Curated by Sisipho Ngodwana and Sinazo Chiya, the gallery aims to stage a place where questions about being, belonging and embodiment can be proposed, interrogated, watched and reflected back.
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Citoyen du Monde, one is almost immediately confronted by the
Globalloon. Impressively sized (just about scraping the ceiling of Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, and spanning at least a quarter of the room), the immense plastic globe is loud in both its bright veneer and its sonic presence. The noise of the pump that keeps it round and full of air is reminiscent of primary school birthday parties and the promised fun of a bouncy castle. Its low rumble can be heard from every corner of the gallery.
This is fitting because the world seen by Meschac Gaba, the conceptual artist behind the work featured in this ambitious survey show (and its prequel,
The word “shame” is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming or impropriety” or, “a condition of humiliation, disgrace or disrepute”. The South African use of the word, however, holds this connotation as well as another, unique meaning. “Shame man, poor guy,” one might exclaim, when hearing some bad news about a friend or relative. It’s the equivalent of saying “I feel for you”, a heartfelt expression of empathy for someone else’s embarrassment or hard times. Further, the Afrikaans word for shame is “
siestog”, which also has a dual meaning, “
From its very inception, the practice of photography has been imbued with racialised prejudices and biases; to accept this as a fact is imperative in understanding the work that photographers of colour, such as those included in
Past Present Currents, an exhibition that opened at Cape Town’s Association for Visual Arts Gallery gallery in mid-April (closing at the end of May), do to reappropriate and subvert the photographic medium.
Before photography, image making was largely done by artists who would draw or paint what they saw. While some were extremely skilled at lifelike renderings, the invention of photography captured life in unprecedented accuracy.