Goodman Gallery is at the forefront of contemporary art in South Africa. Its focus is on artists – from South Africa, the greater African Continent, and other countries – who engage in a dialogue with the African context.
Goodman News
Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin's Holy Bible published June 2013
Violence, calamity and the absurdity of war are recorded extensively within The Archive of Modern Conflict, the largest photographic collection of its kind … Full Story
Siemon Allen wins Guggenheim Fellowship
Siemon Allen has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts for 2013. In its eighty-ninth annual competition for the Uni… Full Story
mounir fatmi shortlisted for the 3rd edition of the Jameel Prize
mounir fatmi has been shortlisted for the 3rd edition of the Jameel Prize, to be exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London from 11 December 2013 unt… Full Story
Jodi Bieber at Museum Goch
Jodi Bieber’s first major solo exhibition in Germany – Between Darkness and Light – which debuted at Stadthaus Ulm in 2012, travels to Museum Goch th… Full Story
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+27 21 462 7573 || cpt@goodman-gallery.com
Structures
Goodman Gallery Cape Town presents Structures, a group exhibition bringing together works by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Carlos Garaicoa, David Goldblatt, Mikhael Subotzky and Jeremy Wafer. The exhibition is concerned with structures both monumental and mundane, and aims to examine the ways in which they inform the environments we inhabit, and what they suggest about the underlying systems that give rise to them.
David Goldblatt’s series South Africa: The Structure of Things Then deals in part with the architectural landscape of Apartheid South Africa and the relationship between the governing ideology of the time and its physical manifestations across the country. Mikhael Subotzky’s ongoing Security series is in some ways a contemporary response, documenting the surveillance cameras, security huts and electrified fences of the modern suburban landscape, and examining the links between poverty, race, crime and the effects of a legacy of discriminatory spatial planning.
Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer is a book of what Brecht called ‘photo-epigrams’: newspaper and magazine clippings of images of the Second World War, each captioned with a 4-line poem. In Poor Monuments, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin juxtapose pages from Brecht’s original book with images of modern conflicts (in particular the so-called War on Terror) to look at the changing (and sometimes unchanging) narrative of war, and the systems responsible for crafting and disseminating it.
Cuban-born Carlos Garacioa’s Para transformer la palabra política en hechos, finalmente II (To transform political speech into facts, finally) takes as its subject the city as a site for collective memory and imagination, while a new floor sculpture by Jeremy Wafer contemplates abstract and physical notions of space, and the degree to which a space is produced by the structures it contains.
06 June - 13 July 2013
Jabulani Dhlamini / Umama
Art Basel Hong Kong 2013
+27 11 788 1113 || jhb@goodman-gallery.com
Sue Williamson / All Our Mothers
All Our Mothers, Sue Williamson’s new show at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, celebrates the strength of the extraordinary women who helped to bring this country to freedom, and examines the generation gap between these wise, iconic veterans of the struggle, and their granddaughters, the confident young born frees.
Williamson’s multi-screen video installation, There’s something I must tell you portrays six intense conversations in which the older women recall important moments of their histories and their lives, and the younger women respond, and present their own forthright views on living in South Africa right now. Stories of exile, of the women’s march, of imprisonment evoke the ultimate question: Was it all worth it? The answers are sometimes surprising.
In making the series, Williamson worked with such key figures as the charismatic Amina Cachalia, to whom this exhibition is dedicated, the distinguished Dr Brigalia Bam, the 101 year old Rebecca Kotane, Carollne Motsoaledi, widow of Rivonia triallist Elias Motsoaledi, Ilse Fischer, activist daughter of Afrikaner lawyer Bram Fischer, and liberation movement heroine Vesta Smith
Amina Cachalia and Caroline Motsoaledi were two of the women who were portrayed in Williamson’s portfolio of etchings/screenprints of the 1980s, A Few South Africans, a series that was reproduced as widely distributed postcards at a time when images of these women were rarely seen in the press. Today, those postcards and prints are in such museum collections as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the V & A Museum in London, and the Walther Collection, Germany.
Accompanying the video installation There’s something I must tell you is a new series of more than twenty photographic portraits of women taken over a thirty year period.
There’s something I must tell you originated when Williamson was a Rockefeller Foundation Creative Arts Fellow in Bellagio, Italy in 2011 and received a phone call from Amina Cachalia to contribute to a book at the very moment the artist was thinking she would like to interview and photograph Amina again, and to reconsider the important contribution of that generation almost 20 years into the new democracy. And so the new project began.
The artist is greatly indebted to the National Arts Council of South Africa, the Goethe Institute and Business Arts South Africa for support for All Our Mothers. The producer of There’s something I must tell you is Monkey Films’ Clare van Zyl. The exhibition opens at Goodman Gallery on May 16 and ends on June 15.

