Sue Williamson

All Our Mothers, Sue Williamson’s new show at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, celebrates the strength of the extraordinary women who helped to bring this country to freedom, and examines the generation gap between these wise, iconic veterans of the struggle, and their granddaughters, the confident young born frees.

Williamson’s multi-screen video installation, There’s something I must tell you portrays six intense conversations in which the older women recall important moments of their histories and their lives, and the younger women respond, and present their own forthright views on living in South Africa right now. Stories of exile, of the women’s march, of imprisonment evoke the ultimate question: Was it all worth it? The answers are sometimes surprising.

In making the series, Williamson worked with such key figures as the charismatic Amina Cachalia, to whom this exhibition is dedicated, the distinguished Dr Brigalia Bam, the 101 year old Rebecca Kotane, Carollne Motsoaledi, widow of Rivonia triallist Elias Motsoaledi, Ilse Fischer, activist daughter of Afrikaner lawyer Bram Fischer, and liberation movement heroine Vesta Smith

Amina Cachalia and Caroline Motsoaledi were two of the women who were portrayed in Williamson’s portfolio of etchings/screenprints of the 1980s, A Few South Africans, a series that was reproduced as widely distributed postcards at a time when images of these women were rarely seen in the press. Today, those postcards and prints are in such museum collections as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the V & A Museum in London, and the Walther Collection, Germany.

Accompanying the video installation There’s something I must tell you is a new series of more than twenty photographic portraits of women taken over a thirty year period.

There’s something I must tell you originated when Williamson was a Rockefeller Foundation Creative Arts Fellow in Bellagio, Italy in 2011 and received a phone call from Amina Cachalia to contribute to a book at the very moment the artist was thinking she would like to interview and photograph Amina again, and to reconsider the important contribution of that generation almost 20 years into the new democracy. And so the new project began.

The artist is greatly indebted to the National Arts Council of South Africa, the Goethe Institute and Business Arts South Africa for support for All Our Mothers. The producer of There’s something I must tell you is Monkey Films’ Clare van Zyl. The exhibition opens at Goodman Gallery on May 16 and ends on June 15.

Sue Williamson has been a key figure on the South African art scene since the early 1980s when she produced A Few South Africans, a groundbreaking series of portrait prints featuring women in the struggle against apartheid.
 
Voices, which opens at the Goodman Cape on February 19, is Williamson’s first solo exhibition in Cape Town in a number of years. Important selected work from the past three decades will be shown alongside her latest two series – Other Voices, Other Cities, an international series of projects documented in photographs, and The Diaries of Lady Anne B.  Also on view will be Last Supper at Manley Villa, a portfolio of black and white photographs taken in the home of one family in the final days of District Six in 1981.

The theme running through all of these rather different works is that of personal history, and in many cases, the exact words people use to express themselves and to describe their situations.

Williamson’s work has always been about addressing social issues and mediating contemporary history through the people who are living through it. After the end of apartheid she addressed the stories that came to light during the hearings at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and subsequently addressed the HIV/AIDS pandemic in a moving series entitled From the Inside.

Extending her attention beyond South Africa, Williamson’s Other Voices, Other Cities examines what it means, in this age of globalization, to live in a particular place. Why do the residents of a city choose to live there, and if there were one message that would express the essence of that city, what would it be?

Williamson approaches the project by gathering together a group of young artists and others and asking them to workshop this question. At the end of the workshop the participants vote on the most popular statement. This statement is then made up in large cardboard letters, and the participants pose in the city, holding up the letters to spell out their message. On almost every occasion, there have been difficulties with local authorities in getting the photographs taken.

At a time when so much of the world is grappling with accelerated globalization, the dialogue created by the residents of the different cities is engaging and revealing. The cities featured in the series so far are Havana, Harare, Johannesburg, London, Bern and Berlin. Other cities like Beirut, Beijing and New York are in the planning.

Last year, Williamson undertook a large-scale commission at Cape Town International Airport on a 30-metre glass wall, producing a work entitled A Random History of Cape Town, 1499 – 1994. Research for this project led her to the diaries of Lady Anne Barnard, wife of the British Colonial Secretary of the Cape Colony. From 1797 to 1800 Lady Anne wrote freely and openly of daily life in Cape Town, bearing witness to the treatment of the ‘Hottentots’, the intrigues, the babies of suspicious parentage, the fears of a slave revolt, the floggings, the fleas, the food … the complex picture she paints of early colonialism throws light on later history.

In The Diaries of Lady Anne B, Williamson draws on Lady Anne’s writings and sketches to present a series of monotypes. With this work, Williamson, who trained as a printmaker, returns to the mark of the hand.

Williamson’s work forms part of almost every museum collection in South Africa and is also included in many international art institutions and private collections. She was recently honoured with the Rockefeller Foundation Creative Arts Fellowship for 2011, and will take up her three-month residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy.

In the age of the global, what message would the residents of one particular place send out to the world about their home? In a new series, begun in March 2009 at the 10th Havana Biennale in Cuba, Sue Williamson investigates this question.

Williamson had been honoured by the Biennale committee as a special invited artist with an individual exhibition, and spent more than a month in Cuba working on a new public art project, but at the last minute she was prevented by local authorities from putting messages up on buildings. Williamson’s solution was to invite artists and friends to hold up the letters instead, in a series of photographs which recall activist protest lines. A similar project in Harare followed, then Johannesburg was next on the list. Other cities followed.

The message from Cuba was ‘The blockade is also in the mind’. From Harare,
‘For whom has the sun risen?’ In Johannesburg, the group asked ‘Who is Johannes?’ Although the messages are local and distinctive, they have a universal resonance.

Making voices heard has always been a major focus of Williamson’s work, and in other work on ‘Other Voices, Other Cities’, Williamson updates an early theme of dislocation with Last Supper at Manley Villa 1981 and 2008, a portfolio of haunting photographs of one family in District Six, Cape Town, shortly before their home was demolished. In What About El Max? (2005) Williamson worked with fishermen in Alexandria, Egypt to voice their fears about being moved out of their homes.

Williamson is internationally recognized as one of the leading artists working in South Africa, and her work is represented in numerous major public and private collections both here and abroad.

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.

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.

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.

Ryan Arenson | Walter Battiss | Deborah Bell | Justin Brett | Lisa Brice | Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin | Adam Broomberg | Kudzanai Chiurai | Marlene Dumas | Claire Gavronsky | Robert Hodgins | William Kentridge | David Koloane | Moshekwa Langa | Alexandra Makhlouf | Brett Murray | Sam Nhlengethwa | Walter Oltmann | Jonah Sack | Kathryn Smith | Jaco Spies | Clive Van Den Berg | Diane Victor | Jeremy Wafer | Sue Williamson

For many artists, drawing forms part of a larger process – a loose way of visualizing an artwork before committing to it in a more permanent medium. But the act of drawing itself remains one of the oldest and most eloquent forms of artistic expression. Goodman Gallery Cape is proud to present a group exhibition of drawings entitled ‘The Marks We Make’, exploring notions of mark-making as assertions of ownership and expressions of violence, memory and play.

Drawing usually refers to pencil marks on paper. In this exhibition we approach the term more loosely, featuring a range of media to question what constitutes a drawing and what gives it power. Works will include photographs from the Red House series by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, depicting the marks left behind by prisoners of Saddam Hussein in Iraq; wire and sculptural elements by Walter Oltmann and William Kentridge; installations by Jeremy Wafer, Jonah Sack and Justin Brett, as well as more traditional pencil, oil and charcoal drawings by Sue Williamson, Lisa Brice and Sam Nhlengethwa.

‘The Marks We Make’ brings together South African artists to explore the ways in which marks shape our environments and inform our perspectives. Bodies are circumscribed, silenced or marginalized by the invasive marks of violence. But these marks can also be used to express an identity, stake out a position or form communities. Territory is claimed, land contested, and ownership asserted through the use of marks, both physical and symbolic. The exhibition seeks to interrogate the ways in which these marks act to create the contingent, political spaces within which we form ourselves, and the role they play in shaping our personal and cultural memories.