[Working Title] / 2012
RESHMA CHHIBA / GABRIELLE GOLIATH / MURRAY KRUGER / GERALD MACHONA / KYLE MORLAND / MONIQUE PELSER / THABISO SEKGALA
Goodman Gallery Cape presents [Working Title] – a group exhibition of young artists working in South Africa, brought together in a way that allows multiple and perhaps surprising dialogues to emerge, and foregrounding questions of authorship, authority and notions of the relational.
Reshma Chhiba’s Kundalini Shakti and Linga-yoni – a slashed canvas and an unsettlingly organic sculpture, both informed by the artist’s ongoing interest in the Hindu goddess Kali as an embodiment of unbridled feminine creativity – act as a complement and counterpoint to the cool, Apollonian rationalism of Kyle Morland’s Double-Ended Saddle Cut, a suspended sculpture of welded steel. Both are also concerned, in different ways, with the act and effects of making. Murray Kruger, too, plays with concepts of creativity and authorship in his recreation of, and extrapolation from, Walter Battiss’ 1973 performance piece Open tent for contemplating the cosmic origins of art, while at the same time raising questions about the nature of the artwork, its evolution over time, and the ways in which its audiences are implicated in its inscription into history.
Artworks
About
Gabrielle Goliath
Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath (b.1983, South Africa) attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed remove and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, on terms of complicity, relation and love.
Goliath’s immersive, often durational installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. She has won several awards including a Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum. She lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Recent exhibitions include Chorus, Dallas Contemporary (2022), Dallas; This song is for…, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2022); The Normal, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburg (2021); This song is for…, Konsthall C, Stockholm (2021); Our Red Sky, Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg (2020); and The Power of my Hands, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (2020). She has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum.
www.gabriellegoliath.com
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Gerald Machona
Gerald Machona is a Zimbabwean born Visual artist with a Master’s Degree in Fine Art from Rhodes University and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Cape Town, completed at the Michaelis School of fine art. Machona’s work has been included on several prominent international exhibitions, which include the South African Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in Italy, All the World’s Futures and at the 20th Biennale of Sydney, The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed. Machona’s work has also appearedin exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town.
Machona works with sculpture, performance, new media, photography and film. The most notable aspect of his work is his innovative use of currency—particularly decommissioned Zimbabwean dollars—as an aesthetic material. Machona’s current work engages with issues of migration, transnationalism, social interaction and xenophobia in Africa.
In 2013, Machona featured in Mail and Guardian’s 200 Young South African’s supplemental and was selected by Business Day and the Johannesburg Art Fair in 2011 as one of the top ten young African artists practicing in South Africa. In 2019 Machona was included on the group exhibition Still Here Tomorrow to High Five You Yesterday at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town.
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Thabiso Sekgala
Thabiso Sekgala (b. 1981 in Johannesburg, South Africa) was a photographer whose work explored themes of abandonment, memory, spatial politics and concept of home.
‘In photography I am inspired by looking at human experience whether lived or imagined,’ Sekgala once expressed. ‘Images capture our history and who we are, our presence and absence. Growing up in both rural and urban South Africa influences my work. The dualities of these both environments inform the stories I am telling through my photographs, by engaging issues around land, peoples’ movement, identity and the notion of home.’
Sekgala held solo exhibitions in South Africa and Europe and exhibited in group shows internationally, including Les Rencontres D’Arles, LagosPhoto Festival and Bamako Biennale. In 2013 he had residencies in both the Kunsterhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and at HIWAR/Durant Al Funun, Jordan.
He studied at Johannesburg’s Market Photo Workshop from 2007 to 2008 and was awarded the Tierney Fellowship in 2010.
Sekgala died in Johannesburg in 2014.
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