How To Disappear

David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018) was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, South African he chronicled the people, structures and landscapes of his country from 1948, through the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the apartheid regime and into the democratic era – until his death in June, 2018. In particular, Goldblatt documented the people, landscapes and industry of the Witwatersrand, the resource-rich area in which he grew up and lived, where the local economy was based chiefly on mining. In general, Goldblatt’s subject matter spanned the whole of the country geographically and politically from sweeping landscapes of the Karoo desert, to the arduous commutes of migrant black workers, forced to live in racially segregated areas. His broadest series, which spans six decades of photography, examines how South Africans have expressed their values through the structures, physical and ideological, that they have built.

In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop, a training institution in Johannesburg, for aspiring photographers. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2001, a retrospective of his work, David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years began a tour of galleries and museums. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. He has held solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum and the New Museum, both in New York. His work was included in the exhibition ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and has featured on shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Barbican Centre in London. In 2017, Goldblatt installed a series of portraits from his photographic essay Ex-Offenders in former prisons in Birmingham and Manchester. The portraits depict men and women, from South African and the UK, at the scene of their crimes, with accompanying texts that relate the subjects’ stories in their words. In the last year of his life, two major retrospectives were opened at Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The Goldblatt Archive is held by Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Goldblatt is the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, the 2013 ICP Infinity Award and in 2016, he was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France.

Ja'Tovia Gary

Ja’Tovia M. Gary (b. Dallas, TX. 1984) is an artist and filmmaker currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Gary’s work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed while fleshing out a nuanced and multivalent Black interiority. Through documentary film and experimental video art, Gary charts the ways structures of power shape our perceptions around representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence. The artist earned her MFA in Social Documentary Filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

In 2017 Gary was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Filmmaking. Her award-winning films, An Ecstatic Experience and Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) have screened at festivals, cinemas, and institutions worldwide including Edinburgh International Film Festival, The Whitney Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Atlanta Film Festival, the Schomburg Center, MoMa PS1, MoCA Los Angeles, Harvard Film Archives, New Orleans Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and elsewhere. She has received generous support from Sundance Documentary fund, the Jerome Foundation, Doc Society, among others.

In 2016 Gary participated in the Terra Foundation Summer Residency program in Giverny, France. She was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. Gary is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee and a Field of Vision Fellow.

Kahlil Joseph

Kahlil Joseph is an American artist and filmmaker working in Los Angeles. Across his career, Joseph’s work has explored the space between music video, short film and art installation. He has collaborated with influential artists such as Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar, FKA twigs and Shabazz Palaces. His previous work includes Until the Quiet Comes, which received widespread critical acclaim and won the Grand Jury Prize for Short Films at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and Video of the Year at the UKMVA’s in 2013. The following year, the film was included in Kara Walker’s celebrated exhibit, Ruffneck Constructivists, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Joseph’s first solo major museum show, Double Conscience, comprising his double-channel film, m.A.A.d., at the Museum of Contemporary Art, ranked #1 in the “Top 10 Los Angeles Art Shows of 2015” by leading art/culture site Hyperallergic. In 2016, m.A.A.d. was featured at Art Basel’s Unlimited exhibit in Switzerland as well as the popular group show, The Infinite Mix, at the Southbank Centre in London. The same year, Young Blood: Noah Davis, Kahlil Joseph and The Underground Museum, a show of new film works by Joseph and paintings by his late brother Noah Davis (and founder of the Underground Museum), opened at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. Soon after, Wizard of the Upper Amazon, which included a performance piece with 25 Rastafarian men, was on view at Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles in the fall of 2016. Joseph was Emmy and Grammy nominated for his direction of Beyonce’s feature length album film, Lemonade. Joseph most recently completed a visually dynamic music film for Sampha’s debut album, Process, shot in London and Sierra Leone. Joseph is a recipient of the 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Currently, Joseph serves as Vice President of the board at The Underground Museum, a vanguard and pioneering independent art museum, exhibition space and community hub in Los Angeles.

Jeremy Wafer

Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953, Durban, South Africa) grew up in Nkwalini in what was then Zululand. He studied Fine Art at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (B.A.F.A.1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand (B.A. Hons. in Art History 1980, M.A. Fine Art 1987 and PhD 2016). 

Wafer taught in the Fine Art Departments of the former Technikon Natal (now DUT) and Technikon Witwatersrand (now UJ) before being appointed  Professor of Fine Art in the Wits School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.  He retired from full time teaching in 2019.
 
Wafer is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, notably the Standard Bank National Drawing Prize in 1987 and the Sasol Wax Art Award in 2006. His work featured on the South African Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Wafer has exhibited in South Africa and internationally, his work is represented in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, the South African National Gallery, the Johannesburg Art Gallery as well as in many other museum, private and corporate collections.

Wafer lives and works between London UK and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Mary Wafer

Mary Wafer was born and grew up in Durban. After three years of study at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, she relocated to Johannesburg and completed her advanced diploma in fine art at Wits University. She travelled to London and Copenhagen where she worked as a gallery administrator and artist. By 2005, Wafer had returned to South Africa to embark on her Masters of Art in fine art.

Wafer’s earlier works draw on images related to movement and transport; she explored issues of exclusion and marginality in relation to the notion of space. Through paintings of alienating peripheral structures, such as freeways and bridges, focusing on the architectures of trans­port and mobility, Wafer explores ideas of structural marginality and exclusion in a contemporary South African context.In her paintings and prints, Wafer takes structures of corridors and lighting tracks, often seen on basement parking ceilings, as inspiration. By homing in on metaphorically isolated psychological spaces, Wafer explores notions of structural marginality and exclusion in contemporary South Africa. Depictions of peripheral structures, such as freeways and bridges, constitute this angle of exploration.

In her work, Wafer uses lines of perspective to create the sense of a space exceeding the limits of the page. She is careful not to over-work a print, leaving it up to the viewer to “complete” the image within our imaginations. The slightest suggestion of an extended space can be enough information to grasp the image and its underlying social commentary.

Nolan Oswald Dennis

Nolan Oswald Dennis (b. 1988, Zambia) is a para-disciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores what they call ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.

Dennis’ work questions the politics of space (and time) through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach. They are concerned with the hidden structures that pre-determine the limits of our social and political imagination. Through a language of diagrams, drawings and models they explore a hidden landscape of systematic and structural conditions that organise our political sub-terrain. This sub-space is framed by systems which transverse multiple realms (technical, spiritual economic, psychological, etc) and therefore Dennis’ work can be seen as an attempt to stitch these, sometime opposed, sometimes complimentary, systems together. To read technological systems alongside spiritual systems, to combine political fictions with science fiction.

Dennis’ is the 2016 winner of the FNB Arts Prize, and has exhibited in various solo and group shows, including the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016), the Young Congo Biennale (2019), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Architekturmuseum der TU München, Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and ARoS Aarhus (Denmark). They were the 2020 artist in residence at NTUCCA (Singapore) and the 2021 artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation (London).

Dennis’ work featured at the Liverpool Biennale with their installation, ‘no conciliation is possible (working diagram)’ in 2023, as well as Kunsthalle Bern and Van Abbe Museum. Dennis also participated in the 12th edition of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale as well as the ‘back wall project’ at the Kunsthalle Basel.

Hyun-Sook Song

Hyun-Sook Song was born in 1952 and grew up in a mountain village in Korea. In 1972 she travelled to West Germany and soon after that she began to draw and to paint. In doing so she often gave voice to her nostalgic memories of her beloved motherland. Over several decades she created paintings with only a handful of motifs or themes: clay pots, silk ribbons draped around posts, or woven textiles hung on a thread.

Song developed both a very distinctive style and a technique that blends elements from the West and the East. She chose to use tempera, a type of paint made by mixing pigments with egg yolk. This technique was widely used in Western painting in the Middle Ages, notably because of the paint’s opaque character. Song, by contrast, uses tempera in a way that is almost transparent: the brushstrokes are economical but accurate. Each brushstroke represents a single movement and there is no room for doubt.

Hyun-Sook Song studied at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg between 1976 and 1981. In 1984 she returned to her homeland for a year to study Korean art history at Chonnam National University in Gwangju.

Hyun-Sook Song’s work is included in the collections of the following institutes: Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Leeum-Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Seoul Museum of Art, Gwangju Art Museum and Gyeonggido Museum of Art.

Ewa Nowak

Ewa Nowak is a graduate of the Faculty of Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her projects have been repeatedly awarded in competitions for designers and shown at exhibitions in Poland and abroad. She designs utility objects, creates conceptual art, sculptures and jewelery. In her artistic works, she is interested in combining various areas – the scrupulous experience of the industrial designer with the freedom of expression in the world of art. Ewa, together with Jarosław Markowicz, established the NOMA design studio, where they both deal with industrial design. She also designs jewelry for her newly created brand, Ferja.