SABC ART NEWS
Gerhard Marx’s @gerhardmarx solo exhibition ‘Landscape Would Be the Wrong Word’ is currently showing at Everard Read Gallery @everard_read_johannesburg . From delicate labyrinthine structures to tectonic earthen constructions, these finely wrought sculptures, reconfigured map works and filigree plant drawings ‘pulse with energy and are like portals to new realms’.
Expanding on the title of the exhibition, Marx comments, ‘Instead of making a landscape, I’m making a place.’
‘You feel you could step into them: reach forward, rotate these three-dimensional planes of maps and plants, expand them, inhabit them,’ reads the curatorial statement.
By folding, cutting and re-assembling maps, the artist deconstructs the way they shape our view of the world and proposes new spatial possibilities and meanings.
Marx has long be drawn to dismantling and reconstituting maps, and the SABC Art Collection is proud to house one of his earlier reconfigured map works, ‘Horizontal Figure’ (2005) [Detail, Frame # 1]. Also in the Collection is a photographic contact print titled ‘Bird with Stars’ (2007) [Frame # 2] and ‘Claudiograph’ (2008), a work composed of weeds, watercolour and glue on paper [Frame # 3].
Marx continues to work with gathered plant matter—dried nasturtium stems, hydrangea heads and poppy stalks—to build delicate otherworldly surfaces.
The panels of his new bronzes are cast from the Karoo ground—precise imprints of the rugged surface of the Earth.
‘What links all these works is their immediacy and vitality,’ reads the exhibition text. ‘They resist flat description, conjuring layered, immersive spaces charged with possibility.’
Marx’s exhibition runs until 1 November 2025.
‘Mercurial Map’, 2025, cut and reconfigured map fragments on aluminium, 140 x 160 x 29 cm. [Frame # 4]
‘Lattice’, 2025, bronze, 80 x 65 x 3 cm. [Frame # 5]
‘Wilding Drawing’, 2025, plant material, tissue paper, and acrylic ground on canvas, 125 x 150 x 6.5 cm. [Frame # 6]
#southafricancontemporaryart #placemaking #deterritorialisation #perspectiveshift #earthmatters #sabcartcollection #gerhardmarx
![Gerhard Marx’s @gerhardmarx solo exhibition ‘Landscape Would Be the Wrong Word’ is currently showing at Everard Read Gallery @everard_read_johannesburg . From delicate labyrinthine structures to tectonic earthen constructions, these finely wrought sculptures, reconfigured map works and filigree plant drawings ‘pulse with energy and are like portals to new realms’.
Expanding on the title of the exhibition, Marx comments, ‘Instead of making a landscape, I’m making a place.’
‘You feel you could step into them: reach forward, rotate these three-dimensional planes of maps and plants, expand them, inhabit them,’ reads the curatorial statement.
By folding, cutting and re-assembling maps, the artist deconstructs the way they shape our view of the world and proposes new spatial possibilities and meanings.
Marx has long be drawn to dismantling and reconstituting maps, and the SABC Art Collection is proud to house one of his earlier reconfigured map works, ‘Horizontal Figure’ (2005) [Detail, Frame # 1]. Also in the Collection is a photographic contact print titled ‘Bird with Stars’ (2007) [Frame # 2] and ‘Claudiograph’ (2008), a work composed of weeds, watercolour and glue on paper [Frame # 3].
Marx continues to work with gathered plant matter—dried nasturtium stems, hydrangea heads and poppy stalks—to build delicate otherworldly surfaces.
The panels of his new bronzes are cast from the Karoo ground—precise imprints of the rugged surface of the Earth.
‘What links all these works is their immediacy and vitality,’ reads the exhibition text. ‘They resist flat description, conjuring layered, immersive spaces charged with possibility.’
Marx’s exhibition runs until 1 November 2025.
‘Mercurial Map’, 2025, cut and reconfigured map fragments on aluminium, 140 x 160 x 29 cm. [Frame # 4]
‘Lattice’, 2025, bronze, 80 x 65 x 3 cm. [Frame # 5]
‘Wilding Drawing’, 2025, plant material, tissue paper, and acrylic ground on canvas, 125 x 150 x 6.5 cm. [Frame # 6]
#southafricancontemporaryart #placemaking #deterritorialisation #perspectiveshift #earthmatters #sabcartcollection #gerhardmarx](https://www.sabcart.co.za/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed-pro/img/placeholder.png)
Currently on show @javett_up is ‘One and the Many’, a daring new exhibition by guest curator Storm Janse Van Rensburg in collaboration with Javett-UP’s curatorial team. Constellations of artworks explore the ways in which artists narrate the relationship between the individual and the collective, or self and others.
Six invited artists – Stephané E Conradie, Goldendean, Ledelle Moe, Abdus Salaam, Inga Somdyala and Katlego Tlabela – have large-scale artworks in dialogue with three Javett-UP collections: the South32 Collection, the Javett Family Collection and the Bongi Dhlomo Collection.
Visitors are greeted by a site-specific commission by Inga Somdyala, which soars from the ground floor through the atrium spaces.
In the first chapter, ‘Living School’, the artwork groupings explore abstract impulses, musings on spirituality and religion, and the complex intimacies between humans and the natural world.
The second features artworks by Tshwane-based artist Katlego Tlabela whose connection to black South African art histories is explored through the inclusion of artworks significant to his journey, such as Gerard Sekoto’s ‘Song of the Pick’ (1946). Goldendean’s voluptuous, sensual ‘Soft Vxns’ (2021) dialogues with works by Mme Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi, Tracey Rose and Adriene Piper, among others. Fragility, the safety of home and making new objects from fragments is central to Stephané E Conradie’s sculptures and wall-based works, which dialogue with serial works by Jane Alexander, Willie Bester and Sam Nhlengethwa, among others.
‘Colossal Time’ includes two large-scale, bodily concrete sculptures by Ledelle Moe, a video work by Abdus Salaam exploring the metaphysicality of water, and Jeremy Wafer’s photographic series ‘Antholes’ (1998), which explores monumentality and collective action.
The SABC Art Collection is proud to house artworks by several of the featured artists, including Ezrom Legae, William Kentridge, Bonnie Ntshalintshali, Dumile Feni, Louis Maqhubela, Harold Rubin, Ernest Mancoba, Durant Sihlali, Goldendean, Mme Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi, Tracey Rose, Jane Alexander, Willie Bester, Sam Nhlengethwa and Jeremy Wafer.
Kudos to Paul Emmanuel @paulemmanuelartist , who was recently awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree (honoris causa) from Montserrat College of Art in Boston. He was invited to give the keynote address to the graduating class of 2025 and did so wearing sparkly heels. ‘I hope I`ve encouraged some to face their fears, embrace their perceived challenges, even if they seem ridiculous or uncomfortable, […] find their balance and walk tall,` he said.
Last year, Emmanuel graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He delivered his thesis paper in the same silver, sparkly, $7 heels, picked up from a thrift store in Philadelphia. ‘Apart from the joy of prancing around in the silver sparkles, I used the heels as a prop to talk about gender and my past growing up in apartheid South Africa,’ he wrote.
Since 2022, Emmanuel has been a Fulbright Scholar in the United States, researching the cultural dimensions of its public spaces, while investigating its involvement in Middle East conflicts. He is the currently Director of Civic Engagement for the Tour de Force Foundation, Washington DC and a lecturer for the Medical College of Wisconsin’s discussion series: Talking with Monuments: Veteran Dialogues on Remembering.
Born in 1969 in Kabwe, Zambia, Emmanuel’s multidisciplinary work is focused on exploring the ways mental and physical landscapes interact in their construction of memories and identities. Trained as a printmaker, specialising in lithography, he creates photo-realistic drawings using a blade to scratch into the surface of exposed photographic paper, removing layers of the surface to reveal its undertones. [‘Vault of Breath’, 2000, Slides 1 – 5] His work is well-represented in the SABC Art Collection.
In 2004, on the 10th anniversary of South Africa’s democracy, the first of his series of counter-memorials ‘The Lost Men’ [Slide 6] was installed at the 1820 Settlers Monument in Makhanda. In 2007, phase two took place in Maputo, Mozambique, and, in 2014, phase three was installed adjacent to the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in France as an official event of the WWI centenary.
The bronze sculpture ‘Mangy Dog’ (1996) by prominent South African artist Ezrom Kgobokanyo Sebata Legae (1938 – 1999) is currently on loan to the High Museum of Art @highmuseumofart in Atlanta, Georgia. It is being shown as part of ‘Ezrom Legae: Beasts’, the first major museum exhibition dedicated to Legae’s work in the United States, which opened last week and runs until 16 November 2025.
The more than 30 works on view address apartheid through form and metaphor, exemplifying the ways in which Legae, like other artists at the time, used coded visual languages to subvert and endure tyranny. Legae’s sculptures and drawings often depict animals in distress, subversively articulating the suffering and resilience of his fellow South Africans.
Born in Vrededorp, Johannesburg, Legae studied at the Polly Street Art Centre, where he learned from artists like Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Kumalo. Later, he continued his studies at the Jubilee Art Centre, eventually becoming a teacher and taking over Kumalo’s position at the Centre in 1965.
The current exhibition features drawings from 1967 to 1996, foregrounding the 1970s and 1990s, each groundbreaking periods in South African history. Amid mounting unrest and anti-apartheid protests in the 1970s, such as the Soweto uprisings (commemorated yesterday on Youth Day), activists and civilians endured increased violence, exile and imprisonment, often without trial and including solitary confinement. This period is considered Legae’s most prolific, in which he produced pencil, ink, and charcoal depictions of animals as covert representations of apartheid’s players and impact. The artist produced substantially less until the 1990s, when he re-emerged during South Africa’s political transition.
‘The poignant symbolism in Legae’s work reminds us of the expressive power of art, especially for those living through oppression,’ said the High’s Director, Rand Suffolk. ‘Through this exhibition, we are […] telling a story of 20th century South Africa, which is particularly timely as we enter the third decade after the end of apartheid.’
#southafricansculpture #animalmetaphors #apartheid #resistance #transnationalsolidarity
‘Miss January’, a 1997 painting by South African artist Marlene Dumas, recently sold for over $13.6 million (R243 million) at a Christie’s auction in New York, setting a new record for a living female artist. In this magnum opus work, which stands 2.82-metres high, Dumas revisits ‘Miss World’, an artwork depicting 10 models, that she painted 30 years earlier at the age of 10.
Dumas was raised in Kuils River in the Western Cape and studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, before relocating to the Netherlands in 1976, and studying Painting and Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Her figurative paintings are inspired by personal memories and a diverse array of printed matter including Polaroid photographs, newspaper and magazine cuttings, letters, and Flemish paintings. Race, sexuality, guilt and innocence, violence and tenderness are recurring themes in her work.
There are two works by Dumas in SABC Art Collection. ‘Faceless’ (1993) [Slide #1] is one of a limited edition of 200 silkscreen prints that accompanied her 1993 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Dumas’ artworks are often frankly erotic, exploring themes of sexuality, love, death, and shame. Central to her practice is the human figure—often naked or partially clothed. Painted from photographs, Dumas’ models strike Playboy-style poses: backside in the air, or crouched down naked in high-heeled boots, face raised suggestively, or peeling off one stocking in a silk-gloved hand. Yet, in this work, the face and breasts of the female figure are covered up as if in a gesture of shame. Reflecting the viewer’s desire for total exposure back at them, it is a work that poses questions about the potential for abuse in the power of the gaze.
‘Agter Die Nag Bedrieglik Die Dood’ [Behind the Night, Deceptively Death] (1982) [Slide #2] is a meditation on mortality’s capacity to energise the living. The brilliant blue of this lithograph defies the gloominess of the blunt tombstones hovering within a dark shape that repeats their form. The text in the image reads: ‘The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvellously.’
The SABC Art Collection team joins countless others across the world in mourning the loss of visionary curator Koyo Kouoh, who died on 10 May. Born in Douala, Cameroon, Kouoh was the Executive Director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa @zeitzmocaa in Cape Town.
Last week, the Museum held a memorial service to honour her life and legacy. Rousing words and poignant memories were shared by speakers David Green, Jochen Zeitz, Albie Sachs, Liesl Hartman, Gavin Jantjes, Wangechi Mutu, Berni Searle, Thania Petersen and Bulelwa Kunene—each celebrating her extraordinary ingenuity, dynamism and passionate commitment to building spirited African diasporic communities of contemporary art practice.
In 2024, Kouoh made history as the first African woman to be named artistic director of the world’s most prestigious art exhibition. Last week, La Biennale di Venezia @venice.art.biennale announced that it would be following her vision for the 61st International Art Exhibition, to be held from 9 May to 22 November 2026. Titled ‘In Minor Keys’, the exhibition will be realised exactly as she conceived it. For six months, Kouoh and her team—which includes advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti; editor-in-chief Siddhartha Mitter; and assistant Rory Tsapayi—worked intensively to shape the exhibition’s vision—developing its theoretical framework, selecting the participating artists and artworks, commissioning catalogue authors, defining its graphic identity and exhibition architecture, and engaging in close dialogue with the invited artists.
‘“In Minor Keys” invites audiences into a sensory and emotional realm, where quiet frequencies, poetic gestures, and intimate worlds offer a counterpoint to the dominant noise of global crisis and spectacle,’ reads the news announcement via C&. ‘Kouoh embraces the metaphor of the “minor keys”—in music, feeling, geography, and social practice—as a space of resilience, resistance, and relation.’
Rest in power, chère Madame Koyo.
#koyokouoh #tribute #africancontemporaryart #visionary #inminorkeys
Johannesburg – in all its fractured, shifting, dynamic, and jazzy dimensions – takes centre stage in the exhibition ‘Urban Entanglements: How Art Reflects Citymaking’. Currently on show at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, this trifecta features a selection of paintings, drawings, and charcoal works on paper by three South African greats: the late David Koloane (1938–2019), Kagiso ‘Pat’ Mautloa @kagisopatmautloa , and Sam Nhlengethwa @sam.nhlengethwa – all alumni of The Bag Factory artist studios in Fordsburg. The selected artworks span a period from the 1980s to the 2020s, from the final years of apartheid and into the unfolding 21st century.
Pictured here is a pairing of works by each artist – from the Goodman Gallery show and from the SABC Art Collection. In each instance, the work on show precedes the work held in the Collection.
Street Scene (1999) [Slide #1] is an iconic work by Koloane, whose charcoal drawings and mixed media works capture Johannesburg’s restless rhythm through expressive, gestural marks. Although ‘My Bike’ (2001) [Slide #2] touches on the same theme of transport, traffic, and movement through the congested city streets, it is a more unusual work in the context of Koloane’s oeuvre – a rare declaration of individual freedom and personhood by an artist whose work is more devotedly concerned with the collective struggles of the city’s Black residents to survive and thrive in the face of systemic oppression.
Mautloa, who continues to work from the Bag Factory, reflects on how Johannesburg’s landscape and collective psyche have been shaped by mining and the lingering effects of racially divided space. With its high contrasts and bold linework, ‘Portrait’ (2023) [Slide #3] is a jazzy work that transmits a sense of the multiple personalities one might adopt in the course of navigating and adapting to the divergent contexts of city life. Shackscape (1997) [Slide #4] is an abstract mixed-media, found-object painting that cites the industrial textures of urban life and the materiality of informal settlements in which dwellings are knocked together from sheets of salvaged metal. [Read on in comments…]
Guests and visitors to @radissonredrosebank should get ready to be wowed by a stellar selection of super-sized artworks by the legendary @sam.nhlengethwa , ranging from large-scale acrylic, oil and collage works on canvas to finely textured hand-woven tapestry pieces. Presented by @rdcpropertygroup in association with @goodman_gallery , the exhibit is part of a sustained programme of striking art installations and contemporary African design features at the hotel, which has firmly established itself as a ‘creative hospitality hub’. To maintain a fresh and current perspective, the artworks in the Radisson RED common areas are updated every nine to 12 months, as new works continue to be added to the Hotel’s art collection.
Sam Nhlengethwa is part of a pioneering generation of late-20th and early-21st century South African artists whose work reflects the sociopolitical history and everyday life of the country. Through his paintings, collages and prints, Nhlengethwa depicts the evolution of Johannesburg through street life, interiors, jazz musicians and fashion.
The SABC Art Collection is proud to host one of the widest selections of the artist’s work [as featured in the reel].
Nhlengethwa was born in Payneville, near Springs, a satellite mining town on Johannesburg’s East Rand, and grew up in Ratanda location in nearby Heidelberg.
In the 1980s, he moved to Johannesburg where he honed his practice at the renowned Johannesburg Art Foundation, founded by Bill Ainslie. Nhlengethwa was one of the original artists at the legendary Bag Factory Artist Studios in Newtown, in the heart of the Johannesburg CBD, where he used to share studio space with fellow luminaries, like Pat Mautloa and the late David Koloane.
Nhlengethwa’s practice features in important arts publications, such as Phaidon’s The 20th Century Art Book (2001).
Launch event photographs by Mbongo Keswa @_mkfoto
#sabcartcollection #samnhlengethwa #goodmangallery #rdcproperties #radissonredrosebank #southafricancontemporaryart #collageartist #jazz #johannesburgart #jozilife
Gerard Sekoto’s ‘Self Portrait’ (1947) is currently emblazoned across the façade of the @centrepompidou in Paris. His painting takes pride of place on the exhibition poster and catalogue cover of ‘Paris Noir’ / ‘Black Paris’, which runs until 30 June 2025.
‘Black Paris’ retraces the presence and influence of Black artists in France from the 1950s to 2000. It offers a vibrant immersion into cosmopolitan Paris, a place of resistance and creation that gave rise to a wide variety of practices, from a new awareness of identity to the search for transcultural artistic languages.
Sekoto (1913 – 1993), who was both an artist and a musician, is recognised as a pioneer of South African 20th-century modernism and social realism. He was born at the Lutheran Mission Station in Botshabelo, in the Eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga). From an early age, he favoured painting and drawing as his chosen medium of expression. He attended Grace Dieu Diocesan Teachers` Training College, in Pietersburg (now Polokwane), where he took art classes and was mentored by Ernest Mancoba.
After spending four years as a teacher, he left Mpumalanga to pursue his full-time art career, living and working first in Sophiatown, Johannesburg (1938 – 42), then in District Six, Cape Town (1942 – 45), then in Eastwood, Pretoria (1945 – 47).
In 1940, the Johannesburg Art Gallery bought one of his artworks – the first image by a Black artist to enter a South African museum collection – and by the mid-1940s, Sekoto had earned a reputation as a significant artist. But his opportunities remained severely limited under apartheid. Seeking a larger and more inclusive art world, he emigrated to France, where he would remain for the rest of life in self-imposed exile.
The SABC Art Collection is proud to be home to Sekoto’s ‘Husband and Wife’, a bold and tender oil painting of a young couple [Slide #4]. In 2023, the artwork had its surface gently cleaned and its shimmering metallic frame repaired as part of a three-year restoration and conservation project.
[Paris images courtesy Karel Nel]
Several artists represented in the SABC Art Collection will be participating in this week’s @investeccapetownartfair , which will be taking place at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), from 21–23 February, with the VIP Preview happening this Thursday, 20 February.
The Fair brings together 124 exhibitors and 500 artists from 58 countries and five continents. It will feature a mix of curated sections, special projects and inner-city activations, popping up across Cape Town’s cultural landscape. Highlights include:
• Tomorrows/Today, ‘Experience, Attempt, Experiment,’ curated by Dr Mariella Franzoni (Barcelona, Spain), which showcases cutting-edge practices from the global contemporary art scene.
• SOLO 2025, ‘Playscapes: Shaping Worlds and Selves,’ curated by Céline Seror (Amsterdam, Netherlands), featuring bold, solo presentations that offer a deep dive into an artist’s work.
• Generations, curated by Heba El Kayal (London, United Kingdom), which focuses on the dialogue between emerging and established artists across generations.
• The new name Lookout section, will spotlight emerging galleries and innovative artistic narratives, offering visitors the chance to discover fresh voices in contemporary art.
Alongside the core sections of the fair, Cabinet/Trophy is special project curated by Alexander Richards and Dr Phokeng Setai of Exhibition Match (Cape Town, South Africa).
Also, as part of the Unbound City programme, various local museums will host events, offering a chance to engage with exhibitions and works by leading artists.
Looking forward to seeing you at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair!
#InvestecCapeTownArtFair #ICTAF2025 #southafricancontemporaryart
Currently showing at the Origins Centre at Wits University is Impact, Joni Brenner’s artistic response to the 2.5–2.8-million-year-old Taung skull. The exhibition marks the beginning of Wits’s year-long commemoration of the discovery, in 1924, of the fossilised skull of the Taung child, a young Australopithecus africanus, found by quarrymen working for the Northern Lime Company in Taung, a small town in the North West Province. The name means place of the lion and was named after Tau, the Chief of the Legoya or Bataung people. Tau is the Tswana word for lion. Anatomist and anthropologist Raymond Dart described it as a new species in the journal ‘Nature’ in 1925 and Dean Falk, a specialist in brain evolution, has called it ‘the most important anthropological fossil of the 20th century’.
The exhibition arises out of Brenner’s long-term creative engagement with the skull, exploring themes of fragility and survival, destruction and creation, uncertainty, loss, pressure and chance.
Brenner, a lecturer at Wits School of Arts, was born in Zimbabwe and is an honorary member of the Marigold beadwork co-operative in Bulawayo. ‘[Her] work is primarily concerned with portraiture but not in the traditional rendering of the physical likeness of an individual. [It] investigates commemoration, life and death and her technique bridges abstraction and realism,’ says The Artists’ Press in Mpumalanga.
The SABC Art Collection houses two sculptures by Brenner: Sofonisba [1–3] and Anguisola (both 2005) [4–6). These clay forms have a primal, essential quality, affirming the fundamental urge toward creativity and the animate circuit that runs between earth, hand, heart and brain. They speak directly of the Earth from which they were wrought and, from certain perspectives, call forth skull or phoetus – the living being taking shape.
Their titles offer a clue to Brenner’s womancentric practice. Sofonisba Anguisola (1532 – 1625) was one of the most accomplished painters of the late Renaissance, known for her portraiture. Her work, like that of many early female painters, was often attributed to male painters – as various as Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Battista and others.
Jill Trappler @jill_trappler is an artist based in Cape Town. This work in the SABC Collection is executed in oil and focuses on textural and formal qualities in the composition. It is neither abstract nor fully representational but suggests enigmatic figures and a subtle compositional arrangement. The vertical shapes are shifting states; the work evinces the rocking of boats or soothing of a child. The movement and direction dances and comforts in its groundedness.
Trappler is having an exhibition of her work entitled ‘Opening the Drawers’ in Tamboerskloof, Cape Town on 25th, 26th and 27th October, 2024.
Abstract
oil on canvas
112 x 112cm
1997
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Artist Stephen Hobbs @hobbsstep is interested in the impact of defensive urban planning and architecture on the behavioural aspects of city and society. Since 1994, when he graduated from Wits University with a BA Fine Art, he has been pursuing his interests in World War I and II theatres of war, surgery rooms, construction sites, structural engineering, orthopaedics and camouflage.
Simultaneously, the City of Johannesburg has served as a constant critical reference point for his artistic and curatorial interventions. In his practice, Hobbs is concerned with ‘artistic equivalents for defensiveness, congestion, precarity, entropy and death’. These concepts are explored through video, printmaking, bookmaking, assemblage and sculpture in his current solo exhibition ‘Man Shouting In Distance’, which is showing at Wits Art Museum until 23 November.
Dazzle camouflage – a zebra-like pattern used on gunships in the early 1900s to fragment the visual field of enemy sites in combat situations – is a key trope in his practice. Although dazzle patterning became obsolete after World War I, Hobbs has mined the potential that such visual deception presents for aesthetic reflection in dystopian urban environments.
In his own words, he is committed to ‘constantly exploring the intersections of positive and negative space with a variety of experimental objects and tectonic moves’.
His fevered interest in the reflections, structures, intercultural assemblages, constant movement and mutating grid of the streets of Johannesburg is strikingly evident in his 2003 photographic series ‘Mirage City’ [Frames #1–6], which is held in the SABC Art Collection.
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Currently showing at Norval Foundation is ‘They Came and Left Footprints’ – an exhibition of sculptures and works on paper by two of South Africa’s most significant artists of the 1960s and 70s, Cyprian Shilakoe and Lucas Sithole [frames #1, 4, 5]. ‘Their outputs speak of the harshness of experience “normalised” under Apartheid and particularly, the effect on the fabric of families caused by the migratory labour system,’ reads the exhibition statement.
A sombre and moving exhibition with moments of piercing spiritual transcendence, its title is from a carved inscription on a sculpture by Shilakoe, which refers to his forebears who have passed into the ancestral realm – ‘a reminder of the transience of our lives, what we leave behind and how we are remembered’.
A walkabout by curator Karel Nel will be taking place tomorrow, Saturday, 5 October, at 11am.
The SABC Art Collection is proud to hold artworks by both of these artist truthtellers.
‘Leopard’[frame #2] is an ink drawing produced by Sithole in 1964. The constriction of the prowling animal within the frame conveys a sense of entrapment. It is as if the leopard, one of the most powerful predators in the wilderness, has been humbled and cowers, perhaps even wounded. The animal’s facial expression conveys anguish.
‘My Childhood Remembrance’ (1970) [frame #3] is one of 12 works by Cyprian Shilakoe in the Collection. In this poignant self-portrait, the artist projects himself back into his own childhood. A small figure labours under the weight of a heavy log. On closer observation, it appears that the child is not entirely human. Birdlike, he perches on the fence – hands for claws. His face and body are covered in scales, giving him a shape-shifting, creature-like appearance. It is possible that he is resting on the shoulders of another figure, crouched between his legs. The small, hovering changeling is overcome by a sense of being strange and other in a harsh, brittle environment.
Exhibition photos taken by Alexandra Dodd.
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#cyprianshilakoe
#lucassithole
#norval
Artist Christine Dixie @christinedixie recently donated her sculptural installation ‘The Matrices’ [Frame #8] to the SABC Art Collection. Dixie is a multimedia artist whose work challenges the ways gender roles have been historically conditioned by society, myths and image-making.
The installation comprises six relief sculptures depicting a young boy sleeping – ‘To Dream II’ [Frame #1], ‘Bind II’ [Frame #2], ‘Offering II’ [Frame #3], ‘Burning II’ [Frame #4], ‘Blind II’ [Frame #5], ‘To Sleep II’ [Frame #6] – and one of a pregnant woman looking on through the lens of her camera – ‘Captured II’ (detail), [Frame #7]. The work draws attention to the loadedness of the gaze and how we have been socialised to view the male child.
‘The Matrices’ forms part of ‘The Binding Project’ (2010 – 2019). Dixie is a senior lecturer at Rhodes University and her practice and aesthetic draw on archival imagery and in-depth research. This installation is accompanied by two images of the text of the Aqedah – which tells of God’s challenge to Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac [Frames #9 and #10]. Through its engagement with this Biblical story, ‘The Binding’ grapples with the complexities of being both an artist and a mother: distance is required as an observer/artist, while closeness is needed as a mother in relation to her son. The presence of the mother is conjured through the use of materials associated with ‘women’s work’, such as a crochet blanket and embroidery.
In her essay ‘Paternity and Intertextuality in Christine Dixie’s The Binding’, Deborah Seddon notes, ‘Dixie[’s] work towards The Binding began to take shape with her realisation that “the flagrant visibility of my pregnant body, its excess” seemed in stark contrast to the body of the father of her child, for whom “the outward signs of eminent fatherhood” were “noticeably absent”.’
#sabcartcollection
Three artworks by Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) @clivevandenberg are currently on loan from the SABC Art Collection to Wits Art Museum (WAM) and can be seen as part of the artist’s current survey exhibition ‘Porous’: ‘Love’s Ballast I’ (Jelutong sculpture, 2004) [SLIDE #1]; ‘Skin and Ghosts IV and V’ (monoprint series, 2006) [SLIDES #2 and #3].
Van Den Berg’s practice is centred around two core themes: land and love. He often depicts the body as landscape and sees the body and land as related entities that carry wounds, scars and memories.
He became acutely aware of the permeability of skin in the 1980s with the identification of the HIV virus. ‘From that time I began to re-imagine my body as a porous thing, vulnerable to an invisible and incomprehensible threat. It was a medieval moment. Modernism had ruptured, medicine meant nothing and the words gay and plague, were joined. And yet we found ways to love, knowingly, in the face of accumulating threats to our health and identity.’
Each of the artworks in the SABC Art Collection depicts a figure with contortions, protrusions, markings and invasions of the surface of their skin. In Love’s Ballast I the figure’s skin is marked by irregular shapes that could be scars or boils, while in the Skin and Ghosts series the skin is penetrated by an abstract snake-like entity or an amalgamation of invader cells.
These works were made at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa – just before and after the rollout of antiretrovirals in the public health system began in 2004 (following a tough political struggle) – when a disease that was eating away at the innards of the country went largely unseen and unspoken, shrouded in denialism, until it began to show up in welts and Kaposi’s sarcoma on the bodies of those afflicted by it. The disruption of the smooth limits of the outer layer of the body in these artworks draws attention to the diseased or troubled interior of the body/body politic.
‘Porous’ runs until 26 October 2024.
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