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BASIC REALITY / 2011

04 September - 09 October 2011

BASIC REALITY

Text by Katrin Lewinsky

The art exhibition Basic Reality is not a curated exhibition. As the artistic positions existed prior to the invitation, it is the artists’ present context that relates to this exhibition. The exhibiting group of South African artists provide examples of contemporary art mainly produced in South Africa between 2010-2011. The exhibition exists alongside current creative processes and contributes to their development within a public interface. It is at the same time to be seen as a medium in itself, created and completed by the artists. This exhibition is unique and can’t be repeated. Goodman Gallery takes the position of a commercial production partner offering the artists advice and curatorial dialogue. In this sense Basic Reality is a conceptual exhibition. It is formulating a liberal progress of reference for contemporary art. It contains a neutral perspective towards the possibilities of exchange between the media art and public in order to relate to and establish processes of reality. In the following conceptual text a theory on reality is introduced as part of a greater philosophical discourse and as a consideration for statements on contemporary art, like this exhibition. For the interest of relating to the artists and the exhibited artwork outside of the theoretical concept on reality, selfreferential artistic statements form a main component of this exhibition. ………… Theoretical text as a philosophical background and basis of discussion The world can be seen as completely catalogued and analysed and then, almost as compensation, artificially regenerated as if this were the reality. And it is by these artificial strategies that we, all being specimen of ethnology, here, in a metropolis, in all forms of society, try to live with representations of reality. This common state assumes that none of our societies know how to manage their social self, their power, their reality. In this sense, the real that we experience is not reality. A basis for the development of various structures: a growth of the true, of the lived understanding for anthropological structures such as religion, technology, language etc. There is a utopian culture that is conditional to human awareness of, for example, a return of the metaphorical without object and substance; of creations of idealistic models such as melancholy, of myths of origin and signs of reality; of truth, objectivity and established authenticity. Furthermore, a frantic production of the real and the referential exists, greater than and similar to the madness of material production. We create visible continua, visible myths of origin as existential evidence for the ultimate belief. We correlate to productions of systems, commodities, of political economy and of over-production. This is the restitution of the real that society has developed to remove itself from. This is a hyperreality. This hyperreality implicates an anti-form to every principle and objective. And thus also to an interesting current principle in our society: the code of capital. Capital is a challenge to society. It was capital that was the first to feed, throughout history, on the destruction of every referential, of every human goal, which crushed every ideal separation of the good and the truth and their counterparts in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, its law of power. It was the first to practice abstraction, severance, deterritorialisation, etc. If capital has generated reality, its reality principle exterminates the use of value, of real equivalence, of production and wealth. In this system another evaluating strategy is simultaneously manifested: power. This capacity shall be mentioned here as for a certain period it has the disposition to assemble only signs of an affinity and the figure of a collective demand for its signs. Those signs are equivalent to a setting, which is not a principle, and more substantially not an ideology, as ideology does not relate to reality or power, only to its infidelity. Reality is evident in modes of power, as it is real in anything that is situational. While ideology aims to restore the objective process, especially those of common standards, this causes pretentious problems with restoring the truth beneath a setting. This dynamic leads to the reason why power is so in agreement with ideological discourses, for these are all discourses of truth that always establish a good and avant-garde quality. Art, and contemporary art in this context, of the matter of reality and its structures of acceptance, manipulation and anticipation in our society, has the power to create realities. In the existing scenarios art is closer to reality than any other form of artificial production. Art inherently expresses critical conditions, abstraction and redemption of the status quo. As a creative selfreferential system it is not dependant on any form of power, reality, hyper structure and capital, on any existential and ethnological conditions. Art has thus by its immanent reduced artificial conditions, have the ability to settle the basic conditions of the society to participate and create reality. Every art exhibition is an opportunity to experience the visualised expressions of this basic reality.

Artworks

Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26cm
Unavailable
Color photograph on fibre paper
Work: 32 x 32 cm Frame: 49 x 49 x 3.5 cm
Oil, acrylic on canvas
50x50 cm
Unavailable
Relief print on semi-transparent paper chine colle on Hahnemühle Copperplate
54 x 78.5 cm
Unavailable
Wood, plaster, automotive paint, speakers
95 x 70 x 33 cm
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Concrete, mineral crystallization and time.
Unavailable
Wearable Art Piece
165 x140cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Unavailable
Wearable Art Piece
165 x140cm
Unavailable
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Variations in dimensions and content
Unavailable
Archival Print on cotton rag paper
61x28 cm-framed
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Color photograph on fibre paper
Image: 60 x 60 x 3.5 cm Frame: 84 x 84 cm
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink Print
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable
Acrylic on Wall
Dimensions Variable
Silicone, ZWD currency, cloth
33 x 10 x 8cm
Unavailable
Archival Pigment Ink
18 x 26 cm
Unavailable

About

Gerald Machona image

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 image

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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