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This winter the Goodman Gallery will relaunch its Parkwood space, which has been extensively reconsidered, both physically and conceptually. This launch will be initiated with a group exhibition simply titled Winter Show, featuring a range of luminary-status local and international artists. The show will not only present recent works by Goodman stalwarts such as William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Sam Nhlengethwa and Mikhael Subotzky, but will also reveal a shift in the Gallery’s approach, showcasing work from around the Continent and beyond that is both explicitly and implicitly concerned with synergies and tensions between Africa and the rest of the globe. Some of the participating international artists, such as Ghada Amer and Hank Willis Thomas, are not only being showcased by the Goodman Gallery, but are now officially represented by us.

The Winter Show will act as a confluence of the Goodman Gallery’s top represented artists, as well as artists participating in In Context – a series of exhibitions and interventions currently taking place at Arts on Main and other venues in Johannesburg. Artists such as Jenny Holzer, Amer, Willis Thomas, Bili Bidjocka, Willem Boshoff and Kara Walker will participate in both shows, with the Winter Show presenting some of their more recent work. While In Context manifests an intimate and often candid exploration of the dynamics of the African continent, the Winter Show will offer a broader conceptual platform, covering many aspects of South African, African and global landscapes and conditions.

The Winter Show will elaborate on the thorny notion of the politics of representation, which Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz confronted in their 1999 collection of essays Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art. The book was a direct response to the critique of Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who was the creative director of the Second Johannesburg Biennial in 1997. At the time, Enwezor interrogated the practice of artists such as Breitz, Minnette Vári and Penny Siopis, intricately considering the question of ‘who has the right to represent whom?’ Now, over a decade later, accusations of misrepresentation have been revisited and reconsidered not only by Enwezor himself and those whose essays were included in Grey Areas, but by the art community at large. In Context magnifies these issues, while the Winter Show augments the dialogue, bringing new voices into the conversation.

Artworks

Painted Metal Cutout
189 x 120cm
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Silkscreen on canvas
5 x 190 x 245 cm, 4 panels
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Painted on bronze
78 x 74 x 12 cm
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Seed beads on digitally printed canvas
121 x 160 cm
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Carrier Bag, Handbag
40 x 16 x 30cm
Unavailable
Ink on paper
Work: 100 x 70 cm Frame: 116 x 87 x 4 cm
Ink on paper
100 x 70 cm
Unavailable
Bluegum, paint, laser cut mild steel
225 x 28 x 28 cm
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Bluegum, paint, laser cut mild steel
220 x 28 x 28cm
Unavailable
Bluegum, paint, laser cut mild steel
244 x 28 x 28 cm
Unavailable
LightJet C-print mounted on Dibond
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Mixed media sculpture
198 x 50 x 60 cm
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Mixed media sculpture
198 x 50 x 60 cm
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Mixed media sculpture
198 x 50 x 60 cm
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Tapestry
344 x 455cm
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Cut and reconstituted map fragments on paper
120 x 120 cm
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Mixed media on paper
150 x 102 cm
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Carrier bag, handbag
30 x 45 x15 cm
Unavailable
Carrier bag, handbag
40 x 33 x 15 cm
Unavailable
40 x 33 x 15 cm
Unavailable
Ink on paper
100 x 70 cm
Unavailable
30 x 40 x 16
Unavailable
Size 1: c-type print, 12" x 16" (edition of 7) Size 2: c- type print, 40" x 50" (edition of 5)
100 x 76.6 cm
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Size 1: c-type print, 12" x 16" (edition of 7) Size 2: c-type print, 40" x 50" (edition of 5)
100 x 76.6 cm
Unavailable
Size 1: c-type print , 12" x 16" (edition of 7) Size 2: c- type print 40" x 50" (edition of 5)
100 x 76.6 cm
Unavailable
Linoleum, wood, plastic, metal, foam
170 x 170 cm
Unavailable

About

Kudzanai Chiurai image

Kudzanai Chiurai

Kudzanai Chiurai (b. 1981, Zimbabwe)

Chiurai has held numerous solo exhibitions since 2003 and has participated in various local and international exhibitions, such as Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography (2011) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now (2011) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Other notable exhibitions include The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited curated by Simon Njami at Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2014) and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah USA (2015), as well as Art/Afrique, Le nouvel atelier (2017) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Regarding the Ease of Others (2017) at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Genesis [Je n’isi isi]- We Live in Silence at IFA in Stuttgart, Germany and Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream (2020) at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Chiurai’s Conflict Resolution series was exhibited at DOCUMENTA (13) (2012) in Kassel and the film Iyeza was one of the few African films to be included in the New Frontier shorts programme at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013. Chiurai has held numerous solo exhibitions with Goodman Gallery and has edited four publications with contributions by leading African creatives.

At present the artist lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.

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William Kentridge image

William Kentridge

William Kentridge (b.1955, South Africa) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions.

Kentridge’s work is held in collections including MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi and Zeitz MoCAA, Cape Town.

Kentridge’s largest UK survey to date was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2022. In the same year Kentridge opened another major survey exhibition, In Praise of Shadows, at The Broad, Los Angeles. In 2023 this exhibition travelled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums across the globe since the 1990s, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Albertina Museum, Vienna: Musée du Louvre in Paris, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Reina Sofia museum, Madrid, Kunstmuseum in Basel; and Norval Foundation in Cape Town. The artist has also participated in biennale’s including Documenta in Kassel (2012, 2002,1997) and the Venice Biennale (2015, 2013, 2005, 1999, 1993).

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Thomas Mulcaire

Thomas Mulcaire was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1971. He began a Fine Arts degree at Wits University, and then travelled abroad before returning to complete a BA degree in History of Art and Literature at Wits in 1993. He now lives in Ubatuba, Brazil. Mulcaire’s work takes many different forms and crosses into film, photography, sculpture, and installation. In particular, he has worked on a number of collaborations that interrogate the assumed limits of authorship in relation to the artwork. One such project is the Interpolar Transnational Art Science Constellation (ITASC), which he founded in 2005 with Marko Peljhan.

ITASC is described on their website as ‘a decentralized network of individuals and organisations working collaboratively in the fields of art, engineering and science on the interdisciplinary development and deployment of renewable energy, waste recycling systems and sustainable architecture to enable the production and distribution of open-format, open-source remote field research in Antarctica and the Arctic. ITASC is a lichen-like structure sharing and integrating local knowledge, resources and skills across seven continents in order to symbiotically engage with the air, ocean, earth and space commons.’ In February 2009, Mulcaire, Ntsikelelo Ntshingila, and Pol Taylor installed ICEPAC (the ITASC Catabatic Experimental Platform for Antarctic Culture) at Vesleskarvet Nunatak in the Dronning Maud Land sector of Antarctica, the world’s first mobile polar research base to be powered entirely by solar and wind energy. Such projects illustrate Mulcaire’s interest in various forms of networks – spatial, human, technological, and cellular, as well as his concern with the way in which we inhabit and make use of the limited resources of our planet.

Mulcaire has exhibited at the Saõ Paulo, Sydney, and Ushuaia biennales. He has worked as an exhibitions co-coordinator (notably for the Johannesburg Biennale in 1995), an assistant curator at Documenta, founder and director of the ICA in Cape Town, as well as a curator for projects in Kassel, New York, Saõ Paulo, and Perth. In 2008 and 2009 he exhibited his work at the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg and Cape Town. This year he participates in Unwetter at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin, CUE at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Halakasha at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.

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Hank  Willis Thomas image

Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, New Jersey, United States) is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture.

Thomas has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands.

Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), Writing on the Wall, and the artist-run initiative for art and civic engagement For Freedoms, which in 2017 was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is also the recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2018), Art for Justice Grant (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission. Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts (2004). In 2017, he received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.

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Bill Bidjocka

Bili Bidjocka was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1962, but lived in Paris from the age of twelve. Nowadays, he moves between Paris, Brussels, and New York. Though he says of himself that he is a painter not a writer, Bidjocka acknowledges that he often begins a work with writing, with a title. ‘I am more inspired by writing than by painting’ he says. He has made works that are indicative of this impulse, the impulse to write, to reflect on writing, and, by extension, to create an archive of his own travels, memories, and experiences, but also of the memories and thoughts of others. This led to his creating an ongoing Le carnet de voyage and also a mammoth project called L’écriture infinie – envisioned as the ‘biggest archive of handwriting in the world’ in which people write as if what they are writing is the last thing they will write by hand in their lives. Bidjocka is inspired by African knowledge systems and draws on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A spectacular beaded curtain invokes the Seder question, ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ and suggests associations with sacred practices. A photograph of Venice adorned with beaded script inspired by Arabic texts asserts an Islamic presence largely occluded in the centres of Europe. In all of these movements, across religious and secular texts and practices, Bidjocka asserts the primacy of making meaning out of experience.

Bidjocka has exhibited in the Johannesburg, Havana, Dakar, Taipei, and Venice biennales. He has also participated in landmark international exhibitions such as Zeitwenden at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn in 1999; Black President at the New Museum, New York in 2003; and Africa Remix (Düsseldorf, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Johannesburg, 2005–2007). In collaboration with Emily Cantrell and Jesus Polanco, he founded Matrix Art Project in 1995, a contemporary exhibition space in New York with branches in Paris and Brussels.

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Patrick Waterhouse

Patrick Waterhouse was born in 1981 in Bath, England. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the Camberwell College of Art and worked for a time with a design agency in London before joining Fabrica to publish a fully illustrated version of Dante’s Inferno. He has been a guest editor of Colors Magazine and art director of the Benetton social campaign, Africa Works. A long-term project has produced a book on the life and work of the Hungarian sociologist Franktof F. Burnsteins, Absolute Truth and Other Possibilities. Waterhouse met Mikhael Subotzky in Italy and the two have been working on the Ponte City project since 2008.

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Jeremy Wafer image

Jeremy Wafer

Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953, Durban, South Africa) grew up in Nkwalini in what was then Zululand. He studied Fine Art at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (B.A.F.A.1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand (B.A. Hons. in Art History 1980, M.A. Fine Art 1987 and PhD 2016). 

Wafer taught in the Fine Art Departments of the former Technikon Natal (now DUT) and Technikon Witwatersrand (now UJ) before being appointed  Professor of Fine Art in the Wits School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.  He retired from full time teaching in 2019.
 
Wafer is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, notably the Standard Bank National Drawing Prize in 1987 and the Sasol Wax Art Award in 2006. His work featured on the South African Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Wafer has exhibited in South Africa and internationally, his work is represented in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, the South African National Gallery, the Johannesburg Art Gallery as well as in many other museum, private and corporate collections.

Wafer lives and works between London UK and Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Kara Walker

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Atlanta College of Art, and now lives in New York. Walker is well known for her cut-out silhouettes and films that examine, in particular, race, the history of the Antebellum South in the USA, African-American identity, and representations of black women. These tableaux offer a visual paring down of the history of Africa in America but despite their graphic simplicity they are often replete with violence and action. In an interview for the film series Art:21 Walker comments that ‘A lot of my work has been about the unexpected … wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time. That kind of dilemma, that push and pull, is the underlying turbulence that I bring to each of the pieces that I make. The silhouette lends itself to avoidance of the subject, not being able to look at it directly.’

Kara Walker began exhibiting her work in 1995. She has had numerous solo exhibitions since then in galleries and museums in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Mannheimer Kunstverein in Munich, Deutsche Guggenheim, Tate Liverpool, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has also participated in group exhibitions such as SITE Santa Fe, the Whitney Biennial, and the Istanbul Biennale. Her works are in many important public collections.

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Marco Cianfanelli

Marco Cianfanelli was born on 30th November 1970 in Johannesburg.

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Lisa Brice image

Lisa Brice

Lisa Brice (b.1968, Cape Town, South Africa) negotiates the precarious terrain of artistic production, as she moves between practices of spontaneous drawing and figure painting. She makes use of unexpected painting and printing techniques on a variety of surfaces, which include canvas and tracing paper. For Brice, the act of tracing often leads her to a repetition of similar motifs or figures in her work, sometimes biographical, and at other times art historical: ‘I am attracted to the idea of repetition,’ Brice remarks. ‘Chasing that high, stories told and retold.’

In 2006 Brice had her first solo exhibition of paintings at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, titled Night Vision, in which she reflected on the uncertainties of childhood. In 2009, a solo show, More Wood for the Fire, was presented at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg; the exhibition detailed Brice’s relationship with the island of Trinidad. In 2011, Brice’s work was included in the Vitamin P2 publication, Phaidon’s major anthology of international painting. In 2012, Brice presented a solo exhibition titled Throwing the Floor at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town. She has had subsequent shows at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in 2015 titled Well Worn, and in June 2016 she was included on a show at Camden Art’s Centre in London Making & Unmaking curated by Duro Olowu. Brice had her first solo museum exhibition in the UK at the Tate Britain in 2018, where she exhibited large scale paintings which addressed the longstanding art-historical tradition of the female nude.

The artist lives and works in London, UK.

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Sam Nhlengethwa image

Sam Nhlengethwa

Sam Nhlengethwa was born in the black township community of Payneville near Springs (a satellite mining town east of Johannesburg), in 1955 and grew up in Ratanda location in nearby Heidelberg. In the 1980s, he moved to Johannesburg where he honed his practice at the renowned Johannesburg Art Foundation under its founder Bill Ainslie.

Nhlengethwa is one of the founders of the legendary Bag Factory in Newtown, in the heart of the city, where he used to share studio space with fellow greats of this pioneering generation of South African artists, such as David Koloane and Pat Mautloa.

Despite Nhlengethwa’s pioneering role in South Africa art, his work has received rare visibility in London. A major survey exhibition, titled Life, Jazz and Lots of Other Things, was hosted by SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia in 2014, which was then co-hosted in Atlanta by SCAD and the Carter Center.

Other notable exhibitions and accolades in South Africa and around the world include: in 1994 – the year South Africa held its first democratic elections – Nhlengethwa was awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year award; in 1995, his work was included in the Whitechapel Gallery’s Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa in London; in 2000, he participated in a two-man show at Seippel Art Gallery in Cologne.

Other significant international group exhibitions include Constructions: Contemporary Art from South Africa at Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Niteroi at in Brazil in 2011, Beyond Borders: Global Africa at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in 2018.

Nhlengethwa’s work has featured on a number of international biennales: in 2003, his work was included in the 8th Havana Biennale, Southern African Stories: A Print Collection, the 12th International Cairo Biennale in 2010, the 2013 Venice Biennale as part of the South African pavilion, titled Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive, and in the 6th Beijing Biennale in 2015.

Nhlengethwa’s practice features in important arts publications, such as Phaidon’s The 20th Century Art Book (2001).

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Clive van den Berg image

Clive van den Berg

Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) is an artist, curator and designer, who works on his own and in collaboration with colleagues in a collective called trace, whose primary activities are the development of public projects. He has had several solo exhibitions in South Africa, and his work is regularly exhibited abroad. His public projects have included the artworks for landmark Northern Cape Legislature and, since he has joined the trace team, museum projects for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Constitution Hill, Freedom Park, the Workers Museum, The Holocaust and Genocide Centre and many other projects.

Van den Berg has much experience working on large-scale institutional projects with teams representing diverse constituencies: urban planners and policy makers, architects, landscape designers, museum curators, historians, community liaison officials and representatives of local and national governments. In the Northern Cape, for example, where he worked with the Luis Ferreira da Silva architects, he pioneered a new strategy for integrating forms of the local landscape and indigenous aesthetics into the overall building design, while also training local artisans as part of a skills transference project aimed at long-term sustainability. The result is a world-renowned and uniquely South African state edifice: a monument to the people of the Northern Cape.

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Kendell Geers image

Kendell Geers

South African-born, Belgian artist Kendell Geers changed his date of birth to May 1968 in order to give birth to himself as a work of art. Describing himself as an ‘AniMystikAKtivist’, Geers takes a syncretic approach to art that weaves together diverse Afro-European traditions, including animism, alchemy, mysticism, ritual and a socio-political activism laced with black humour, irony and cultural contradiction.

Geers’s work has been shown in numerous international group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2007) and Documenta (2002). Major solo shows include Heart of Darkness at Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town (1993), Third World Disorder at Goodman Gallery Cape Town (2010) and more recently Songs of Innocence and of Experience at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg (2012). His exhibition Irrespektiv travelled to Newcastle, Ghent, Salamanca and Lyon between 2007 and 2009. Geers was included on Art Unlimited at Art 42 Basel in 2011. Work by Geers was included on Manifesta 9 in Genk, Limburg, Belgium and a major survey show of his work was exhibited at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany in 2013. Earlier this year Geers held a solo exhibition, The Second Coming (Do What Thou Wilt), at Rua Red in Dublin.

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David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018) was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, South African he chronicled the people, structures and landscapes of his country from 1948, through the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the apartheid regime and into the democratic era – until his death in June, 2018. In particular, Goldblatt documented the people, landscapes and industry of the Witwatersrand, the resource-rich area in which he grew up and lived, where the local economy was based chiefly on mining. In general, Goldblatt’s subject matter spanned the whole of the country geographically and politically from sweeping landscapes of the Karoo desert, to the arduous commutes of migrant black workers, forced to live in racially segregated areas. His broadest series, which spans six decades of photography, examines how South Africans have expressed their values through the structures, physical and ideological, that they have built.

In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop, a training institution in Johannesburg, for aspiring photographers. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2001, a retrospective of his work, David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years began a tour of galleries and museums. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. He has held solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum and the New Museum, both in New York. His work was included in the exhibition ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and has featured on shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Barbican Centre in London. In 2017, Goldblatt installed a series of portraits from his photographic essay Ex-Offenders in former prisons in Birmingham and Manchester. The portraits depict men and women, from South African and the UK, at the scene of their crimes, with accompanying texts that relate the subjects’ stories in their words. In the last year of his life, two major retrospectives were opened at Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The Goldblatt Archive is held by Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Goldblatt is the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, the 2013 ICP Infinity Award and in 2016, he was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France.

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Ghada Amer image

Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963 and moved to Nice, France when she was eleven years old. She remained in France to further her education and completed both of her undergraduate requirements and MFA at Villa Arson École Nationale Supérieure in Nice (1989), during which she also studied abroad at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts in 1987. In 1991 she moved to Paris to complete a post-diploma at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques. Following early recognition in France, she was invited to the United States in 1996 for a residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has since then been based in New York.

Amer’s wide-ranging practice spans painting, cast sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, and garden and mixed-media installations. Further, she often collaborates with her long-time friend Reza Farkhondeh. Recognising both that women are taught to model behaviors and traits shaped by others, and that art history and the history of painting in particular are shaped largely by expressions of masculinity, Amer’s work actively subverts these frameworks through both aesthetics and content. Her practice explores the complicated nature of identity as it is developed through cultural and religious norms as well as personal longings and understandings of the self.

Amer’s work is in public collections around the world including The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Samsung Museum, Seoul; among others. Among invitations to prestigious group shows and biennials—such as the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and the Venice Biennales of 1999 (where she won the UNESCO Prize), 2005 and 2007—she was given a midcareer retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2008. Multiple institutions across Marseille, France are currently co-organising a retrospective for 2022 that will travel to the United States and Asia.

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Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer was born in the village of Gallipolis, in southeastern Ohio, USA, in 1950. She first visited New York City when she was eleven, and eventually moved there in 1977 when she was accepted into the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. She had studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and at a certain point during her MA there, she began incorporating text into her paintings. She wrote her first Truisms in 1977. In an interview with Diane Waldman in 1989 (published in Jenny Holzer, Guggenheim Museum), Holzer talks about what motivated her decision to begin writing and more or less abandon painting as she had practiced and studied it up to that point: ‘I wanted to see if I could make anything that would be of use to or have some kind of meaning for a general audience, people on their way to lunch who didn’t care anything about art.’ She also says that in incorporating her work into the signage and furniture of a city like New York (she has, over the years, placed work in many other urban spaces all over the world) she didn’t want either complete control of complete chaos, ‘but both there in their extreme forms, not averaged.’ To this end, Holzer has employed every kind of public sign writing to make art that is incorporated into the public architecture of cities.

Holzer has been doing solo and collaborative installations and exhibitions in galleries and urban environments all over the world since 1978, including in New York, Berlin, Venice, Osaka, Lund, Boston, Hamburg, London, Paris, Saõ Paolo, and Seoul. These works have taken the form of LED signs, pastings, posters, light installations, writing on stone, billboards, plaques, graffiti, prints, projections, t-shirts, and tattoos. She is also a painter and printmaker – her canvases are strongly text based – and has published books, essays, and stories. She has done a number of special projects for various cities and these include LED installations, electronic signs, projections, and engravings on benches. Holzer has won several major awards including honorary doctorates, the Leone d’Oro at the Venice Biennale, and the Goslar Emperor Ring.

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Mikhael Subotzky

Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981, Cape Town) is a Johannesburg based artist whose film, video and photographic works are concerned with the structures of narrative and representation, as well as the relationship between social storytelling and the formal contingencies of image making.

Subotzky’s first body of photographic work, Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners), was an in-depth study of the South African penal system. Umjiegwana (The Outside) and Beaufort West extended this investigation to the relationship between everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa and the historical, spatial, and institutional structures of control. Beaufort West (Chris Boot, 2008) was Subotzky’s first monograph and the series was included in the exhibition New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2008).

The exhibition Retinal Shift was produced by Subotzky on the occasion of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2012 and toured South Africa’s major museums. Retinal Shift includes two large photographic and video installations that critically engage with the artist’s own ambivalence towards the processes of representation and image construction. Retinal Shift (Steidl, 2012) was published to accompany the exhibition.

Retinal Shift also includes Subotzky’s first major film installation, Moses and Griffiths 2012, which uses four screens to narrate the contrasting and conflicting institutional and personal histories of two seventy-year-old tour guides in the small South African town of Grahamstown. Moses and Griffiths has subsequently been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2013) Yale Art Gallery (New Haven, 2014) and Art Unlimited (Basel, 2014).

A third monograph, Ponte City (Steidl, 2014) is the product of a six-year collaboration with the British artist Patrick Waterhouse. This project focuses a single 54-story building that dominates the Johannesburg skyline. The building is cast as the central character in a myriad of interweaving narratives that, through photographs, commissioned texts, historical documents, and urban myths, chart the convoluted histories of both the building and Johannesburg itself. The Ponte City exhibition, which consists of a single installation of thousands of photographs and documents, has been exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh, 2014), FoMU (Antwerp, 2014) and Le Bal (Paris, 2014). Excerpts from the series have been shown at the Liverpool (2012) and Lubumbashi (2013) Biennales, as well as the South African National Gallery (Cape Town, 2010). Ponte City has won the 2015 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.

Show ‘n Tell was initiated while on residency at the Musée MAC/VAL (Paris, 2013). This body of work looks to the relationship between images, the various instruments of their construction, and both the politics and physiology of their reception. Pixel Interface, a multi-component video installation from this body of work was included in All The World’s Futures, the main exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor at the 56th Venice Biennale. WYE, Subotzky’s first fictional film installation, was commissioned by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (Sydney) and premiered there in March 2016. Yellow Bile (or Work in Progress), his first exhibition of paintings and performance, took place at Maitland Institute in September 2017.

Subotzky’s work is collected widely by international institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (New York), the National Gallery of Art (Washington), Tate (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the South African National Gallery, among others.

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Sue Williamson image

Sue Williamson

Sue Williamson (b. 1941, Lichfield, UK) emigrated with her family to South Africa in 1948. In the 1970s, Williamson started to make work which addressed social change and by the late 1980s she was well known for her series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle, titled A Few South Africans (1980s). 

Major international solo exhibitions include: Can’t Remember, Can’t Forget at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg (2017); Other Voices, Other Cities at the SCAD Museum of Art in Georgia, USA (2015), Messages from the Moat, Den Haag, Netherlands (2003) and The Last Supper Revisited (2002) at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. Williamson has participated in biennales around the world, including the Kochi Muziris Biennale (2019); several Havana Biennales as well as Sydney, Istanbul, Venice and Johannesburg biennales. Group exhibitions include, Resist: the 1960s Protests, Photography and Visual Legacy (2018) at BOZAR in Brussels; Women House (2017, 2018) at La Monnaie de Paris and National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington D.C); Citizens: Artists and Society Tate Modern, London; Being There (2017) at Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris) and Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life (2014) at the International Centre for Photography New York and the Museum Africa (Johannesburg), curated by Okwui Enwezor, and The Short Century (2001-2) also curated by Okwui Enwezor, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and P.S.1 New York.

Williamson’s works feature in museum collections, ranging from the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Pompidou Centre, (Paris), Hammer Museum, (Los Angeles) to the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C), Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town) and the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg). Williamson has authored two books - South African Art Now (2009) and Resistance Art in South Africa (1989). In 1997, Williamson founded www.artthrob.co.za, a leading website on South African contemporary art and the first of its kind in the country.  Awards and fellowships include The Living Legends Award (2020), attributed by the South African government’s Department of Sports, Arts and Culture; the University of Johannesburg’s Ellen Kuzwayo Award (2018); the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship (2011); the Smithsonian’s Visual Artist Research Award Fellowship (2007) and the Lucas Artists Residency Fellowship (2005) from Montalvo Art Center in California.

Williamson lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Hentie van der Merwe

Born in Windhoek, Namibia in 1972. Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa

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Joël Andrianomearisoa

Joël Andrianomearisoa was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1977. He lives and works between Antananarivo and Paris. Andrianomearisoa says of his work: ‘The only thing that matters to me is to deal with time. And what frightens me most is never to be on time, to be outdated. My way of answering this challenge is to be permanently against the current’. In his ‘dealing with time’ Andrianomearisoa falls into no clear category: his work crosses boundaries into video, fashion, design, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation. But perhaps his works in paper and textile are most indicative of his larger interests. Black features prominently, especially in his textile works, which hover enticingly between the ephemeral and the permanent. These works are partly sculptured and partly left to the chance and serendipity of the material with which he works. The same may be said of the performance and video works on which he has collaborated.

Andrianomearisoa has participated in a number of group shows, including Africa Remix; Rencontres Africaine de la Photographie in Bamako; the Havana Biennale; Fashion in Motion; the Design Biennale in St Etienne, France; and Africa Now!. His solo shows include Bir Gece, a one-night performance and installation in Istanbul; Habillé – Deshabillé, a performance/video piece in Stockholm and Saint-Brieuc; Bar and Une Histoire in Antananarivo (2004 and 2008 respectively); Black Out in Istanbul; and I don’t know how to begin, I don’t know how it will end in Ghent.

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