Goodman Gallery Cape Town 4 October – 3 November 2018
Stories of mobility are strongly linked to the individual and collective search for greener pastures. This yearning for a better life, place or situation is the conceptual thread that runs through Gerald Machona’s second solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery. In this show, Machona explores past and present manifestations of this pursuit and utilises an intersectional approach to navigate the various ways in which interlocking systems of power impact and overlap with individual and collective aspiration towards greener pastures.
‘ Induku enhle igawulwa ezizweni is a Zulu proverb that expresses the desire and appreciation of searching for love in faraway places or nations,’ writes Machona in an artist statement about this body of work. ‘Journeying for survival in a search to better understand oneself or even for love is not a foreign concept in tracing nomadic or migration patterns in Africa.’ But due to a past marked by segregation, South Africa has been ‘shaped [by] a culture of mistrust and suspicion amongst its citizens’. The unfortunate effect of this has been the outbreak of ‘xenophobic’ attacks against fellow Africans in the country in recent years; a reaction Machona suggest might be described better as ‘Afrophobia’.
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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