Minnette Vári / Songs of Excavation / 2013

Building on last year’s body of work shown at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, Vári’s new exhibition in Johannesburg concentrates on the trope of excavation. For this native Gauteng artist, who has worked consistently with the idea of a mutant geopolitical landscape throughout her career, the revelatory potential of turning up the soil, or drawing things out of the earth, is not new.

Nor is it an unfamiliar trope in South African contemporary art. While many celebrated SA artists concentrate on the direct confrontation between landscape, capital, labour and imagination that goes into the iconography of South African mining, this is becoming less tenable, for both historical and politico-aesthetic reasons, the seismic shifts of Marikana being prominent among them.

Vári’s exhibition departs from the general template of an aesthetic depiction of the contest between capital and the embedded political power of the historically white mining elite on one hand and the perpetually displaced and disempowered working class majority on the other.