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(Animation still from Christine Dixie’s
exhibition "To Be King" 2014)
The 40th
National Arts Festival will be held in Grahamstown from July 3 to 13, 2014. The
programme offers an awe-inspiring number of events across the arts. Herewith
information on the Main Festival’s Visual Arts programme:
2014 SBYA: THE ESSOP BROTHERS
Supported by
the Goodman Gallery, Hasan & Husain will exhibit a body of new work in the
Monument Gallery. The photographer twins use popular culture, the media and
Hollywood as inspiration. They are interested in subjects
that interest the youth and forming the next generation, often highlighting the
multi-cultural clash between religion and popular cultures and the dominating
influence of Western theatrics.
14/30: GOODMAN GALLERY AND THE
STANDARD BANK YOUNG ARTIST AWARD
14/30: Goodman Gallery and the
Standard Bank Young Art Award is an exhibition curated
by Neil Dundas and Lara Koseff, celebrating both the 30th
anniversary of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, as the well as the
historical link between the Goodman Gallery and this prestigious national prize
for visual art in particular.
The exhibition will present work by
artists either represented by or associated with the Goodman Gallery, looking
both at the period when each artist won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award,
as well as work that they have produced since. The title of the show hints at
the fact that – including 2014 winners Hasan and Husain Essop – 14 out of 30
Standard Bank Young Artists are linked to the Goodman Gallery.
The
exhibition will feature the work of the following Standard Bank Young Artists: Mikhael Subotzky (2012),
Nontsikelelo Veleko (2008), Kathryn
Smith (2004), Brett Murray (2002), Walter Oltmann (2001), Sam Nhlengethwa
(1994), Pippa Skotnes (1993), Tommy Motswai (1992), Bonnie Ntshalintshali &
Fee Halsted-Berning (1990), Margaret Vorster (1988), William Kentridge (1987), Marion Arnold (1985) and Peter Schütz
(1984).
WIM BOTHA
Wim Botha’s artwork – commissioned for
the 2014 National Arts Festival – is a room-sized installation within which
viewers become immersed. Composed of a multitude of sculptural and
architectural elements, the work demonstrates Botha’s fascination with traditional
materials including marble, bronze, wood, paper and paint, and also those of a
more ephemeral nature such as cardboard, polystyrene and fluorescent lights.
These materials are classical on the one hand and contemporary on the other. These
surprising juxtapositions create lines of communication from the dogmatic
towards the artist’s recent exploration of spontaneity, improvisation and
coincidence.
The installation’s central component is Study for the
Epic Mundane (2013),
commissioned for Imaginary Fact:
Contemporary South African Art and the Archive, the South African Pavilion
at the 2013 Biennale di Venezia. Constructed of books bolted together and
sculpted into two figures that may be either warring or loving, dancing or
fighting (and any of their permutations), this composition provides a central
hub around which existing and hitherto unseen works come together in an
environment that applies Botha’s technical mastery and conceptual elegance to
create an experience that suspends disbelief.
The exhibition is curated by Brenton
Maart, and is accompanied by a catalogue that demonstrates the development of
Wim Botha’s interest in immersive, room-sized installations.
TO BE KING
Located
in the Alumni Gallery at the Albany History Museum, Christine Dixie’s
exhibition To Be King re-conceives
this historically and geographically specific space as Room XII , the gallery
in the Prado Museum, Spain, in which the painting Las Meninas by Velasquez hangs. Informed by the first chapter in
Michel Foucault’s book The Order of
Things (1966), entitled Las Meninas,
To Be King points to the fragility of
the established order and envisions a different order in which characters and
spaces from the periphery play a central role.
Christine
Dixie completed her under-graduate degree at the University of the
Witwatersrand and graduated with her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art,
Cape Town. She is currently a Senior lecturer in the Fine Art Department at
Rhodes University. Her work is included in both national and international
collections including the New York Public Library and the Smithsonian National
Museum of African Art, The Standard Bank Gallery, The Johannesburg Art Gallery
and the Isiko Museum of Cape Town. In 2012 she was an Artist Research Fellow at
the Smithsonian Institute.
The
entwined relationship between place (in particular, the Eastern Cape), history
and the performance of gender informs her exhibitions. Her solo exhibitions
include FrontTears (1997); Track (2000); Hide (2002); Corporeal Prospects
(2007); and The Binding (2010). She
has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions including
more recently Earth Matters – land
as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa (2013), Smithsonian National
Museum of African Art, curated by Dr. Karen Milbourne; Deconstructing Dogma (2014), UJ Gallery, curated by Dr. Karen von
Veh and Heaven, Hell, Purgatory – The
Divine Comedy from the Perspective of Contemporary African Artists (2014) curated by Simon Njami.
HOMING
The
travelling project Homing encourages
audiences to talk about what home means to them in the context of diaspora. It
is an opportunity to move diverse people to interact and exchange stories,
embracing the differences and similarities that unite South Africans. Sourced
from the unique soundscape of Grahamstown, this meticulously hand-built
interactive environment has been designed to be an accessible and exciting
meeting of contemporary art, sound and live interactive participation.
Artist
Jenna Burchell completed a BAFA at the University of Pretoria in 2007. Burchell
received the Thami Mnyele Fine Arts Award (2011), Arteles Art Residency in
Finland (2012), Ithuba Arts Fund (2013), and is represented in the UNISA Art
Collection as well as private and corporate collections. Her work has been seen
at Arts Festivals (Klein Karoo, Aardklop), museums (Oliewenhuis, Museum
Africa), institutions (UNISA Art Gallery, Michaelis Art Gallery, ABSA Gallery),
as well as commercial spaces (Fried Contemporary, KZNSA Gallery). In 2012, her
work If These Walls Could Talk was
exhibited at the Smithsonian in Washington DC.
A TEMPORARY ADMISSION
Bridget Baker’s work is situated
at the intersection of documentary and myth making, forming a series of complex
visual fragments realised through film making, installation and documented
re-stagings. The artist interweaves personal histories and narratives with
larger historic moments, with an interest in the blind-spots created by
official narrations of the past. Her practice is infused with humour, labour
and frailty.
For the exhibition, a large
artefact is freighted by ship from London to the Port Elizabeth harbour. Its
arrival mimics its original function, that of human transporter or lift,
landing passengers between settler ships and smaller boats out at sea before
the development of harbours on the coast of the Indian Ocean. As part of the
installation a new film documents this ‘retour’.
Jetty SCOUR is projected
alongside the object, a strange relic from another time, whose function and
purpose is not immediately evident. At the end of the exhibition,
it returns to London, as its import conditions stipulate: ‘temporary
admission’. Curated by Storm Janse van Rensburg
IT
BEGAN WITH A WALK
Curated by Portia Malatjie, it began with a walk is a selection of videos from Emile Stipps’
collection. The seven video pieces selected for the 2014 edition of the Festival
are works by Kemang Wa Lehulere, Robin Rhode, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Penny
Siopis, Moshekwa Langa and 1987 Standard Bank Young Artist William Kentridge in
collaboration with Deborah Bell and Robert Hodgins.
The exhibition aims to explore the curation
of video works – an interrogation which culminates in the exhibition taking
place in a cinema setting, where viewers are allowed the opportunity to see the
time-based works from beginning to end; an act that is often a challenge in a
gallery setup.
Portia Malatjie completed her Masters in History of Art at the University of the
Witwatersrand in 2011. She was guest curator for the 2012 MTN New
Contemporaries Award and recipient of the 2014 Getty Foundation Travel Grant to
the 102nd College Art Association conference in Chicago. She is
currently curator at Brundyn+ Gallery in Cape Town.
IMPRESSIONS OF RORKE’S DRIFT – THE JUMUNA
COLLECTION
The Impressions of Rorke’s Drift – The Jumuna Collection is curated by
Thembinkosi Goniwe and, drawing works from the Jumuna Family collection, looks
at the phenomenal legacy of the iconic Rorke’s Drift Arts and Craft Centre. The
exhibition showcases over 100 pieces - mostly prints - from 17 artists. Regrettably,
no formal archive or permanent exhibition of the work from Rorke’s Drift
exists, but the Jumuna Family from Durban has been collecting pieces made in
the Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre since the 1960s and have graciously made
their family collection available for this exhibition. As a result, the public
is offered a chance to see a significant body of work representing the Rorke’s
Drift legacy in one exhibition.
Bookings for
the 2014 National Arts Festival can be made online through the website – click
on the banner advert above or go to www.nationalartsfestival.co.za
Programmes are available on the website or free printed copies at selected
Exclusive Books and Standard Bank branches.
The National
Arts Festival is sponsored by Standard Bank, The National Lottery Distribution
Trust Fund, Eastern Cape Government, Department of Arts and Culture, City Press
and M Net.
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