists of 100kg of sand which was collected over three months from the Riverlea mine dump – this is of significant sentiment to Robyn as she grew up in the community situated right next to the dump.

    ‘Toxic Playground’ is emblematic of the socio-economic and environmental issues currently facing the residents of the area, and essentially speaks to the community’s concerns. This is because the city’s mine dumps have been normalized to be included in the community’s everyday landscape, yet they are severely toxic. They symbolize the exploitative deep-rooted nature of the city. Robyn’s body of artwork raises important questions that require effective answers such as: “what should be done with remnants of the city’s division post-conflict, post-apartheid state? What influence do memory and remembrance of these places have on transformation of the city’s spatial morphology (formation), identity and flows of everyday urban life?”.

    In all aspects of this work Robyn does the job of detecting the intersection between history, heritage, identity, displacement and space. Robyn eloquently expresses how she is “interested in the city as a living organism and how the tangible and intangible fragments meet and overlap to form a lived experience”. An in-depth interpretation of Robyn’s artwork demonstrates that she thinks of Johannesburg in various ways. She sees the city as a complex living organism in which certain spaces act as remnants of personal memory and of an overlapping history. In addition to this, her unique artwork illustrates a vivid relationship that the city of Johannesburg presents between space and identity.

    Robyn is open to collaborate with people outside of the art industry such as historians, architects and urban planners. She would also like to have to the opportunity to exhibit her work at more experimental spaces. Having showcased at Wits Art Museum, The Point of Order as well as Nothing Gets Organised and with the hopes of showcasing at Zeitz MOCAA someday, Robyn is truly one fearless trailblazer who is more than ready to get her message across.

  • Allana Clarke | Investigating the Construction of Power Politics

    Allana Clarke is a conceptual artist born in 1987 originally from Trinidad and Tobago. Her practice is expressed through sculpture, video, performance and installation work. The residencies that can be marked off on her list at present are The Vermont Studio Center, the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and the Lighthouse Works. In 2014, she was the recipient of the Skowhegan fellowship, the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship MICA, the Peter W. Brooke Fellowship as well as the Vermont Studio Civil Society Fellowship. Adding to her accomplishments, Allana received the Franklin Furnace grant in 2015. Completing her MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art at MICA, she currently resides in Brooklyn New York.

    The artist branches out the reach of her investigation into the formation of power politics as an authoritative edifice and an abstraction through her selected choice of mediums. Her practice is enthused by conceptual information largely chosen from colonial and post-colonial theory, philosophy, art history and gender studies. Her work is however not solely informed by these texts as she intertwines personal narrative within this theoretical context.

    On Allana’s website she shares a statement bringing to light certain declarations that she outlines as ultimate truths. She expresses therein that all people are identified and affected by our cultural group personae. She continues to say that discourse diction is inherently problematic. Her statement goes on to say that all discourses are totalizing structures that engage cultural group identity and push various individual nuanced entities together. Lastly, she states that there is no discourse that encompasses the cultural group of women of colour that exist within the Caribbean and American context.

    “The primary discourses that they/we/I could fit into are ‘Feminism’ and ‘Black Liberation’ movements. They/we/I do and have not fully been articulated within either of these spaces. ‘Black Liberation’ theories, while giving the perception that “black” is inclusive of both male and female, actually focus on the black male as sole agent and his agenda to gain equal citizenship with the white male allowing him to fully participate within the capitalist system and equally gain the benefits of said system. While feminism, is focused on the white female, using liberalism to negate the experiences of non-white females.”

    Allana’s work is thus centred around this point of realization. She asks the question of whether it is possible to assert her agency while acknowledging inherent antagonism? Which leads her to question if it possible to do so while not participating in hegemonic practices.  Or if it is possible to create a non-totalizing identity structure? Allana’s work serves to investigate these concerns and question the way in which human beings identify as well as the way in which they are identified and is a result of hegemonic power structures.

    Still from ‘Propositions of Questionable Intent Part I’

  • Interpreting Objects as Identities

    A prawn shell ripped apart with the soft, tender innards swept clean. Suspended from a hook fastened to a ceiling. This serves as a description of Kasia Fudakowski’s ‘Are you eating well?’. A piece that best encapsulates the satirical tone of the artist that flows throughout her work.

    Born in London in 1985 she is currently living and working in Berlin. Her sculptural work feeds an autonomous viewpoint of artistic production within a social context.

    Sculptures meet at the point between what can be considered figurative and abstract. With performances and video pieces that relate to her sculptural work they speak about the artist’s interest in the theory and philosophy of humour.

    Are you eating well?, 2016

    Kasia pin points in her work the strained relationship between artist and spectator, the abrupt, theatricality, and representational ideas. In addition to this she captivates her viewers with the interpretation of objects as identities.

    Fascinated by the critical potential of humour, Kasia regards it as commentary on human failure. Relating this notion onto social systems; it is a critical feature of her work.

    Having exhibited her work at 1646, The Hague; Arnolfini, Bristol; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Modern Art Oxford; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; GAK, Bremen; FUTURA, Prague; and Harburger Bahnhof Kunstverein, Hamburg it can be esteemed that Kasia’s work is in high demand.

    lower your ambitions, 2015

    Kasia’s a-typicality and devotion to the use of humour as a form of critique on society is not only refreshing but innovative. Humour is for the most part never regarded as something to be taken seriously. Kasia however, takes this connotation that has been forced upon it and subverts its meaning. This critical potential is evoked with punchy titles that tell you exactly how she views things as can easily be seen when looking at ‘Are you eating Well?’ –  commentary on the luxury, greed and wastefulness that the bourgeoisie exhibit one can assume.

    You can discover more of Kasia’s work here:

    http://www.kasiakasia.com

  • Bubblegum Club Stories Ep6

    This week we visited new media artist Simphiwe Xulu, aka Mr MediaX, at Assemblage Studios to check out the beginnings of the logo he created with Sanele Omari Jali for the “I Make Africa’ project being hosted in Harare. We also share some behind the scenes footage from our latest cover shoot with the talented Zandi Tisani, who let’s us in on what she is working on at the moment. Rosie Parade chats to us about bringing Ikonika over to SA for a teaching residency and her first gig at Kitcheners. Slice Frederico serves us our fashion feature for the week. We also visited the new spot in Braam, Kota Kings, and chatted to co-founder Tankiso Tank Makwela about how they are switching up the way you eat your kota.