Bill Bidjocka

Bidjocka’s experiences of this city and its people has heightened his awareness of the extremes of beauty and vulnerabilty, qualities that he has foregrounded in the conception and production of FICTION #1. The first of a series of exhibitions to take place globally, it is conceived as an onirique wandering through the life of Bernardo Soares, both a character and one of the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese author of The Book of Disquiet who, coincidentally, grew up in Durban at the turn of the twentieth century.

Pursuing notions of formlessness leaves open the possibilities for creating alternate personas and new experiences. Merging the artist and the work of art by transforming the former into the latter, the artist becomes, in a sense, an artifact, or a beautiful fiction. With serious intent, he sets up situations of play through which to explore various enigmas. These may take the form of photographs, embellished with layers of beaded texts or designs added in collaboration with the Beloved Beadwork collective. Suggesting a fictional retrospective, they present enigmas while offering opportunities to revisit or re-imagine past projects.

Inspired by African knowledge systems and by diverse traditions of philosophy and religious mysteries, Bidjocka draws on Judaism, Christianity and Islam as well as on literary references. A spectacular beaded curtain invokes the Seder question, ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ provoking associations of sacred practices, yet remaining open-ended and suggestive. A photograph of Venice adorned with beaded script inspired by Arabic texts asserts an Islamic presence largely occluded in the centres of Europe.

A sequence of videos, made in Dakar during the biennale of 2000, features a lone boxer who in one video is a toned, muscled athlete and in another, the artist seen shadow boxing. They evoke Don Quixote and Charlie Chaplin in flailing performances that are at times both ridiculous and vulnerable. In fending off an imaginary enemy outside and within, he explores the mercurial qualities of contradiction and inversion. The making of art thus becomes an adventure in which viewers are invited to particpate in an imaginary game of creation.

Dakar Tour at Dak’Art, 2000 required biennale audiences to locate, throughout the city, flags inscribed with the double lines of a pause where they could engage with the city and its inhabitants beyond the confines of the biennale. Invoking the search for the perfect lover – that interminable quest for connectedness – which he finds as much in human intercourse as he does in the imaginary world of art, Bidjocka seeks ways to balance the inevitability of life with the risk of failure. Whatever their form, Bidjocka’s works are elegant and poetic explorations of the condition of humanity that embrace intimacy, mystery, ambiguity and change.

Bili Bidjocka was included in the Havana Biennale (1997), the Taipei Biennale (2004) and the Venice Biennale (on Check List: Luanda Pop, 2007 curated by Fernando Alvim and Simon Njami). Bidjocka has featured on landmark international exhibitions such as Black President (New Museum, New York, 2003); Zeitwenden (Museum of Modern Art, Bonn, 1999) and Africa Remix (Düsseldorf, London, Paris, Tokyo and Johannesburg, 2005-2007). In collaboration with Emily Cantrell and Jesus Polanco, he founded and directed Matrix Art Project, a contemporary art platform in New York, Paris and Brussels.

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.