Hasan & Husain Essop

In a new body of work, Hasan and Husain Essop explore the notion of memory, specifically in relation to the history and practice of religion. In a series of 360º panoramic photographs, each consisting of hundreds of individual photographs meticulously stitched together, they explore the history of various landscapes, searching for the memory of what came before and examining its effects on the captured moment. In a series of smaller photographs, they resume their trademark performance style, using their bodies, costumes, and a variety of poses to enter into a dialogue with the landscape, simultaneously documenting what is seen and creating a different narrative altogether.

The work is concerned with the notion of remembrance, and with the act of memorialising – particularly with reference to religious sites, ancient and modern – and with the tensions inherent in the act of photographing and recording memory; and the exhibition raises a number of important and topical question relating to history, heritage, religious identity, and the politics of place in the context of globalisation and xenophobia.

Tracing their travels to Mecca, Jerusalem, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Senegal, the photos seek to uncover and engage with the particular and unstable memories of each location – the birthplace of Islam in Mecca, inaccessible to most non-believers, and now paved over with parking lots and luxury hotel chains; the sacred sites of Jerusalem, fought over, destroyed and restored time and again for centuries; the ostensibly liberal cities of Western Europe, where paranoia, surveillance and religious profiling are becoming the new normal; and Dakar, where the legacies of slavery and colonialism gave rise to unique Islamic identities and practices, which are increasingly under assault by globalizing forces.

Born and raised in Cape Town, the Essop brothers have been collaborating since their graduation from the Michaelis School of Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town. In 2011 they completed a three-month residency at the prestigious Thami Mnyele Foundation in Amsterdam. They have participated in numerous group exhibitions, including most recently Figure and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography at the V&A Museum in London and Les Rencontres d’Arles 2012, a photography festival held annually in France. This is their second solo exhibition with the Goodman Gallery.

Hasan & Husain Essop / Halaal Art / Opening 20 February 11h30 – 13h30

Goodman Gallery is proud to present Halaal Art, an exhibition of photographs and a video installation by twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop. The exhibition, as with all their work, deals with notions of performance, representation, and the tension between self and other. Born and raised in Cape Town, the twins graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2007. During 2009 they completed a residency in Cuba – coinciding with the inclusion of their work in the Havana Biennale – and facilitated a workshop on invitation from the University of Hamburg, Germany.

Halaal Art extends the artists’ preoccupation with the role of the individual in society, in particular the space that Muslim youth negotiate in a secular environment. Inspired by their experiences abroad, the images depict the brothers in various carefully staged locations and poses around Havana, Hamburg and Cape Town.

The thread that ties the images together is their subjects: in Islam, the rendering of the human form is considered haraam or forbidden, and the artists are deliberate about limiting this to their own bodies and bearing the responsibility. They are also not interested in making objective statements – the questions they ask are personal and intimate, and they perform these questions, and the search for answers, with their own bodies.

The title of the show refers to the process of making pure. In the same way that they seek to halaal their lives, to remain pure within the various secular environments they find themselves, the artists create work that is concerned with ritual as a process of purification and cleansing – an acknowledgement of mortality and a preparation for death, the imminence of which is a motif that recurs throughout the exhibition. The photographs occupy a space fraught with tensions; between documentation and narrative, the spontaneous and the staged (as evidenced by the accompanying video installation), and between overt expression and that which is left unsaid.

Hasan and Husain Essop have been collaborating since their graduation from the University of Cape Town. Their work has appeared in several group shows, including Integration and Resistance in the Global Age at the Havana Biennale, ABSA L’Atelier in Johannesburg and Power Play at Goodman Gallery Cape, as well as various private and public collections, including the Durban Art Gallery and the South African National Gallery. They are represented by Goodman Gallery.

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.