Ghada Amer & Reza Farkhondeh

Goodman Gallery Johannesburg is pleased to present No Romance, a three person-exhibition featuring individual works by Ghada Amer, Reza Farkhondeh and collaborative work by the two artists.

Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh met in art school in Nice in 1988. They both moved to New York in 1996 where they established studios in Harlem. The collaborative works between Amer and Farkhondeh started by accident in the early 2000s. “I began to paint on canvasses that Ghada was preparing for her work,” explained Farkhondeh in an interview with Martine Antle in the catalogue for The Gardens Next Door at Galeria Filomena Soares in Lisbon, 2010. “I would apply acrylic paint using masking tape. That was the beginning of new experimentation and of new discoveries… A little later I began to [make] watercolours and this time Ghada intervened on them… And gradually we created together a body of works on paper… One of the secrets is coming to appreciate sharing territory without destroying harmony and not thinking of establishing one’s ego as the sole winner in the collaborative work.” Their collaborative process involves passing the drawings back and forth until each artist is creatively satisfied. The show at Goodman Gallery presents a sampling of several series that the two artists have developed since 2005, including three large new works on paper. Women and nature are the themes of their collaborations.

Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt. She graduated from Villa Arson in Nice, France with an MFA in painting in 1989. For over 20 years Amer has been producing works that are profoundly linked to an aesthetic language specific to women. She chooses needle and thread as her medium to question the classifications of sexuality, beauty, gender and domesticity. “What interests me,” explained Amer in the exhibition catalogue for her show in Brétigny-sur-Orge in 1994, “is the idea of a ‘model to be followed’, and in life we are confronted with these everywhere; from birth one is shown how one must live; one is educated this way, one grows up and follows the model imposed on us. All my work revolves around the idea of ‘a model’.” Amer’s individual contribution to No Romance is a new series of embroidered paintings and a sculpture: 100 words of love – an amorphous, spherical and hollow work, displaying carved out synonyms for the word ”love” in Arabic.

Farkhondeh was born in Iran and graduated with an MFA in video/short film from Villa Arson in 1991. For 20 years Farkhondeh has been developing videos, short films and paintings that deal with lyrical expression within the context of ever-changing cultural differences between Western and Middle Eastern civilisations. From 1991 to 1998, Farkhondeh focused on a series of paintings he calls “99 cents” objects. “The dollar store is so cheap, so real and so present that I could not resist the temptation to paint the objects within it, the discounted objects of our contemporary life,” commented Farkhondeh in the catalogue for his 2004 exhibition at La Chapelle Sainte Elizabeth. In 2001, Farkhondeh started to paint and draw landscapes experimenting with a vast range of techniques and often layering them with stripes of masking tape. These paintings, he explains, evoke “separation, uprooting, wandering, the idea of a landscape that has been cut up and then reassembled through different layers…" Farkhondeh’s individual contribution to No Romance is a new series of paintings under the title of “Broken Landscapes”. These paintings, while they examine nature as the main subject, offer a journey over poetic, social and political landscapes of our time.

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Goodman Gallery Johannesburg welcomes you to 2012 with Advance/… Notice, an exhibition of new works by a dynamic group of contemporary artists from around the world. As we advance into a new calendar year, this exhibition gives notice of innovations from some of our artists who are already familiar to you, and of our new ventures into an intellectual exchange with artists with whom we are excited to work for the first time. This show will also give audiences a preview of what is to come, as many of the featured artists have solo shows planned for 2012 at Goodman Gallery spaces and other prestigious South African institutions.
Advance/… Notice introduces newly perfected techniques or processes for some of our well-known artists, such as platinum photographic prints by David Goldblatt, and a completely new turn of direction and field of interest for African American artist Hank Willis Thomas, who first exhibited with us on In Context in 2010, as well as for Sigalit Landau, the acclaimed Israeli artist we co-hosted at last year’s Venice Biennale. These international savants are joined by South African artists such as Hasan and Husain Essop, Moshekwa Langa, Mikhael Subotzky, Sue Williamson, William Kentridge, Rosenclaire, and Frances Goodman revealing either brand new works, or works not yet seen in Johannesburg. Also featured are works by Kendell Geers, whose retrospective exhibition will open at IZIKO South African National Gallery in late March 2012.
Our first show of the year seems an apt time to introduce the novel and the unexpected in the work of a number of artists and to also welcome prominent figures including Liza Lou, a world-renowned American now living and working in KwaZulu Natal; South African Candice Breitz, now resident in Berlin; Chilean-born New Yorker Alfredo Jaar; London-based Iranian Reza Aramesh, as well as Carla Busuttil – a young South African artist based in Berlin who is well-established in the United Kingdom, but has never before exhibited in her home country.
Liza Lou presents a work titled Gather Forty, one of a series of forty individual sculptures made from gold-plated beads that have been expertly threaded onto four hundred individual pieces of stainless steel wire and bound in a sheaf – continuing the shift of the beadwork medium from craft to conceptual art. Alfredo Jaar, internationally recognised artist, filmmaker and architect, celebrated for the public interventions he has created all over the world, shows From Time to Time, a panel of nine Time magazine covers focusing on Africa that either feature animals or malnourished Africans – revealing how the rest of the world often encapsulates its second largest continent. Breitz, who opens a major survey of her work titled Extra! at the Standard Bank Gallery this February, presents The Character, a video installation filmed in Mumbai that seeks to understand the role and influence of child characters in mainstream Indian cinema through interviews with a group of young moviegoers. In Action 78, Aramesh uses familiar scenes from news footage of the first Gulf War to restage, re-present and destabilise any easy readings of the conflicts we think we understand. Oil paintings by Busuttil offer a sinisterly-executed perusal of the exploitation of power and cruelty.
We are also very pleased to present for the first time the work of Nelisiwe Xaba, who will be presenting an interactive dance and video collaboration with Mocke J van Veuren at Goodman Gallery Projects in February. The crossover into visual art is exciting new territory for this renowned performer/dancer.
Goodman Gallery hopes you will join us to be inspired, challenged and excited by this exhibition and its promise of advances in the visual arts of South Africa. We trust you will find the exhibition gives notice of an innovative and exciting programme for 2012 in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

“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.

Goodman Gallery presents a group exhibition simply titled Winter Show, featuring a range of local and international art luminaries. Traveling from Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, the show presents recent works by Goodman stalwarts such as William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Sam Nhlengethwa and Mikhael Subotzky, as well as revealing a shift in the Gallery’s approach, showcasing work from around the African continent and beyond that is both explicitly and implicitly concerned with the synergies and tensions that exist between Africa and the rest of the globe. Some of the participating international artists, such as Ghada Amer, are not only being showcased, but are now officially represented by the Goodman Gallery.

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, considering in great depth 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. The Winter Show augments the dialogue, bringing new voices into the conversation.

Compelling features of the Winter Show include one of artist, Kara Walker’s 2009 films – which are based on narratives from the archives of a bureau established in 1865 to assist African Americans with the transition from slavery to freedom – featuring 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 evocative movements. William Kentridge will present a new drawing produced this year, a large scale tapestry, as well as a maquette of the structure World on its Hind Legs, created in collaboration with Gerhard Marx.

With Goodman Gallery firmly established as a world-class contemporary art institution, the Winter Show will reveal the gallery’s commitment – not only to representing artists of the highest caliber, but 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, both locally and abroad.