Art Basel 2021

GHADA AMER

Ghada Amer is a multimedia artist whose body of work is anchored and informed by ongoing ideological and aesthetic concerns: the submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life, the celebration of female sexuality and pleasure, the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty, constitute the territory that she explores and expresses in her artistic practice.

From afar Amer’s ANOTHER BLACK PAINTING (2019) reads as an abstract work rendered in rich black colour. On closer inspection, the work depicts a repeated motif of a woman’s outline in black thread stitched onto a black painted surface. The repeated figure merges with the background in certain places, then re-appears elsewhere to create an important visual interplay between the abstract appearance of the canvas and its figurative elements, inviting parallels between the linearity of thread and painted brushstrokes. The effect is a visual and intellectual tension between visibility and invisibility, both of the subject depicted and the material ‘objecthood’ of the work itself. In this work, Amer points to traditions of abstraction and the canon of painting, historically dominated by men, and practices of needlework often designated as “women’s work”. ANOTHER BLACK PAINTING directs audiences to look, and look again, and question whether we can rely on vision alone.

NICHOLAS HLOBO

Working with various found objects and materials — leather, rubber, bronze, ribbons, copper and brass —Nicholas Hlobo considers his artistic practice to be a kind of autobiography through which he articulates a sense of self. Through an obscured grammar within a language of abstraction, Hlobo explores his psychological, emotional and spiritual journey. “My work is about my journey, how I relate to myself and to the outside world. I’m very curious about the invisible, intangible and incomprehensible aspects of that journey and there is always a slipperiness to the process of figuring it out”, says Hlobo. 

Hlobo uses materials that have resonance to his personal memories, he explains;  “Materials are found and used as a way to add more layers to the narrative. And how they are intervened with forms a part of becoming a language that tells the story. Found objects have their own stories with various patinas depending on where they come from.” In Unomalanga, loosely translated as the sun goddess, Hlobo uses ribbons and leather on cotton canvas. As a coproduct from cattle, leather has personal significance to the artist. Within the isiXhosa culture, cattle are considered sacred and the Kraal, where they are kept, is revered as a spiritual site. The work references the sanctity of the animal and reflects on the sun through its feminine qualities. 

Exploring and championing a breadth of mediums, such as animation, sculpture, performance and drawing, William Kentridge’s complex creations are multifaceted in form, resonating with audiences through their unifying exploration of the very fabric of our existence. Revisiting and reacting to philosophical, historical or political tropes, Kentridge conjures myriad themes in his polymorphic works which are experimental and conceptually rich. Kentridge proposes a way of seeing art and life as a continuous process of change rather than as a controlled world of certainties. He constantly questions the impact of artistic practice in today’s world and has investigated how identities are shaped through shifting ideas of history, and place, looking at how we construct our histories and what we do with them. 

William Kentridge’s botanical drawings of trees are rendered in Indian ink on the pages of old encyclopedias and attempt to capture the forms of trees indigenous to the area around Johannesburg. Using photographic references and drawing loosely in Indian ink, the plants are grown page by page – each page holding only a fragment of the whole. The complete botanical forms emerge more by recognition than by a pre-existing clarity as to what the plant must look like, as the pages are shifted, layered, torn, pieces added, marks added – until the tree reveals itself as complete. 

KAPWANI KIWANGA

Working with sound, film, performance, and objects, Kiwanga relies on extensive research to transform information into investigations of historical narratives and their impact on political and social systems. 

Kiwanga’s interest in the historical and symbolic effect of materials is demonstrated through an arrangement of steelworks covered in sisal fibre. The golden spun fibre, harvested from the botanical plant Agave sisalana, is typically used for rope and twine. Kiwanga first encountered sisal whilst travelling through rural Tanzania where this flowering plant is a primary export commodity. Fascinated by the fibre’s colour (yellow and gold) as well as the rhythmic rows of the crop, Kiwanga came to learn more about the plant in relation to Tanzania’s political, economic and social history.

“The agave cactus was first brought illegally to Tanzania by German plantation owners who began to develop the crop on a large scale,” Kiwanga explains in an interview from her new book published by Kunsthaus Pasquart, elaborating further; “At the time of Tanzanian independence, plantations that had once been privately owned were nationalised, in an attempt to assure Tanzania would be economically self-sufficient. Sisal was meant to play an economic role in the country becoming an independent socialist state. Ujamaa socialism failed, for many different reasons, but when the price of sisal plummeted on the world markets it contributed to this as it adversely affected prospects of financial resilience.”

YINKA SHONIBARE CBE

Over the past decade, Shonibare has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the context of globalization. Working in painting, sculpture, photography, film and installation, Shonibare’s work examines race, class and the construction of cultural identity through a sharp political commentary of the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Shonibare uses wry citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities

Planets in My Head is a series of sculptures set against the current context of global anxiety about the planet. The sculptures all incorporate a globe-like form in the position of a head, which ties into the idea of breaking with traditional and established Western canons of knowledge. This concept is illustrated using the figure of children in the sculptures, who all bear Western tools which subvert our ideas around a European understanding of the world. These figures have seemingly departed Earth, entering other galaxies where they may resist the formalisation of knowledge that the West has set up. In turn, the sculptures re-imagine our dominant bodies of knowledge to create a new globalised perspective.