Gallery News
Mikhael Subotzky & Patrick Waterhouse in State of the Art Photography
Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse have been selected to exhibit on State of the Art Photography at The NRW-Forum Düsseldorf. “The future does not belong to pure photography, but to the free arts,” says Andreas Gursky, one of the advisors of the exhibition. The NRW-Forum Düsseldorf asked for photographers who are tipped to be the movers and the shakers in this field in the coming years. In an attempt to reflect this remit, each of the 40 artists/photographers who feature in this summary exhibition is represented by a collection of images or an installation. The photographers were proposed by Andreas Gursky, Thomas Weski, Klaus Biesenbach, Udo Kittelmann, FC Gundlach, Thomas Seelig, Andrea Holzherr, and Werner Lippert. They hail from America, Europe, and South Africa; other continents and cultural spaces will be addressed at a later date. The exhibition runs from 4 February to 6 May 2012. For more information click here
Siemon Allen in Found in Translation at Deutsche Guggenheim
Work by Siemon Allen features on Found in Translation at Deutsche Guggenheim. The exhibition brings together recent works by nine artists who look to translation as both a model and a metaphor to critically comment on the past and to produce richly imagined possibilities for the present. For these artists, converting a text from one language to another exposes a discursive field in which the terms of identity – class, race, religion, sexuality – are negotiated, and meaning is generated. An apparently straightforward linguistic task therefore becomes a microcosm for the interaction between cultures, laden by power relations but also open to new aesthetic possibilities. Delving equally into history and fantasy, the works on view here investigate diverse political and social contexts; at their hearts, language continues to provide the crucial link between the cultures and temporalities they explore. The exhibition runs from January 28–April 9, 2012. For more information click here
Caption: Siemon Allen, Land of Black Gold II, 2004 (detail). Printed paper with correction fluid, mounted on foam board panels, 248.9 × 510.5 × 1 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Young Collectors Council 2004.88
World Press Photo 11 travels to Cape Town
The 2011 World Press Exhibition will finally travel to South Africa, taking place at the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town from 26 January–17 February 2012. Featured on the show is Jodi Bieber’s World Press Photo of the year 2011 – her iconic portrait of Bibi Aisha. There will also be a series of Photography Masterclasses and discussions presented as part of the 2012 Iziko Summerschool Program running from 4–17 February. Contact Jenny Altschuler for more information on 0829355522 or jenarch@iafrica.com.
Candice Breitz Extra! at Standard Bank Gallery
Candice Breitz: Extra! is the first comprehensive survey exhibition of the artist’s work to be presented in South Africa early next year. It runs at the Standard Bank Gallery in partnership with the Goethe-Institut and Goodman Gallery from 8 February until 5 April, 2012. Breitz, who was born in Johannesburg but now lives and works in Berlin, is an internationally renowned artist who has exhibited her photographs and video installations worldwide.
Breitz’s exhibition derives its title from her new work Extra (2011), a single-channel video as well as a series of photographs created on the set of the popular local soap opera, Generations. Breitz inserts herself into a number of actual scenes from the soap, sometimes subtly, sometimes awkwardly and absurdly, but always without judgement or easy explanation. Here she resonates as a conspicuously white presence amongst an otherwise black cast. The resulting images are simultaneously thought provoking and uncomfortably amusing – implicitly raising questions about what it might mean to be white in the context of the new South Africa, without offering easy answers. Extra was specially commissioned by the Standard Bank Gallery and is being shown for the first time in this exhibition.
The second video installation in the exhibition is similarly concerned with questions around identity and self-formation. Factum (2010) is a series of dual-channel installations, each of which juxtaposes the testimonies of a pair of identical twins, whom Breitz interviewed individually at length. As each pair of siblings competes to narrate lives that have been intimately intertwined, the play of similarity and difference between them comes to evoke the struggle that all individuals must negotiate in defining their selfhood in relation to others.
The third work on this exhibition, Mother + Father (2005), is a pair of video installations that features a selection of fictional parental characters drawn from popular cinema. Mother includes Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton, Shirley MacLaine, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep, while Father features Tony Danza, Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Keitel, Steve Martin, Donald Sutherland and Jon Voight. In each case, Breitz’s edit weaves carefully selected snippets of footage drawn from a variety of films into a new dialogue that probes parental stereotypes, and at the same time explores the formative power of mainstream entertainment.
Candice Breitz: Extra! runs at the Standard Bank Gallery, corner of Simmonds and Frederick Streets, Johannesburg, from 8 February – 5 April 2012. The Gallery (Tel: 011 631 4467) is open Mondays to Fridays, 08:00-16:30; on Saturdays, 09:00-13:00; and is closed on Sundays and public holidays. Admission is free. See www.standardbankgallery.co.za
Goodman Gallery at VIP Art Fair 2.0
Goodman Gallery will participate in VIP 2.0, the second edition of the internet-only VIP Art Fair, presenting a selection of works by Siemon Allen, Willem Boshoff, David Goldblatt, Mikhael Subotzky, Kendell Geers, Clive van den Berg, Gavin Turk, Gerhard Marx, Kudzanai Chiurai and William Kentridge.
The fair takes place online from 3 to 8 February 2012.
To register for the fair, or for more information, please visit vipartfair.com
Nontsikelelo Veleko and Kathryn Smith at the 11th Havana Biennial
Nontsikelelo Veleko and Kathryn Smith will participate in the Eleventh Havana Biennial under the theme ‘Art Practices and Social Imaginaries’.
The Biennial runs from 11 May to 11 June 2012
Click here for more information (website is in Spanish)