Minnette Vári

Minnette Vári’s new body of multimedia work, on show at Goodman Gallery Cape in an exhibition titled Revenant, is built around the concept of the uncanny return – of repressed sexualities, identities, returns to earth from beyond it, and returns from beyond death itself, in a new cycle of work that features vibrant departures into relatively unfamiliar media for the artist.

Building on a recent showing of drawings that explored ancient depictions of pre-pagan female deities around the world, Vári depicts the goddess ‘Baubo’ as a narrative presence pulling the strands of the show together, weaving weirdly in and out of various landscapes, situations, objects and interactions. Dating from at least the 5th Century BC. Baubo became one of the first “sacred fools” and her image of a jesting, sexually liberated, wise woman has informed the identities and practices of many subsequent cults of worship. Baubo has been celebrated as a positive force of female sexuality and the healing power of laughter, which is why the series of drawings featuring the figure is named ‘apotrope’: a ritual or object to ward off bad luck. One origin story of the Baubo has it exposing its genitals to provoke the laughter of the inappropriate response, as she causes the goddess Demeter to stop mourning her daughter Persephone and to laugh instead. The unbidden nakedness that attracts immediately the unavoidable gaze is, in short, an uncanny response.

The Baubo figures certainly immediately strike one as absurd, the absurdity of a violated body. Their legs lead one’s gaze upwards, to the decorous suggestion of a vulva, indistinguishable from a slight cleft in – a chin? And then up to a face. Much larger than the legs it sits atop, the face is variously screaming, laughing, in repose… but where is the middle? A closer look changes the feeling of absurdity to one of unease at this absent middle. Physically impossible, it demands an explanation, a palliative analysis.

What schema of interpretation, then, can we map onto these uncanny figures? While there are legs akimbo and the available, public pudenda of the id-fuelled sexualised jester here, yet these genitals are demure, melding into the superego of the emotive face, the rational and feeling mind which laughs, shouts or rests in repose. The absent middle here, then, could be that of the ego, the slave to three masters. It is the ego’s function to introduce time to experience, to instil the presence of a narrative, of social organisation. In these figures narrative is delicately but unyieldingly subverted, in the profound way that art can make possible. Here, the unconscious agencies have taken over the asylum in the form of mysterious and uncanny bodies par excellence. It is not precisely what Deleuze and Guattari had in mind, but these bodies-without-organs tell us about the irruption of that freedom of existence that lies within us all, and which we sometimes call the unconscious. Vári’s masterstroke is to make this goddess/jester the viewer’s tour guide through this irruption of the uncanny return, and our guide through the exhibition.

The show comprises a variety of work, most connected to or featuring the Baubo. ‘The Life of Baubo (Apotrope series)’ introduces the figure to the audience, and is extended in a series of storyboard drawings placing the goddess in different and strange environments and landscapes. There are thematically important large studies of the Baubo playing in front of a Victorian mirror, a period motif that will itself re-emerge in the work. Here the goddess acts out a mysterious and almost childlike othering, a staging of Lacan’s famous ‘mirror phase’; as if recognising herself as a creature with her own identity for the first time.

The show also features a series of seven jewel-like three-dimensional objects, the ‘Charm Series’, another reference to the Baubo’s reputed apotropaic magic; ‘that which turns away harm’. Each is based on a piece of space debris (parts of satellites, rocket booster gear etc.). The reference to the number seven is to seven days of the week, where each day corresponds to a heavenly body and its related metal, gods & goddesses; eg. Wednesday = Mercury (Mercredi) = Wodin/Mercurius/Hermes. This collaboration with designer goldsmith Cronjé Grobbelaar also evokes alchemical principles of change, transformation and return.

The last two sets of works are in a more familiar medium for the artist – video. The first is a video work in 7 channels, featuring an extended panorama within which the Baubo acts out a ‘creation myth’ of sorts. This time the goddess interacts with characters and objects in an ever-evolving landscape, including well-known megalithic and other South African landmarks, and actual items of ‘space junk’ that have fallen back to earth. Lastly, the show features a video projection based on Victorian/Edwardian memorial photography. In this narrative, figures wake from their deathly slumber (or take turns to be the ‘dead one’). They are ‘revenants’, returning from the dead. While referencing how technology would be applied in the search of the paranormal, and the world of spiritualism in the late 19th Century in its visual lexicon of double exposures, images of ectoplasm etc., it is also set against the backdrop of the Johannesburg of the Randlords era. In making this work, Vári was hosted by the landmark mansion of Northwards, a Herbert Baker home built in 1904. The historical frame gestures to going into the belly of the earth, like Persephone whose mother Demeter was cheered up by Baubo, and returning with precious goods – referencing both mining and the creative process. A series of photographs will accompany this video work.

Minnette Vári presents a range of new work in her latest solo show at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. Titled Parallax (from the Greek for ‘change’ or ‘alternation’) the exhibition meditates on the question of mutability, particularly the changing nature of perceptions of women, and the shifts in perception and attitudes brought about by aging and by changes in intergenerational position. In 1999, Vári produced a hard-hitting and highly successful video piece entitled ‘Oracle’, based on Francisco de Goya’s famous painting ‘Saturn Devouring his Children’. Vári’s sensibility shows an affinity with Goya’s visceral treatment of supernatural subject matter that allegorises socio-political realities.

A new series of anamorphic images on paper, which can be viewed straight-on, but assume a different perspective when viewed from side-on, references Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’, a collection of obscure moral parables on the follies of humankind. Vári’s images can be read as sinister landscapes, which she has populated with ‘decoys’ that relate to more contemporary conflicts and moral dilemmas, such as ecological disaster and xenophobic violence.

A particular focus of the exhibition is a meditation on the way history and myth consider the different ages of woman. From temptresses to hideous crones and imbecilic innocents, they are often viciously, but just as often tenderly, portrayed. The triadic figure of the Fates, appearing in many different guises in different cultures, weaves its way through this exhibition in diverse forms and media. The eldest of the three, the death-dealing Crone called Atropos, gives her name to the Death’s Head moth, around which superstitious lore abounds. This compelling motif moves through the video work on the show, drawing out a personal recollection for the artist through her entomologist grandfather. The genus of the moth, Acherontia, draws its name in turn from the mythological river Acheron that souls must cross into the underworld. There is also an actual river Acheron in north-western Greece, and this play between mythical and real landscapes is a further theme of the exhibition.

Vári has had a long-term interest in the idea of fantastical and allegorical places and creatures, and in this show presents virtual and impossible scenes featuring real cartographic material. Prominent in these constructions are various star maps showing the seasonal migration of constellations such as that featuring Sirius, the Dog Star, which symbolizes a bridge between higher and lower consciousness. All these interwoven themes were developed during extensive research periods that Vári recently spent in both the Southern and Northern Hemispheres.

Vári is well-established locally and abroad, and her new body of work elicits both careful intellection and an intuitive, visceral appreciation. In demonstrating the artist’s enormous talent and technical skill across different media, the show works on many levels. It is historically-informed and highly contemporary, intellectually rigorous, yet emotionally charged. As her work matures and diversifies, it confirms her reputation as one of South Africa’s foremost contemporary artists.

Goodman Gallery Cape presents Summer Show – opening on 15 December and running until 14 January. The exhibition has been designed as a review, focusing on new and recent work by South Africans artists either represented by or associated with the gallery. Important works from series produced by the artists over the past year are showcased, and the show also features a selection of works recently shown at the gallery’s Johannesburg spaces.

The exhibition includes prints from Siemon Allen‘s Records series, in which the artist explores images of South Africa through the collection and archiving of music records from the beginning of the 20th Century to the present day. Photography is strongly represented, with works from Jodi Bieber’s vibrant, urban-denizen take in her Soweto series, in marked contrast with David Goldblatt’s large-scale colour prints of rural South Africa. Mikhael Subotzky (who recently won the 2012 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art) and Patrick Waterhouse show recent work from their ongoing collaboration on the Ponte City project.

A text piece by Stuart Bird is shown in anticipation of his upcoming solo show in January, Gerhard Marx presents exquisitely detailed and artisanally worked surfaces in his new works, continuing his preoccupation with notions of mapping, place and nature, and Walter Oltmann shows a powerful new addition in aluminium wire to his series of insect suit sculptures.

Paintings by Moshekwa Langa, Lisa Brice and Clive van den Berg explore abstraction and gesture in different ways; all three have produced significant bodies of new works which were well received during 2011. Minnette Vari‘s uncanny brush and ink drawings of the goddess/crone Baubo sit in awkward dialogue with Kendell Geers’ La Sainte Vierge.

This exhibition affords a fascinating look at the output of some of South Africa’s major artists, and will also showcase from our Johannesburg spaces works not yet shown in Cape Town, including Kudzanai Chiurai’s Revelations, a series of photographic tableaux exploring politics and power in Africa, new wood sculptures by Willem Boshoff, and a selection of drawings, linocut graphics and sculpture by William Kentridge.

Lisa Brice | Kudzanai Chiurai | Soly Cissé | Tom Cullberg | Claire Gavronsky | Robert Hodgins | David Koloane | Moshekwa Langa | Minnette Vári

There is an element of uncertainty inherent in the medium of paint – it is a fluid material that allows for various modes of expression, and as such is an ideal starting point for an examination of notions of nebulousness and accident.

Goodman Gallery Cape presents Open End, a group exhibition of paintings by both emerging and established artists that speaks to the element of uncertainty in artistic production and expression, and illustrates a process that seeks to arrive at meaning through search.

In an environment where so much emphasis is placed on work that is conceptually pre-determined, where the work is crafted around and invested with a deliberate and established message or meaning, the show aims to create a space for paintings produced without a clear conceptual starting point, focusing on the wrestle or the hunt for meaning rather than the expression of a packaged and determined project.

It is a simultaneously dangerous and powerful position to work from, unstable and vulnerable on the one hand, but filled with the potential of new and unexplored ideas, of work that is discursive and receptive to chance on the other. The title Open End refers not only to the absence of resolution, but to the very manner in which the work is approached: an embracing of uncertainty – or, to paraphrase Francis Bacon, a courting of accidents – in the search for meaning.

The exhibition will feature new works by Lisa Brice and David Koloane, and a painting created in situ by Kudzanai Chiurai. Tom Cullberg will show a series of abstract, perhaps metaphysical paintings dealing with the tensions that exist between the rational and the chaotic. Two anamorphic landscape-like paintings by Minnette Vári – first seen earlier this year as part of her solo show Parallax at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg – as well as several typically humorous and confrontational works by Moshekwa Langa will be included. Dakar-based artist Soly Cissé will show nine small monochrome paintings deftly straddling the figurative and the abstract, Claire Gavronsky will show an oil painting addressing notions of memory and loss, and several works by the incomparable Robert Hodgins illustrate the flex and the power of the medium.

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