Goodman Gallery presents A Different Now is Close Enough to Exhale on You, a group exhibition in three parts, guest-curated by Yaounde-born, Berlin-based curator and writer Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. The exhibition takes place across our Johannesburg and Cape Town galleries alongside a satellite exhibition at Umhlabathi Collective in Johannesburg.

Featured artists at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg: Leo Asemota, Karimah Ashadu, Rehema Chachage, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Eric Gyamfi, Sabelo Mlangeni, Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Dior Thiam, Rubem Valentim, Sunette L. Viljoen.

The exhibition’s conceptual framework extends from musings over the lyrical content of Cameroonian singer-songwriter and political activist Lapiro de Mbanga’s anthem No Make Erreur (1986). At the heart of the show is an exploration of the systems and relationships that comprise the history of power, extraction and exploitation. It also highlights the histories of resilience, defiance and communion that exist despite dehumanising forms of subjugation. This is articulated through the works of 20 artists from across multiple geographies:

“I wanted to bring together artists whose works I have deeply admired, especially because their works are framed between the polarities of poeticality and politicality. What they all have in common is an ability to approach some of the most sensitive sociopolitical issues with prudence, profundity, and in solidarity, while still possessing a strong aesthetic bearing. When I was approached to curate this exhibition, I was reading Eloghosa Osunde’s essay ‘& Other Stories,’ from which I borrowed the exhibition’s title, which symbolised something of a trust that in these times of dread, artists and culture at large play an important role in crafting our worlds” - Ndikung.

Featuring works that engage with climate change, spatial histories and narratives of conquest and oppression, the entangled nature of the exploitation of people and nature are examined. Ndikung builds a geographical and temporal map, gesturing towards the precarity of human existence constructed through processes of othering that can be found at the core of the colonial project.

Art is also explored as the space in which the work of allyship, conviviality and solidarity can be practised. The inclusion of works that explore remembrance and resistance enables an avenue for unpacking the position that art holds in pushing back against systemic erasure.

The exhibition extends to Umhlabathi Collective located at the old Market Photo Workshop in downtown Johannesburg. Titled Downtown Theory: Degrees of comparison, this satellite show focuses on a selection of photographs by members of the collective, namely Jabulani Dhlamini, Lebohang Kganye, Andile Komanisi, Tshepiso Mabula ka Ndongeni, Tshepiso Mazibuko, Sabelo Mlangeni Andrew Tshabangu, Thandile Zwelibanzi. This show grapples with questions about what it means to live in the now while haunted by ghosts of the past. It builds on the Goodman Gallery exhibitions by considering physical and political topographies.

“For many of us who grew up in other parts of the African continent, we have always looked at South Africa’s liberation struggles as our collective struggles. SA’s dreams of freedom are deeply entangled with the rest of the continent’s. Almost three decades after the transition, one can observe that the power gradients have shifted hands, but still exist, and the Africans from other parts of the continent who once upon a time solidarized with struggling South Africans have become the target. So the question posed by Umhlabathi Collective “what it means to live in the now while haunted by ghosts of the past” is a fundamental one and explains why it was so important to conceive of this show in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and invite international artists as well as our people on the ground to deliberate on that different now that is close enough to exhale on us all” - Ndikung.

The exhibition taking place across three locations allows for the artworks and the themes to be read together and apart. In this way, the artworks speak to each other not only across the gallery floor, but between cities.

Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (b.1977,Yaoundé, Cameroon) is a curator, author and biotechnologist. He is the founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and is the artistic director of Sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He is artistic director of the 13th Bamako Encounters 2022, a biennale for African photography in Mali. Ndikung was the curator-at-large for Adam Szymczyk’s Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany in 2017; a guest curator of the Dak’Art biennale in Dakar, Senegal in 2018. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. He is currently a professor in the Spatial Strategies MA program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin. From 2023 he will take on the role of Director and Chief Curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

Sunstrum’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses drawing, painting, installation and animation. Epic draws on the larger thematic considerations of her practice. Her work alludes to mythology, geology and theories on the nature of the universe. Sunstrum’s drawings take the form of narrative landscapes that appear simultaneously futuristic and ancient, shifting between representational and fantastical depictions of volcanic, subterranean, cosmological and precipitous landscapes.

Sabelo Mlangeni

The Royal House of Allure is the name of a (safe) House on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding (due to various circumstances) live together. Mlangeni spent six weeks in Lagos photographing the queer community in this house. This resulted in a series of images bearing the same name. The series sits firmly within Mlangeni’s continuing survey of the most challenging, beautiful and confounding aspects of the human experience. The Royal House of Allure contains images that may at first appear simple, whereas a longer and deeper perusal reveals nuanced prompts that urge us towards complexities behind representation. The images diverge at a single specific point; those that display fantasy through glamour where subjects actively pose for the camera and those that offer quieter banal moments where subjects are simply going on about their day at the house.

The Royal House of Allure forms part of Mlangeni’s broader practice of (re)imaging and (re) imagining vulnerable bodies as safe, seen andworthy of protection and celebration.

Karimah Ashadu

Plateau profiles a group of undocumented tin-miners in Nigeria’s Jos Plateau state and explores the socio-economic implications of their activities. Before Nigeria’s independence in the 1960s, Plateau State was central to the mining of minerals such as tin and columbite. The British colonial regime at the time enabled foreign companies to exploit the area. In the late 70’s and 80’s post-colonialism, many of these companies ceased and workers became redundant. These workers formed small communities and began digging the land for mineral deposits as a way towards their independence. They passed their skills on to future generations. Present day, mining continues with a whole host of complications. Without adequate machinery, the process is rudimentary and unmonitored, posing grave challenges to miners, inhabitants of Jos-Plateau state and the surrounding ecosystem. Plateau questions notions of independence and the detrimental impact of forgotten industries.

Abraham Onoriode Oghobase

Metallurgical Practice: Landscape (2019) and Metallurgical Practice: Miners (2019) are part of a long-term body of work presenting a crosssectional study of Oghobase’s experiences in Jos Plateau region in north-central Nigeria. The work, made up of several sub-series, begins to excavate the metaphoric strata of the landscape, revealing multiple layers beneath the surface of his personal encounter with the unique topography and history of Jos - bare grasslands and ancient rock formations indelibly scarred by human pursuits, past and present.

In this series, mining diagrams from A Text-book of Rand Metallurgical Practice: Designed as a "working Tool" and Practical Guide for Metallurgists Upon the Witwatersrand and Other Similar Fields (London, C. Griffin Limited, 1912) are superimposed on images of the Jos landscape. Just as the land and people today bear witness to the detrimental impacts and legacy of colonialism, the early twentiethcentury technical drawings provide an illustrated guide to natural resource exploitation. They serve as a testament to European imperialist pursuits across the African continent, from the Witwatersrand ridge in South Africa to the Jos Plateau in Nigeria.

Dior Thiam

This series addresses the power of mis/representation and erasure. It also considers ways of seeing and imagining space, deconstructing and unveiling the epistemic and aesthetic traditions upon which we have constructed our relationship with nature. This is done through an exploration of the relationship between sentimental colonial aesthetics in landscape photography.

The works investigate how landscape photography forged and cemented the colonial relationship to nature as an enclosed space to be controlled and exploited. This reframing of nature as landscape produced a perception of nature as “idyllic, paradisiac, empty, wild, barren, unorganised and unproductive”, according to the artist. The myth of emptiness - echoing the racist myth of Indigenous peoples as a “people without history” - underpins the narrative of colonialism as a natural, necessary and civilisational system. This is linked to the erasure of Indigenous languages, knowledge and practices as well as land dispossessions, forced migrations and genocides of the Indigenous peoples living on and with that land before colonisation.

The original photographs were taken during two different colonial expeditions into the former German colonies “Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika (today’s Namibia) and Cameroon. First published in: “Die Deutschen Kolonien”, Carl Weller Verlag für Farbfotografie, 1910 Berlin.

Leo Asemota

The title Outofor is taken from the phrase “out to of for”. This new site-specific installation is an allegory of the exhibition projects' overall thematic concerns and its site-specificity - South Africa. Outofor II, presented in the gallery garden, manifests as an adult-sized grave dug according to the South African state-mandated dimensions as outlined in the Cemeteries and Crematoria By-law of 2004. The grave is filled with King Proteas; the country’s national flower and one that is indigenous to the land. The inclusion of this flower offers a complexity given how expensive it is to purchase despite its native roots.

“Protea” is derived from Proteus of Greek Mythology, who was a shape-shifting god of the sea, and son of Poseidon, god of the Oceans. Proteus had a gift of prophecy, and can determine the prospect in all things past in the present but took on different forms in order to avoid prophesying. Outofor I uses the earth from the dug grave and places it within the gallery space. This extension of the installation produces a positive opposition to Outofor II and converts the external installation’s references to death into considerations of new beginnings.

Farkhondeh Shahroudi

Shahroudi’s drawings have a close relationship with her artist books and fabric artist book creatures made of fabric. Sharing seemingly anthropomorphic and animal features, these hybrid creatures appear to either be floating or grounded to the earth, interacting with plant life. They are in constant communication with themselves and their environment. The dynamic composition of the drawings animate the figures and their surroundings, allowing them to take on the ability to sing, morph and multiply in one’s mind’s eye. The energy in these works can be drawn from the way in which they are created. Shahroudi does not always stand vertically in front of her paper. She sometimes lies on it, walks on it and sleeps on it, producing a playful relationship with the line work that manifests the images.