I think when he's drinking he's drowning some riots, 2009, oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm

Greetings

With the third Joburg Art Fair and the Bag Factory’s first three-month residency and board meeting of the year behind us, the year is now in full swing. Welcome to our March/April email bulletin, updating you on what’s been going down at the ever-inventive urban studio collective on the Western edge of this ‘World Class African City’ as it rocks on towards the heat of the global spotlight in June/July 2010.

Mary Wafer graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2007. Her large-scale paintings capture the eerie melancholy of emptied out urban spaces. Last year she had a solo exhibition, The frontier is never somewhere else, at Brodie/Stevenson, and this year she will be exhibiting in solo shows at the KZNSA in Durban and at Blank Projects in Cape Town. 

In her KZNSA exhibition, No Closer to the Truth, she presents two new series of paintings. The first series of small and intimate works are portraits and still lives of mercenaries and gun nuts and their weapon collections and kit. The second series is an investigation into Durban architecture and the harbour. 

‘One of the recurring threads in my work is the notion of visibility and invisibility, concrete and conceptual visibility, evidence of citizenship, ways of belonging to and possessing the physical and imagined spaces we occupy,’ says Wafer. ‘Painting is a conceptual practice that operates as a platform for investigating social and urban realities. It offers the possibility of both building up complex layers of meaning and signification, and at the same time the possibility of subtraction and distillation, enabling suggestions of real and imaged absences and presences.’

Nadine Hutton participated in the group show, The spirit is not an idea, says the penguin, which opened on 18 March at Co-op gallery in Braamfontein. Other participating artists included Maaike Bakker, Jan Henri Booyens, Nils Eichberg, Dawood Petersen, Cameron Platter and Bongani Khoza.


VIDEO GAMES: A screen shot from Nadine Hutton Skirt Invaders piece at Co-op in Braamfontein

Thenjiwe Nkosi is part of a group show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, entitled Time’s Arrow: Live readings of the JAG collection, curated by Anthea Buys, and featuring works by Alexandra Makhlouf, Alexander Opper, Chaaya Dubashi, James Sey, Tegan Bristow, Serge Alain Nitegeka, Alex Dodd, and others.


AERIAL IMPRESSION: Thenjiwe Nkosi’s Gallery paintings on the Time’s Arrow show
PICTURE: SIMON MARCUS

Time’s Arrow is a time-based exhibition project that looks at the relationship between the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s (JAG) collection of artworks and what it represents for us today. How is this collection is viewed, read, imagined, forgotten, represented, buried and dug up again years later? ‘Time’s Arrow explores the relationship between the history of the JAG, its collection, and the history of the city of Johannesburg,’ said Buys. ‘Crucial to the exhibition is the question of how we read archives – what kind of authority is given to recorded and retained data? 

To what extent can the archive be read according to its omissions? We need to ask can new works, or new knowledge more generally, alter the ways in which we understand what came before? In other words, can works from the past be given new voices in the present through juxtaposition and layering in display?” 
The exhibition runs until 18 April 2010.

ARCHIVE FEVER: Thenjiwe Nkosi rearranging the display case from the JAG's Foundation Collection room with some previously un-displayed photographs and newspaper clippings dug up in the JAG library archives
PICTURE: ANTHEA BUYS

Sam Nhlengethwa exhibited a large-scale collage work at the Goodman Gallery booth at the Joburg Art Fair, which pays homage to construction workers around the country, particularly those who are working on major projects like the Gautrain.  He also showed a fresh new series of jazzy, black and white prints – close up portraits of John Coltrane and Miles Davis – produced in collaboration with master printer Mark Attwood at the Artists’ Press in White River, Mpumalanga.

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Our most recent residency artists, Su Tomesen from the Netherlands (sutomesen.nl), Beate Spitzmueller from Germany (beate-spitzmueller.de) and Pauline Marcelle from Domenica (paulinemarcelle.com) exhibited work arising from their three-month residency in Johannesburg at their Losing Virginity exhibition, which ran from 25 to 31 March at the Bag Factory.

David Koloane Award winner, Senzo Shabangu, presented an open studio during the exhibition.

PALIMPSEST: A work by Beate Spitzmueller exhibited at the Bag Factory as part of the recent Losing Virginity exhibition.

We will be joined in April and May by Pamela Phatismo Sunstrum (Botswana/USA) and Reuben Abels and Iris Vetter (Holland).

Iris Vetter <irisvetter.com> is a photographer based in Amsterdam, who studied at the Academy of the Arts Constantijn Huygens, Kampen, and the Academy St Joost, Breda. Recent exhibitions include Everyday is not like everyday: The 120th day, Queensday, NL, Foam at TNT, Amsterdam. 

‘As a photographer I find I am balancing on the border between art and photography. I am primarily interested in social interactions and human behaviour,’ writes Vetter. ‘Up until now I have mostly worked in my own personal environment. Photographing my own “backyard” so to speak. I deliberately chose to do this because I didn’t want to be “dazzled by the exotic”, instead learning to look closely at aspects of Dutch culture and human behavior. At this moment I feel that I would like widen my view and open up my work to a different perspective.

Reuben Abels is also based in Amsterdam. Since 1999 he has been working together with Adam Oostenbrink in an atelier called DesignArbeid. He studied at Academy of the Arts Constantijn Huygens, Kampen, KHB Weissensee, Berlin and the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, as well as participating in an exchange programme with the University of Central England, Birmingham. Recent exhibitions have included 5’45” mother thinks 15’ at de Ring in Epe, M2 in P////AKT in Amsterdam and What makes Berlin addictive in Shanghai. 

‘I am primarily interested in what I like to call Public Participatory Art. By this I mean starting a project and creating an artwork together with the inhabitants of a given communtiy (locals),’ writes Abels. ‘More and more I come to the conclusion that creating an artwork not only means to create a reflective piece of work. It can also help in designing social cohesion, create self-awareness of the participants and result in a feeling of ownership of communities. I am searching for the border between public participation and autonomous, independent art. In the Netherlands this approach and way of working is still very much to be developed! Artists generally assume that their own independence is lost as soon as they start working in co-operations with audiences or locals. In South Africa there are more artists active and doing research on these kinds of public participatory artforms…’

Pamela Phatismo Sunstrum <pamelaphatismosunstrum.com>was born in Botswana and lives in Baltimore in the United States. She obtained her BA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she is currently an adjunct professor. Recent group shows have included Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Images since 1970 at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, Georgia, and New InSight at Art Chicago. 

‘In my work I allude to my own experiences in travel and migration as a way of understanding my shifting, trans-national cultural identity,’ writes Sunstrum. ‘I am interested in cultural residue: those things we carry that connect us to a place or to a person; those traces that are communicated – as story, as ritual, as “mouth music” – and are transmitted between bodies and across landscapes. In my work I respond to these moments by replicating myself – creating simultaneous or alternate selves and simultaneous worlds in order to gaze at myself… and give myself things to keep or carry, receive or transmit. My work often navigates between and negotiates with pre-conceived notions of blackness and Africanity.’ 

Border Farm, an exhibition conceptualized by Thenjiwe Nkosi, which features videos and writing by migrant farm works on the South African/Zimbabwe national border, opens at the Bag Factory at 5.30pm on Wednesday, 14 April 2010. The show features works by Nkosi, Raymond Marlowe and the Maroi Farm Art and Drama Group.

Nkosi has been participating in a group project called Living In-Between, based in Musina, in Limpopo Province – the last town before the Zimbabwean border. Due to its ongoing history as a mining town surrounded by several productive farms, Musina’s population is largely comprised of migrants. The community of Maroi farm is made up of both Zimbabwean and South African farm workers. 

Through a series of workshops held by Nkosi and Marlowe, along with Tapiwa Marovatsanga, Michelle Harris and Daniel Browde, a group of farm workers from Maroi Farm have been taking photographs, filming and writing about their experiences. Through their experiences one sees a confluence of contemporary issues and questions about national borders and their impact on individuals and communities – particularly communities under pressure. The idea of belonging is central to how self and group identities operate in situations of dislocation.


CROSSING OVER: Thenjiwe Nkosi’s Border Farm exhibition opens at the Bag Factory on 14 April 2010 and runs until 5 May

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LIVES OF ANIMALS: Joachim Schonfeldt's The Four Musicians installation for which composer and Bag Factory administrator James French composed the music

Four Musicians (moo, roar, chee-ow and yeeeoh), a sculptural piece by former Bag Factory studio artist Joachim Schonfeldt, with music by composer (and Bag Factory administrator) James French has been making waves on the international art circuit. The work was originally shown at the 7th Gwangju Biennale in 2008, then at the Joburg Art Fair in 2009. And it has just been featured at the Armory Show 2010 in New York.

Esteemed critic Okwui Enwezor described the piece as: ‘a musical piece to be performed by musicians. The backdrop is important. It is the inspiration for the composition of the musical piece, the gusto of its performance and also its “speech”.’

Four Musicians (moo, roar, chee-ow & yeeeoh) is based on the German folklore tale of the Bremen Town Musicians, as recorded by the Brothers Grimm. In the original tale, a cat, a donkey, a rooster and a dog, past the primes of their lives, leave their masters’ homes, band together and set off on an adventure to Bremen, proving that the whole is stronger than the sum of its parts.

The tale has been retold and interpreted many times in popular culture (film, animation, theatre, literature) and has been represented by a number of contemporary artists (including Maurizio Cattelan).

Schonfeldt’s sculpture substitutes the donkey, dog, cat and rooster with taxidermied animals: an indigenous Nguni cow, a lioness and a vulture – all symbols of African pride and power. The sculpture functions as a backdrop to a performance of original music by James French performed by four musicians playing a selection of cornet, trumpet, trombone, french horn, baritone or tuba. These wind instruments inject crazy life back into the stuffed creatures.

The Bag Factory is part of the Triangle Arts Trust, a worldwide network of artists and projects, including artist-led workshops and independent organisations. Through its activities, Triangle encourages experimentation, artist mobility, exchange and fresh thinking, with an emphasis on process and professional development.

Since 1982 Triangle Arts Trust has helped organise workshops, studios and galleries in places including:  Bangladesh, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Ghana, India, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Pakistan, South Africa, Trinidad, UK, USA and many others.

For more information on Triangle Arts Trust please see www.trianglearts.org or contact info@trianglearts.org.

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Thapong – Botswana: www.artshost.org/thapong
Kuona Trust – Kenya: www.kuonatrust.org
Tulipamwe Workshop – Namibia: www.artshost.org/tulipamwe
Aftershave Workshop – Nigeria: www.aftershaveworkshop.org
Greatmore Studios – South Africa (Cape Town): www.greatmoreart.org
Rafiki Art Trust – Tanzania: www.artshost.org/rafiki
Ngoma Workshop – Uganda: www.artshost.org/ngoma
Insaka Workshop – Zambia: www.artshost.org/insaka
Rockston Studios – Zambia: www.rockstonart.org
Surprise Art Centre – Zimbabwe: www.rockstonart.org
Batapata Workshop – Zimbabwe: www.artshost.org/batapata
Wasla Workshop – Egypt: www.artshost.org/wasla
pArtage Workshop – Mauritius: www.artshost.org/partage
Sansa Workshop – Ghana: www.artshost.org/sansa

Funding provided by: the Ford Foundation, the National Lottery Development Trust Fund,
the National Arts Council, the Mellon Foundation and Robert Loder

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