Andrianomearisoa Joel

Madagascan-born and Paris-based artist Joël Andrianomearisoa will present his first solo exhibition in South Africa – A Perfect Kind of Love – at the Goodman Gallery Project Space at Arts on Main. The Goodman Gallery will also present a performance by Andrianomearisoa at SA Fashion Week’s Winter 2011 Designer Collections show, which takes place at Arts on Main in October.
A versatile artist of consummate talent, Andrianomearisoa qualified as an architect at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. Initially drawn to the multifaceted nature of architectural practice, Andrianomearisoa became increasingly engaged with other modes of cultural production, pursuing a career as a couturier before shifting his practice to the visual arts. He consequentially works across various media, avoiding categorisation and incorporating performance, video and large-scale installation in his work.
A Perfect Kind of Love continues Andrianomearisoa’s ongoing exploration of eroticism and desire, his negotiations with a love of a darker kind. Love is rarely perfect, and perfection is not always lovable, and Andrianomearisoa’s engagement with this contradiction is what forms the raw material of the show. How does one speak of love, or understand love in the age of reason, or amidst the cynicism of this current moment? Romantic love is never just a private declaration or an emotional contract between two individuals – it is a political battlefield. Sexual bodies engaging in acts of love are at times also sites of violence, disease, moral judgment and commodification, and are subjected to legislation, marginalisation and
criminalisation.
It is from within this context that Andrianomearisoa longingly declares Darling you can make my dreams come true if you say you love me too, an installation consisting of 150 small wall-mounted mirrors – each a reflective dream, a yearning for the impossible, or a plea for this world to fade and for something more beautiful and utopian to emerge. Veering from expressions of primal, animalistic lust to whispers of restraint and bondage, Andrianomearisoa’s installations chart an intense emotional journey that is both autobiographically specific and universally symbolic. The work speaks of secret, private intimacies while acknowledging other, more open and public expressions of love and sexuality.
For Andrianomearisoa the body itself is a central aspect to a negotiation of space and ideas within his work. The body becomes fundamental to the artist’s deconstructivist tendencies, alluding to volatility and contained chaos. It is through performance that Andrianomearisoa expresses this aspect of his creative intent most poignantly. He will in this light be presenting Cut Cute at SA Fashion Week, a performance involving several participants who will be subject to a layering of various textiles and materials. The final “cut” of their outfits will be result of a dramatic creative process that has been openly disclosed to the audience, offering what art critic Virginie Andriamirado refers to as “infinite propositions”. “To build or deconstruct, to dress or undress, to fill or empty, to wrinkle or fold, to light up or turn off – Andrianomearisoa is situated between these opposing forces that, according to him, combine rather than conflict. In these paradoxical connections, the works offer infinite propostions,” states Andriamirado.
Andrianomearisoa’s work not only deconstructs modernist ideals such as “purity of form,” and “truth to materials”, but also recalls French curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics. “I like art that allows its audience to exist in the space opened up by it,” explains Bourriaud. “For me, art is a space of images, objects, and human beings. Relational aesthetics is a way of considering the productive existence of the viewer of art, the space of participation that art can offer.” Andrianomearisoa employs this approach in his use of the body as one of the many materials that he integrates and layers within his work, ultimately questioning the way in which our bodies are used and manipulated in a broader context. Cut Cute will take place on Fox street outside Arts on Main on 2 October 2010 and will act as both a collaboration with another creative industry – fashion – as well as an alternative platform for Andrianomearisoa’s use of the body and textiles within performance.
Andrianomearisoa was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1977. He left Madagascar for Paris when he was 19 in order to further his studies at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture. He has participated in a number of major group exhibitions, including Africa Remix, curated by Simon Njami, and the 2010 Sinopale Biennale in Sinop, Turkey. His work most recently featured on In Context, hosted by Goodman Gallery at Arts on Main and other venues in Johannesburg. He lives and works between Antananarivo and Paris.

“I am only interested in what’s not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal.” – Oswald de Andrade, from The Cannibal Manifesto, 1928
 
Eat Me has not much to do with food. Instead it explores relationships between works by artists that mine recent art history and popular culture, through cannibalistic processes of referentiality and consumption to uncover new directions and meanings, either critically or aesthetically. In theoretical explorations by art historian Paulo Herkenhoff and Augustus Klotz, cannibalism is seen as a philosophical process of renewal and regeneration, as well as a form of cultural emancipation.  
 
The show brings together works by South African and international artists to discover the ways in which visual culture is harvested, consumed and given new form. Violence, suffering and eroticism are collapsed and digested to bring forth new visual discourses, and perhaps new ways of seeing.

Reza Aramesh uses familiar scenes from news footage to restage, reclaim and re-represent events and identities we think we understand. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin recycle archival photographs from the conflict in Northern Ireland to make way for new readings and new narratives. Frances Goodman, Ghada Amer, Mickalene Thomas and Joel Andrio use the language and imagery of romance and sex to push against the constraints of popular culture and undermine its hold on our imagination.

Eat Me also features new work by Hank Willis Thomas, video installations by Tracey Rose, Sigalit Landau and Kalup Linzy, and works by Gavin Turk and Kendell Geers. While the ingredients and methods differ, the resulting works all share a concern with the problems and processes of consumption, reclamation and renewal.

This winter the Goodman Gallery will relaunch its Parkwood space, which has been extensively reconsidered, both physically and conceptually. This launch will be initiated with a group exhibition simply titled Winter Show, featuring a range of luminary-status local and international artists. The show will not only present recent works by Goodman stalwarts such as William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Sam Nhlengethwa and Mikhael Subotzky, but will also reveal a shift in the Gallery’s approach, showcasing work from around the Continent and beyond that is both explicitly and implicitly concerned with synergies and tensions between Africa and the rest of the globe. Some of the participating international artists, such as Ghada Amer and Hank Willis Thomas, are not only being showcased by the Goodman Gallery, but are now officially represented by us.

The Winter Show will act as a confluence of the Goodman Gallery’s top represented artists, as well as artists participating in In Context – a series of exhibitions and interventions currently taking place at Arts on Main and other venues in Johannesburg. Artists such as Jenny Holzer, Amer, Willis Thomas, Bili Bidjocka, Willem Boshoff and Kara Walker will participate in both shows, with the Winter Show presenting some of their more recent work. While In Context manifests an intimate and often candid exploration of the dynamics of the African continent, the Winter Show will offer a broader conceptual platform, covering many aspects of South African, African and global landscapes and conditions.

The Winter Show will elaborate on the thorny notion of the politics of representation, which Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz confronted in their 1999 collection of essays Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art. The book was a direct response to the critique of Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who was the creative director of the Second Johannesburg Biennial in 1997. At the time, Enwezor interrogated the practice of artists such as Breitz, Minnette Vári and Penny Siopis, intricately considering the question of ‘who has the right to represent whom?’ Now, over a decade later, accusations of misrepresentation have been revisited and reconsidered not only by Enwezor himself and those whose essays were included in Grey Areas, but by the art community at large. In Context magnifies these issues, while the Winter Show augments the dialogue, bringing new voices into the conversation.

Compelling features of the Winter Show include two of Walker’s 2009 films – which are based on narratives from archives of a bureau established in 1865 to assist African Americans with the transition from slavery to freedom – presenting the artist’s signature black-silhouette cut-out figures, which almost impossibly convey the complexities of race, gender, sexuality and power in their stilted and provocative movements. Jenny Holzer’s Purple Red Curve (2005) transmits a coalescence of master narratives through a curved electronic LED sign. Jeremy Wafer will create a site-specific wall drawing in the Goodman Gallery specifically for the show. Kentridge will present a series of new drawings produced this year as well as a maquette of the structure World on its Hind Legs, created in collaboration with Gerhard Marx. A large scale, steel version of this work will be launched at the Apartheid Museum on 8 July 2010 as part of In Context. The Winter Show will also feature an ongoing screening of all of the Goodman Gallery’s top art films by leading artists such as Kentridge and Vári.

The Goodman Gallery in Parkwood has undergone numerous physical transformations and now boasts a new showroom and a space dedicated to photographic works. We are in the process of establishing an art library accessible to the visiting public and will offer a range of educational art talks and events during the Winter Show.

With Goodman Gallery firmly established as a prestigious, world-class contemporary art institution, the Winter Show will reveal how the Gallery – beyond representing artists of the highest caliber – is dedicated to bringing an innovative programme of relevant and compelling international works to South Africa, offering audiences exposure to some of the best contemporary work being produced locally and abroad.

In Context presents a diverse group of international and South African artists who share a rigorous commitment to the dynamics and tensions of place, in reference to the African continent and its varied and complex iterations, and to South Africa in particular. The works – wide-ranging, frequently provocative – engage with a number of pressing questions about space, context, and geography.

In this gathering of artists – envisioned as a series of conversation and engagements – the question of context is posed once again, but problematised in various ways. The terms ‘local’ and ‘international’ are given new emphasis (especially at this juncture and in the context of one of the largest sporting events on the planet) and the following questions are posed: What does it mean to be a local artist in this age of the global? Do African artists wish to continue speaking of context? How do artists of the African Diaspora reflect on their distance from and proximity to home? Where is home? How have some artists living in Europe and the Americas inherited and absorbed an African heritage or sensibility, even when they have not visited the Continent? Have we reached a point in the story of contemporary art in which the term ‘African artist’ can be dispensed with or do we still require it as a marker of distance from Europe and North America? To what extent does the global art market rely upon or exploit the term to sell art in Europe and North America? Is there thus a distinction to be made between the way in which African artists represent themselves and the ‘Western’ reception of contemporary art from Africa?

Rather than present only artists from the African continent in this project, In Context also considers the works of artists who, though they may have some interest in South Africa, have not visited the country or anywhere else in Africa. Their connection to the continent might be one they have inherited from the history of slavery, or from the displacements of Diaspora and exile. The aim is to generate conversations between works and even to assess the relevance of the questions we have raised in the face of the works themselves. We may find ourselves entirely surprised by the answers. We hope to be provoked, to open engagements that overturn the concerns and themes we have offered, that render them more rather than less problematic, or that dispense with them altogether. We may indeed find that individual practice casts an entirely different light on the question of context.

In Context will take place in a number of non-commercial venues and, through a series of talks, walkabouts, and panel discussions, will promote engagement both with artists and audiences. The partners in this project take seriously the need to begin a number of collaborations that can be sustained beyond the events of In Context. They also seek to reach a wider audience than the usual gallery visitors and to promote appreciation of art through unconventional interventions outside of the traditional gallery space.

Sphères 2009 Galleria Continua / Le Moulin

Joel Andrianomearisoa / Kader Attia / Willem Boshoff / Chris Burden / Angela de la Cruz / Carlos Garaicoa / Claire Gavronsky / Kendell Geers / Liam Gillick / Frances Goodman / Mark Handforth / Camille Henrot / Carsten Höller / Ann Veronica Janssens / Christoph Keller / Joseph Kosuth / Ange Leccia / Claude Lévêque / Pierre Malphettes / Thomas Mulcaire / Hans Op de Beeck / Nathaniel Rackowe Anselm Reyle / Ugo Rondinone / Bruno Serralongue / Rose Shakinovsky / Sudarshan Shetty / Nedko Solakov / Katja Strunz / Mikhael Subotzky / Sun Yuan & Peng Yu / Gavin Turk / Minnette Vari

Opening during the FIAC, Saturday, 24th of October 2009.
Preview from 12h00 – 14h30, brunch on the river bank.

For the second edition, the Spheres project re-involves the participation of several contemporary art galleries of international dimensions prompted by one desire: to join their diverse forces and energies to develop a shared exhibition – a new kind of exhibition experience – with no submission to any restricting theme. The Galleries will present artists from the five continents, whose works will be installed in and will relate to various parts of the exceptional complex. In doing so, they will engage with the rich history of the site.

24 October 2009 – 30 May 2010

Participating galleries:

AIR DE PARIS
GALLERIA CONTINUA
GALERIE KRINZINGER
KAMEL MENNOUR
ALMINE RECH GALLERY
ESTHER SCHIPPER
GOODMAN GALLERY