geography of somewhere
DESCRIPTION
Stevenson catalogue 56TRANSCRIPT
14 APRIL – 17 MAY 2011
Curated by David Brodie
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CONTENTS
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NARE MOKGOTHO
ÂNGELA FERREIRA
ZANDER BLOMDINEO SESHEE BOPAPE
SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA
ODILI DONALD ODITA
MESCHAC GABA
GERALD MACHONA
INTRODUCTION
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
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A truly global city … is composed not only of flows of money, skills, knowledge, security, machinery, and technology, but also of ideas, people, images, and imaginaries – a cultural economy. ...Worldliness, in this context, has had to do not only with the capacity to generate one’s own cultural forms, institutions, and lifeways, but also with the ability to foreground, translate, !agment, and disrupt realities and imaginaries originating elsewhere, and in the process place these forms and processes in the service of one’s own making.
At the heart of Geography of Somewhere is a paradox: the works on exhibition may be
understood as coming from the city, but they are not of the city. They draw aspects of
their vocabularies from conditions of the urban, yet are not simply descriptive. There is
an articulate formalism present in the artists’ practices that understands the city as a
headspace rather than a language. Their ways of seeing ask that we set aside our access
to such space through geography or topography, and look to the city as metaphor. In
so doing, they offer us a tangential, poetic link to the experience of the city, a kind of
musical score. This score is a disjunctive, often roughly hewn flow, with an acknowledged
hybridity that emerges from the accumulation of vast numbers of sources and contexts.
The work of these artists is united by a method of inquiry rather than by style.
The artists are clearly conscious of their practices’ location within current trends. Their
reflective outlook brings with it a fluid approach to formalism and abstraction, and to
their roles within broader conversations of art-making. The relationship between this
resurgence of interest in form and formalism and the socio-political dynamics that
underlie these works is complex, and forms the crux of the exhibition.
Geography of Somewhere posits the works of a loose grouping of younger artists –
Zander Blom, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Gerald Machona, Nare Mokgotho and Serge Alain
Nitegeka – as a counterpoint to those of Ângela Ferreira, Meschac Gaba and Odili
Donald Odita. The former’s language harnesses a more penetrative, aggressive sense
of fracture, and is grittier than the latter’s. There is a quietness to the forms of the more
established artists, perhaps arising from the fact that they are not exclusively located or
Extracts from Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (editors), 2008
INTRODUCTION
David Brodie
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immersed within African metropolises. Their Diasporan experiences differ historically
and materially from the recent, embodied experiences of displacement which underlie
the works of, in particular, Machona and Nitegeka.
While the city is present in the work of Blom, it makes itself known through its
conspicuous absence rather than the artist’s active engagement. Blom’s gesture – his
withdrawal from public space - is seemingly austere. But this strategy allows him to move
deeply into his delight, and grappling, with the dialectic of studio practice and art history.
Blom’s alienation from the city marks him as an ‘anti-flâneur’ of sorts: The ‘stroller’
no longer experiences the street as a means of understanding or participating in the
city, but has rather committed himself to the (internal) loop of the studio. Surrounding
himself with literally hundreds of visual references, Blom is at once deeply concerned
with the history of art and supremely committed to the immediacy of the art object.
Bopape’s installations are hypercoloured, immersive environments. They reveal
space as an accumulation of emotional and phenomenological affects that exist on
the edge of incoherence. Objective processes of urban space-making – hyperfluidity,
aggregation, layering, disjunction – unfold in a deeply evocative and personal manner.
Bopape’s attempts to locate herself in space and time find their metaphoric measure
in the dance between surface and screen: lo-fi videos and roughly hewn photocollages
become an aesthetic of coding personal history, while her idiosyncratic bricolage
demands that we honour seemingly ordinary moments and banal objects. Bopape
constantly shifts between real space and mythical space, between the imagination and
the senses – reminding us that our experience of the present comprises more than the
sum of the parts of ‘concrete reality’.
A 1970s-era Mozambican radio tower, used to transmit information in rural areas, is
the key motif in Ferreira’s Cape Sonnets installation. A photograph of one such tower
led the artist to the work of the Russian Constructivist Gustav Klucis. In Ferreira’s
tower and Klucis’ original agitprop kiosks we may imagine the disembodied voices
of revolutionary celebration – and hear the warning bells of failed political ideals and
impending violence. In Ferreira’s work the rural African setting is interchanged with
that of urban Europe, and news broadcasts are replaced by the creolised Afrikaans
poetry of Austrian/South African poet Peter Blum (1925-1990). We are presented with
the voice of a citizen denied – a ghostly monument to a failed modern moment.
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The city is the central subject in several of Gaba’s works. In his most recent intervention,
Gaba gained permission from the mayor and the minister of arts and culture to declare
the city of Cotonou as the ‘Musée de l’Art de la Vie Active’ – Art Museum of Real Life.
This grand declaration included an opening address that highlighted the absence of a
museum in Benin’s economic capital, followed by a procession through the city of 30
white-clad figures wearing Gaba’s latest series of ‘tresses’. These headdresses, woven
from artificial hair braids, symbolise historical icons including Martin Luther King,
Kwame Nkrumah, Jesus Christ, Fela Kuti and King Guézo of Dahomey (now Benin).
Machona’s video work Untitled 2010 (Harare) presents us with an impeccably suited
figure dancing on a rooftop above the Harare skyline. With the Reserve Bank of
Zimbabwe and government offices in the background, this gargoyle performs a slowed
down and grotesque coming-of-age narrative of migration and economy. This body
of work re-imagines perceptions of migrant workers through the use of a traditional
Malawian (Chewa) masquerade known as Gule Wamkulu or Nyau. This rite of passage is
performed by young men as a means of expressing their identity. Masks and secrecy play
an important role in the practice’s ability to re-imagine self and negotiate a new sense
of group identity. Machona states: ‘My practice is interested in how those that migrate
into a society negotiate cultural and ethnic conflict. Through this Chewa tradition, which
I have appropriated and evolved, I aim to … challenge attitudes of intolerance towards
these newcomers. It is an attempt to reconstruct new identities based on economic and
occupational practices and not derogatory labels such as Makwerekwere.’
Mokgotho’s Look Who’s Laughing is a site-specific sound installation that appropriates
canned laughter – that convention of the televised sitcom – to activate a sense of
audience beyond the confines of the white cube. The gallery’s front window becomes
a ‘screen’ through which the public is invited to watch the ‘actors’ inside, the space
becoming the setting for a strange hybrid of reality TV and situational comedy. The
canned laugher bursts forth in jagged loops, demanding that we laugh at anything
and everything. It operates as a menacing soundtrack to a scene where the symbolic
relations of power and exchange are laid bare, where the actions and exchanges within
the gallery space are revealed as ‘performance’.
The character of the bricoleur appears again in Nitegeka’s work. The artist’s favoured
materials – wooden packing crates and black charcoal – speak of adaptation
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and survival. Nitegeka’s bricoleur is a more political persona than Bopape’s, his
improvisation a marker of migration and fracture. His work with the poetics of
displacement relates to a broader history of cities, especially African, which have
always experienced migrancy and displacement as an integral part of their modernity.
His interest in modernism and abstraction is ironic and self-proclaiming, and his work
can be read in relation to the language of the sublime: ‘behind aesthetic choices are
ethical respondents’, declared Pierre Soulages. High modernism offered the promise
of ‘bearing witness to the unrepresentable’; Nitegeka’s abstraction declares that there
are no more witnesses, only participants.
If the remarkable colours found in the paintings of Odita are partly a product of
memory and projection, then the unpredictable, vibrant forms that appear are
equally part of the artist’s ‘internal geographies’, with the paintings metaphorically
re-enacting moments of cultures coming together, clashing and dispersing. Engaging
the expressive potential of vibrant colour relations, spatial compressions and skewered
perspectives, Odita is at the forefront of examining how abstraction may speak for
both a personal and a cultural experience of dislocation.
Postscript
The photographer and catalogue designer have been discussing the difficulty of shooting
any one work in isolation. As we flick through the images on the camera we realise that
all shots include multiple works. There is a constant sense of looking at and through
works simultaneously. Canned laughter pierces interior space and breaks up Blum’s
sentences as they are broadcast from Ferreira’s tower. Nitegeka’s dark tunnel frames
Odita’s clashing forms. Shards of light from Bopape’s disco balls bounce off an alcove
that holds Blom’s canvas and oil. As we negotiate our movements through the city, so
too must we choose how we move through gallery space: with an eye that can take in
the whole scene and its context, while also having the capacity to focus on the singularity
and materiality of an object. There are moments when, if we do not ‘edit’ but attempt
to take it all in, the overlap and multiplicity may feel overwhelming, and we tumble into
cacophony. But cacophony is the jagged edge of this musical score. Paradoxically, the
all-at-oneness of processes, sounds and materials provides the appropriate setting for us
to notice that what has emerged – both singularly and collectively – is something utterly
original, that could never have been predicted or planned, and which speaks directly to
the symbolic life of the city at this very moment.
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NARE MOKGOTHO
Extract !om Will You Laugh for Me, Please? by Slavoj Zizek
On April 8, Charles R Douglass, the inventor of canned laughter – the artificial
jollity that accompanies comical moments on TV shows – died at 93 in Templeton,
California. In the early ’50s, he developed the idea to enhance or substitute live
audience reaction on television. This idea was realized in the guise of a keyboard
machine; by pressing on different keys, it was possible to produce different kinds of
laughter. First used for episodes of The Jack Benny Show and I Love Lucy, today its
modernized version is present everywhere …
When I come home in the evening too exhausted to engage in meaningful activity, I
just tune in to a TV sitcom; even if I do not laugh, but simply stare at the screen, tired
after a hard day’s work, I nonetheless feel relieved after the show. It is as if the TV
were literally laughing in my place, instead of me.
Yet before one gets used to canned laughter, there is nonetheless usually a brief
period of uneasiness. The first reaction is of mild shock, since it is difficult to accept
that the machine out there can “laugh for me.” Even if the program was “taped
in front of a live studio audience,” this audience manifestly did not include me,
and now exists only in mediated form as part of the TV show itself. However, with
time, one grows accustomed to this disembodied laughter, and the phenomenon
is experienced as “natural.” This is what is so unsettling about canned laughter: My
most intimate feelings can be radically externalized. I can literally laugh and cry
through another.
Look Who’s Laughing
2011
Speaker and sound
Duration 19 min 50 sec, looped
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ÂNGELA FERREIRA
Oor Monnemente GepraatPeter Blum
Wat spog jul so met julle monnement?
Hy’s groot ma’ lielak, en hy staan so kaal
da’ op sy koppie. Wie’t vir hom betaal –
al daai graniet en marmer en sement?
O ja, hy’s groter as ’n sirkustent –
ma’ waa’s die pêd, die mooi nooi innie saal?
die lekka clowns, die leeus in hul kraal?
Nei, daa’s g’n spots nie vir jou Kaapse kjend!
Hier het ons stetjoes, elkeen soos ’n mens:
ou Afduim-Murray, Hofmeyr met sy pens;
hier’s Jan van Riebeeck, bakgat aangetrek
in sy plus-fours; Cecil Rhodes wat jou wys
wa’ die reisiesbaan lê; en vorie Paalmint-hys
ou Mies Victôria met ha’ klein spanspek.
Kaapse Sonnette/Cape Sonnets
(Gump thatching lathes)
2011
Gump thatching lathes, screws,
megaphones, sound system
300 x 153 x 174 cm
Broadcast of Afrikaans and
English versions of Peter Blum’s
6 Kaapse Sonnette published
in Blum’s Steenbok Tot Poolsee
(Nationale Boekhandel, 1955).
English translation: Marji
Geldenhuys. Readers: Basil
Appollis (Afrikaans), Marji
Geldenhuys (English).
Duration 12 minutes, looped
All efforts have been made to obtain permission to reprint Blum’s sonnets. Due to the difficulties
in identifying a family member or institution entitled to give permission, we have failed to do so.
However, the printing of the material seemed important as it offers relevant support for the audio
component of the artwork.
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ZANDER BLOM
Alles is BoringJaco + Z-dog
Okay. Wel ek het wakker geword... Ons word wakker, en ons fokken besluit ons moet
gaan koffie drink. Ons maak koffie. Ons kry koffie en ons sê: Okay, wel ons moet ‘n
bietjie melk kry. Ons gaan koop melk, ons gaan gou die melkies koop.
Ek sê: Okay, wat gaan ons nou doen? Wel, nou moet ons gaan en ons moet gaan
fokken breakfast kry. Ons gaan kry breakfast maar daar’s niemand daar nie. So, dan
gaan ons na ‘n ander plek toe. Ons gaan fokken Parkhurst toe. Al wat in Parkhurst is,
is ou tannies en fokken... ryk bitches. Okay fine, Parkhurst gaan nie werk nie.
Toe besluit ons... Um, ons sal, maybe like um, Greenside toe gaan, want daar’s daai
Vida, en Zander het een keer ‘n hot chick gesien by die Vida. So kom ons gaan na die
Vida toe. Okay cool.
Daar’s niemand by die Vida nie.
Okay wat nou? Well toe besluit ons, ons moet maybe, uh... Linden toe gaan. Ons
gaan Linden toe en al wat daar is, is fokken agro, emo motherfuckers. Toe gaan
ons.. - Brand my arm! - Ja: “Brand my... brand my met jou sigaret!”, sulke shit jy weet?
Whatever.
Toe besluit ons. Fok Dit, ons gaan Kaap toe!
Ek sê...
Ek sê, Z- dog...
Ons kan nie so aan gaan nie.
Kom ons gaan Kaap toe.
En ons klim op daai vliegtuig. Sonder sletting hand luggage, man.
Ons is so hardcore, ons klim sonder handluggage op
en hulle sê: “Ons het nie meer Vodka of Gin op die vliegtuig nie.
All works Untitled, 2011
Page 15, left to right
Ink and graphite on paper
75 x 104.5cm
Oil and graphite on linen
149 x 198cm
Page 16-17, clockwise from left
Ink and graphite on paper
37 x 52.5cm
Oil and graphite on linen
168.5 x 238cm
Ink and graphite on paper
74.5 x 57 cm
Oil and graphite on linen
75 x 105cm
Oil and graphite on linen
56 x 76cm
Page 19, clockwise from left
Oil and graphite on linen
75 x 107cm
Ink and graphite on paper
99 x 70cm
Ink and graphite on paper
56 x 74.5cm
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Julle sal moet bier drink teen fokken 30 000 voet in die lug.”
Oh-o...
En ons kom in die Kaap, en dis fokken boring.
En ek sê:
Ek sê, Z-dog...
Z-dog, luister vir my:
ons kan nie so aangaan nie.
Kom ons gaan Durban toe.
Ek sê, Z-dog...
kom ons klim op ‘n vliegtuig en gaan Durban toe.
En ons klim op daai vliegtuig en ons vlieg fokken vinnig Durban toe.
Ons kom in Durban aan, en dis fokken boring.
Ek sê, Fok Dit, Z-dog, kom ons huur ‘n fokken bakkie.
Kom ons huur ‘n bakkie en ons ry by die kus op tot ons fucked-up is.
Hy sê: “Sure let’s do it”.
Ons ry Umhlanga toe en dis fokken boring,
Ons ry fokken Ballito toe, nee wag wag.
Nee Ballito was befok.
-Hahaha-
Ons ry Umdloti to en dis boring,
Ons ry... Ballito toe... was amazing.
Ons ry Shaka’s Rock toe en dis fokken boring
En ek sê, Z-dog!
Ek kan nie so aangaan nie, man.
Kom ons ry Swaziland toe!
Kom vat hierdie kar en ons fok deur Afrika.
-In ons fokken moer in!-
En ons gaan Europa toe,
Kom ons gaan fokken Holland toe!
En ons vat daai fokken bakkie en ons ry daai bitch al die pad tot in Holland
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En ons kom in Holland aan...
en dis fokken boring
Ek sê,
Ek sê... Z-dog!
Ons kan nie so aangaan nie, man.
Kom ons gaan fokken New York toe
En ons klim op ‘n vliegtuig en ons gaan fokken New York toe op ‘n private jet met
cocaine en bitches.
En ons kom by JFK,
En ons vat ‘n Limo
Ons gaan fokken New York toe,
Ons gaan na die nice-ste deel, whatever dit is,
En dis fokken boring.
Ek sê Z-dog!
Fok dit kom ons gaan Suid-Amerika toe.
Ons gaan Ecuador toe, dis boring
Ons gaan Brazil toe, dis Boring
Argentinië, boring
Rusland, boring
China, boring
Thailand, boring
Alles is fokken boring
Alles is boring!
Toe se ek: Z- dog!
Fok Dit.
Kom ons gaan huis toe.
Toe gaan ons huis toe...
En dit was befok!
Alles is Boring, Die Eerste Leerstelling, 2009
© Jaco van Schalkwyk en Zander Blom
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DINEO SESHEE BOPAPE
Tuesday, January 11, 2011from oct2010 artist statement
My work engages the poetics of the performative (cultural) object. I indulge in the
poetic elasticity & materiality of things (objects, space, event, memory, time...).
The object-based installations exist in a site ephemerally,
performing as temporal situations. (Perhaps sites in which a proposed event is to
happen/or not)
together with the videos, they collectively produce a site for a (semi-contained)
disrupted narrative, an orchestral discord of small stories performing as poems or
fragments of a language, sites of memory that are continuously dismantled.
these sites recall other things/events/stories/situations relating to their function and
place within the everyday or in language....(as with the birds & flowers in …microwave
cosmic… video: in English slang, women are sometimes referred to as birds or flowers
and as ‘sweet’).
Yet central to the character of the proposed narrative/sites is a thing that cannot
really be accounted for. Perhaps a time lapse…
…A feeling resulting from some type of affectation, the application of some ‘special’
effect(s) – (decorative icing), perfume, something in excess (which could also be
a lack)... as with the spatial relations between objects or that between image and
sound within particular video frames.
One of my primary concerns is how to tell a story, how to de/re/construct a story...
how to tell an old story anew. How to forget, and how to remember. There is
‘nothing’ really…a vacuum that one has to account for. It is a situation over-saturated
with ‘it’. A memory erased, or in the process of being erased or reshuffled… as in/
post a traumatic situation: When ‘sense’ is somewhat distorted and there emerge
some holes (spaces of ‘nothing’, [and things that mean nothing]: that fail to occupy a
space within the visible/sensible).
I am interested in video time and in some sort of a decay of a linearity -
There is something about mediation and artifice, things acting as things/things
acting as props around which multiple stories dance/and are entangled. There is
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also something about ‘things’ becoming motifs or masks of themselves - like flower
prints on a piece of fabric/lace… a certain type of virtual life/space…that I am fond of
exploring further,
Something about video space, which I have ‘begun’ to explore in my last show “long
live the immaterial…effect no.55” (in reference to Yves Klein) the blue has become
something I have been interested in - the blue of the sky, the blue of the bluescreen
- a space in which anything can be projected, the blue of church uniforms….
bluescreening/green screening, masking, saturating… editing.
I have also been thinking of ideas of the ideal, the politics of aesthetics: afro
diasporic aesthetics: those of various classes: within Africa or globally, a politic of
taste (?), the use of stock images of our global culture(s) - ie sunsets, nature’s beauty,
love, the family, the hero, the history, the icon, the self, the collective cultural archive,
motifs, pattern(s), mediation and representation. I am interested in pursuing these
thoughts further through my work. But my primary concern I’d say is the question
of representation.
queen of necklace sketch II part 3
2010
Mixed media
365 x 290 x 170cm
feelin cosmic
2008
SD digital video
Duration 1 min 34 sec, sound
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SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA
Notes on Protection and Pragmatism: Addressing Administrative Failures in South A!ica’s Refugee Status Determination Decisions
A study report, Protection and Pragmatism: Addressing Administrative Failures in
South Africa’s Refugee Status Determination Decisions, undertaken by the Forced
Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand, based on a
review of 324 rejection letters collected from asylum seekers at all five permanent
Refugee Reception Offices in South Africa, identified the following irregularities:
• Status determination was hardly operating.
• Generic rejections were issued which bore little or no consideration of the specifics
of individuals’ claims.
• Many rejection letters contained outdated and inaccurate information and often
about the wrong claimant.
• The presence of numerous identical letters revealed that individualised decision-
making was not taking place.
• The fundamental decision of whether it is safe for an individual to return to his or
her country of origin relied on the unthinking cutting and pasting of material.
“Most of the decisions reviewed were in essence generic rejections that could have
been issued without any status determination interview ever taking place; they were
based solely on the asylum seekers’ country of origin. They were characterised by
errors of law, an absence of reasons, a lack of individualised decision-making, and
a widespread failure to apply the mind.” (Roni Amit, Protection and Pragmatism:
Addressing Administrative Failures in South Africa’s Refugee Status Determination
Decisions, 2010)
Tunnel IV
2011
Paint on wood
370 x 450 x 250 cm
Pages 26-27
Installation views of Tunnel IV
with (p27) Black Subjects: Studio
Study II (2011, paint on wood,
136.5 x 111cm) and Black Subjects:
Studio Study I (2011, paint on
wood, 9 panels, 355 x 200 cm)
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27
Black Subjects vs Tunnel III
2011
Paint and oil on wood
2 panels, 238 x 122.5cm each
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Black Subjects: Studio Study I
2011
Paint on wood
9 panels, 355 x 200cm
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MESCHAC GABA
Projet parade icônes historiques dans le Musée de l’Art de la Vie ActiveMeschac Gaba (extract from artist’s statement)
Ce projet icône historique permet de revisiter l’histoire de notre monde en se basant
sur les grands hommes qui ont marqué notre temps, notre monde et qui ne sont
plus. Ils seront représentés par leur icône ou des symboles qui les représentent ou
qui peuvent les représenter réalisés en perruques. Cela deviendra des perruques
iconiques portées par des acteurs ou des modèles habillés en blanc qui vont défiler
dans la ville de Cotonou que je déclare le MUSEE DE LA VIE ACTIVE.
Ce serait un parcours pour montrer la beauté de la ville et aussi le micro macro
économie que je considère comme les pièces d’art contemporain du MUSEE DE
LA VIE ACTIVE que la ville de Cotonou est devenue par ma déclaration. Le micro
macro économie représente la survie de jour après jour des habitants de cette ville.
Il faut créer pour survivre. Quand on circule dans la ville de Cotonou on voit des
installations partout. C’est comme un musée à ciel ouvert. Je me suis beaucoup
inspiré de cette ville de Cotonou. C’est pour cela que je la déclare le MUSEE DE LA
VIE ACTIVE et c’est pour pouvoir voir cette ville que je propose ce parcours avec
les perruques icônes historiques qui représente la première pièce historique de
ce musée. Le micro macro économie est la deuxième pièce qui est une pièce d’art
contemporain que le parcours ou parade va faire visiter.
Dans la ville de Cotonou comme capitale économique du Bénin il n’y a pas un musée
ethnographique, historique ou d’art contemporain. La déclarer MUSEE DE LA VIE
ACTIVE va faire penser à la création d’un musée réel pour les artistes et l’histoire de
cette ville. Les deux pièces que je montre dans ce musée sont:
1. Les perruques icônes historiques portées par des modèles.
2. Le micro macro économie développé par les habitants de la ville.
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Musée de l'Art de la Vie Active
2010/11
Video of performance, Cotonou, Benin
Duration 9 min 38 sec
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Courtesy of Meschac Gaba, Laboratorio Art Contemporain and Galleria Continua.
Produced with Laboratorio Art Contemporain and Galleria Continua in co-operation with ZKM | Center
for Art and Media Karlsruhe for the exhibition The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds after 1989 at ZKM
(17 September 2011 – 19 February 2012)
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ODILI DONALD ODITA
Colour
should not be submissive
It cannot be subjugated
It will not obey
It should not play nice
Colour is unruly
It is not for the faint of heart
It can be hard and strong
It can be bold
It can be clear and true
It can also lie
It can trick and deceive us all
Colour does what it wants
It misbehaves
But most importantly,
Colour can change our minds
Odili Donald Odita, 2010
Echo
2010
Acrylic on canvas
228 x 178cm
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Television (Red, White, Blue, Black)
2009/10
Acrylic on plexiglass
4 panels, each 101.6 x 127cm
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GERALD MACHONA
Extracts !om Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Monetary Policy Statement, January 2011 by Dr G Gono, Governor
3. Inflation
3.36 In 2010, the economy continued to experience low and stable inflation, against
the background of sound macroeconomic policies and general improvement in
the supply side of the economy.
3.37 Zimbabwe’s inflation remains well below levels prevailing in other countries in
the region, reflecting macroeconomic stability
4. Multinational Banks
4.1 The Reserve Bank has noted with serious concern the continued aloof attitude
by some multinational banks towards the need to actively support the domestic
economy.
4.2 In some cases, this aloof attitude has been explicitly exhibited through the
extension of the illegal international sanctions on Zimbabwe by these banks,
taking instructions from their international parentages.
4.3 Under these misguided practices, some internationally owned domestic banks
are deliberately declining loans to Zimbabwean companies and individuals
appearing on the illegal EU/USA sanctions lists.
4.4 Equally retrogressive, the internationally owned banks are paralysing the money
and capital markets by sterilizing huge domestic deposits which funds they are
not passing on to the productive sectors of the economy through lending.
4.5 The low levels of overall loans to deposit ratios at these banks are a
development which is constraining the economy’s recovery.
4.6 Over the outlook period, the Reserve Bank will ensure that these retrogressive
attitudes and practices are decisively dealt with in the interest of laying a solid
foundation for sustainable financial intermediation in the economy. Untitled 2010 (Harare)
2010
Digital video
Duration 4 min 3 sec
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Untitled
2010
Digital print on photographic paper
83.5 x 55.5cm
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Amai Doenda kuJoburg ne Mari Ye-bepa 1
(Mother I Am Going to Joburg with Paper Money 1)
2010
Digital print on photographic paper
83.5 x 55.5cm
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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
ZANDER BLOM was born in 1982 in Pretoria, and lives in Johannesburg. His most
recent solo show, Paintings. Drawings, Photos., took place at Michael Stevenson, Cape
Town (2010). Group shows include Ampersand at Daimler Contemporary, Berlin (2010);
Why Not?, Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin (2009); Disguise: The art of attracting and deflecting
attention, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2008); and .ZA: Young art from South
Africa, Palazzo Delle Papesse, Siena, Italy (2008). Blom was included in the Younger
than Jesus artists’ directory published by the New Museum, New York, in 2009. He was
awarded a Red Bull House of Art residency in São Paulo, also in 2009.
DINEO SESHEE BOPAPE was born in 1981 in Polokwane. She is a 2007 graduate of
De Ateliers in Amsterdam and in 2010 completed an MFA at Columbia University,
New York. In 2008 she won the MTN New Contemporaries Award, and in 2009 was
included on Younger than Jesus, the first Generational triennial at the New Museum,
New York. Group shows include Ampersand, Daimler Contemporary, Berlin (2010); Act
IX: Let Us Compare Mythologies, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2010); and Rebelle: Art and
feminism 1969-2009, Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, The Netherlands (2009).
ÂNGELA FERREIRA was born in 1958 in Maputo, and lives in Lisbon. She represented
Portugal at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include Carlos
Cardoso - Straight to the Point at Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon (2011); Werdmuller
Centre and Other Works, Michael Stevenson, Cape Town (2010); and Hard Rain
Show, Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon, and Centro de Arte Contemporãnea La
Crieé, Rennes (2009). Group exhibitions include Propaganda by Monuments at the
Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), Cairo (2011); Utopia and Monument II: On
virtuosity and the public sphere, steirischer herbst festival, Graz, Austria (2010); the
Bucharest Biennale (2010); and Modernologies: Contemporary artists researching
modernity and modernism, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2009) .
MESCHAC GABA was born in 1961 in Cotonou, Benin, and lives in Rotterdam. He studied
at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His survey exhibition
Museum of Contemporary African Art & More travelled to the Museum de Paviljoens
in Almere, the Nertherlands; the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany; and the
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Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, in 2009/10. Group
exhibitions include The Global Africa Project at the Museum of Arts and Design in
New York (2011), and the Liverpool Biennial (2010).
GERALD MACHONA was born in Zimbabwe, and lives in Grahamstown. He has a BAFA
from the University of Cape Town (2009) and is currently pursuing his MFA at Rhodes
University. He held a solo exhibition of recent work at the AVA, Cape Town, in 2010.
Group exhibitions include US II at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
(2010), and the Refugee Day exhibition at the Cape Creative Centre, Cape Town (2010).
NARE MOKGOTHO was born in 1986 in Johannesburg, and continues to live there. He
graduated with a BAFA (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2009. He
is part of the performance art collaborative MADEYOULOOK. He held a side gallery
exhibition at Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, in 2010. Group exhibitions include
Postdated Solvency at Outlet Project Room, Johannesburg (2010); Absa L’Atelier
(2009); and Sasol New Signatures (2008, Runner-Up Prize).
SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA was born in Burundi in 1983, and lives in Johannesburg.
He is currently completing his MFA at the University of the Witwatersrand. He
was awarded a Fondation Jean-Paul Blachère prize at the Dakar Biennale in 2010,
and won the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts in 2010. He has a solo exhibition
at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2011, and held small solo shows at
Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, in 2010 and 2009. Group exhibitions include Space,
Ritual, Absence: Liminality in South African visual art at FADA Gallery, University of
Johannesburg (2011); Where are you? Voyages dans l’espace, Galerie Beim Engel,
Luxemburg (2011); and Time’s Arrow, Johannesburg Art Gallery (2010).
ODILI DONALD ODITA was born in 1966 in Enugu, Nigeria, and lives in Philadelphia,
where he teaches painting at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Recent
solo shows include Body and Space at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2010);
Perspectives 169, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Texas (2009) and Television,
Project Series, Ulrich Museum at Wichita State University, Kansas. Group exhibitions
include ARS 11 at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2011); The Global
Africa Project, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2010); and the 52nd Venice
Biennale (2007).
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JOHANNESBURG62 Juta StreetBraamfontein 2001Postnet Suite 281Private Bag x9Melville 2109T +27 (0)11 326 0034/41F +27 (0)86 275 1918
CAPE TOWNBuchanan Building160 Sir Lowry RoadWoodstock 7925PO Box 616Green Point 8051T +27 (0)21 462 1500F +27 (0)21 462 1501
Catalogue 56May 2011
Cover View of the city of Johannesburg from Juta Street, Braamfontein
Editor Sophie PerryerDesign Gabrielle GuyPhotography Mario TodeschiniPrinting Hansa Print, Cape Town
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