(Bianca Baldi, Zero
Latitude, Video Still, HD Video, colour, silent, © the artist)
Opening in the Main, Mezzanine and Park Galleries of the
KZNSA Gallery on August 18 will be an exhibition titled Sightings. This is the next in the KZNSA’s 2014/15 Social Art
Programme supported by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund.
The exhibition features the work of seven artists who
variously reflect upon the ways in which the materiality and veracity of the
present are constructed from scattered and partial remains of personal and
collective memory.
Participating artists are Bridget Baker (SA/UK), Bianca
Baldi (SA/DE), Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (SA/UK), Abri de Swardt (SA),
Uriel Orlow (CH/UK) and Kemang Wa Lehulere (SA).
The works in the exhibition are primarily lens-based, and
point to the ways in which media such as photography and film are complicit in
assembling the present. Many of the works negotiate archival material demonstrating
how the archive is subject to misinterpretation and material disintegration.
Other works engage with personal and collective fictions, signalling the
construction inherent in constituting the present. The exhibition title Sightings refers to our elusive and
partial vantage point on the present moment which slips from view.
A number of works consider the problematics of
'explorations' and 'discovery' in Africa, for example, Bridget Baker's The Assemblers #0 (2013) reflects on the
discovery and mis-sightings of the coelacanth fish and its implication into
myth making and throwback theory as well as it's co-option into contemporary
culture, manifest in horror films.
Bianca Baldi's installation Zero Latitude (2014) looks to the Italian-French dandy Pierre
Savorgnan de Brazza’s commissioned transporter for his explorations in the
Congo. Through careful decontextualisation and erasure Baldi demonstrates how
the explorer’s day bed is capable of containing and unfolding, both physically
and conceptually, the trappings and projections accompanying the aesthetic of
colonial ambition at Zero Latitude.
Other works reflect on conditions of history and memory and
the complicity of lens-based media, such as Adam Broomberg and Oliver
Chanarin’s Kodak Ektachrome 34 1978 frame
4 C-41 and KodaColor-X 1968 frame 9,
C-41 (2012) which explore the relationship between the history of colour
photography and race, exposing the complicity of the Western photographic
industry with colonial and racial power structures.
Uriel Orlow’s Yellow
Limbo (2011) destabilises the conventional history of the Six-Day War
between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria through interleaving historic
photographs and Super8 film shot by crew members of 14 cargo ships stranded in
the Suez Canal for 8 years with the artist’s own recent footage on location.
This is shown alongside a slide projection of events of particular relevance,
general importance or personal interest from the eight years of the ships’
confinement. Resisting a singular narrative, Orlow allows for a multiplicity of
voices and vantage points to exist within the work constituting a grammar of
process, construction and the viewer's involvement in completing the work.
Abri de Swardt’s newly realised works, Streams (2015) and Ridder
Thirst (a voiceover) (2015) draw from Alice Mertens’ photographs of
apartheid-era couples next to the Eersterivier in her book Stellenbosch (1966) to explore queer desire in provincial, tertiary
settings as an intervention into photographic acts and archives.
Kemang Wa Lehulere’s Ukuguqula
iBatyi 3 (2012) documents the artist embodying the roles of forensic
investigator and scientist in unearthing a buried skeleton. Wa Lehulere’s
gesture here is poignant in thinking through the forensic and archaeological
process undertaken in negotiating the fictions at work in both the past and the
present.
Curated by Amy Watson, Sightings
run in the KZNSA’s Main, Mezzanine and Park Galleries from August 18 to
September 6.
The KZNSA Gallery
is situated at 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood, in Durban. More information on 031
277 1703, fax 031 201 8051 or cell 082 220 0368 or visit www.kznsagallery.co.za
With thanks to Goodman Gallery, Stevenson Gallery, LUX
Artists’ Moving Image, The Kino Club, Gearhouse Durban, Will Hanke and Ernest
Westbrooke.
The exhibition is generously funded by the National Lottery
Distribution Trust Fund (NLDTF) and the National Arts Council, South Africa
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