ruby onyinyechi amanze

you looked for a beginning but there was none, is a mixed-media drawing coalescing imaginary places, constructed spaces and a unique cast of characters that float, dance, stretch and interact with each other. Through this work, amanze establishes a contemplative dialogue in a quest to materialize her explorations of displacement, dislocation and belonging. By cutting, dicing, sampling, rearranging and mashing together, amanze composes images that articulate free play as an act of revolution. In this work, lines cut through space and multiple sheets of paper are transferred and layered to form complex spatial configurations.

EL ANATSUI

With a career spanning five decades, El Anatsui is an internationally renowned contemporary artist;  awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale in 2017, as well as the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the Venice Biennale’s highest honour, in 2015. Anatsui is best known for his ability to meticulously transform simple materials into complex assemblages that create distinctive visual impact.

In Drying Line strings protrude outward. These freeflowing lines are in contrast to the more structured lines found in other works, motioning a sense of relaxation. The work combines warm and cooler tones balancing vigour and noise against quietude. Through this work, Anatsui contemplates the tension of the energy he observes outside his studio in Tema, Ghana — filled with people during the day and completely dead in the night.

In 2014, Amer expanded her repertoire to include ceramics. For the painterly, image-driven ceramics, such as The Girl in the Box, the artist uses clay as a flat surface to create a link with the imagery that populates her paintings. In so doing, Amer expands her mixed-media repertoire onto this medium, imbuing these works with the same loaded commentary as her canvases and works on pape

KENDELL GEERS

Kendell Geers’ series Les Fleurs du Mal are titled after a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. Charged with an intense longing and melancholia, these works on paper depict cut flowers whose petals simultaneously take the form of bullet holes or wounds. Severed from their roots and invoking a memento mori, the beauty of these blossoms lies in their fragility.​

Geers draws inspiration from the contradictions inherent in his identity as an African artist. In the series, the artist explores the notion of cultural transmission and the process whereby Dutch colonial influences flow into Afrikaans cultural identity. The same seventeenth century morals that permitted, encouraged and profited from colonialism also presided over the culture that gave rise to the Dutch still life tradition. The repetition of an emblem in these works is also inspired by Dutch wax batik fabrics, whose brightly colored patterns are a symbol of African identity yet are designed in Indonesia and produced in the Netherlands.

DAVID GOLDBLATT

In the late 1990s Goldblatt began exploring the use of colour in his personal photography. Prompted by a new political dispensation in post-apartheid South Africa, as well as technical advances in digital reproduction, Goldblatt felt that colour best captured his feelings about the time. This work included explorations of land and landscape, people, towns and monuments - all held together by Goldblatt’s fundamental interest in our values as a society, and how we express those values in the marks we make and leave behind.

DOR GUEZ

Dor Guez’s new series of prints, titled Amid Imperial Grids (2022), presents manipulated negative images of the first modern maps of Palestine dating back to 1885. Based on these maps, two geographical grids were established at the beginning of the 20th century: “The British Palestine Grid” and “The French Levant Grid”, divided on the map by a thick pink line. Guez removes any human markers from the maps that categorise the landscape, including names of roads, towns, borders, villages, cities, mountains, and valleys.

Serra Pelada is an opencast mine, a prodigious pit dug by human hands, the result of a massive influx of self-employed miners to a remote part of northeastern Brazil. The promise of gold lured more than 80 000 garimpeiros from their homes and families, to a life of arduous labour in hazardous conditions. In 1985 Alfredo Jaar traveled to Serra Pelada, and over the course of weeks, he documented these miners and their backbreaking work in the mammoth crater. It was on these bare, muddy, terraced slopes that Jaar photographed and filmed what was to become Gold in the Morning.

The resulting images are a stark portrayal of Promethean repetition; the treacherous, daily descent of the men down the slippery walls and the clambering back up, laden with sacks of sodden earth. Beyond the graphic representation of their toils, the works reveal the humanity of the miners and their suffering. Jaar provides a portal into a hidden and unfamiliar place, dramatic in its scale and topography. In giving ‘visibility to those our world denies it to’, Jaar invites us to examine the social, cultural and political motivations for their labour. This illuminated installation counterbalances the great, faceless demand of the industrialised world with a profusion of faces: the faces of those, in the developing world, who supply.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

Drawing for Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (Waterfall) can be considered the most recent addition to Kentridge’s series of Colonial Landscapes from 1995 - 1996. The Colonial Landscape drawings were created for the rear projection of Kentridge and The Handspring Puppet Company’s version of Goethe’s play ‘Faustas in Africa!’ Their source was the nineteenth-century publication Africa and Its Exploration as Told by Its Explorers, which was a two-volume account of the explorations of the continent via Livingstone, Burton and other prominent colonial figures. Explorers typically brought along artists to illustrate their journeys through the continent, which are depicted as empty, uninhabited landscapes. Kentridge redrew these images, incorporating the red and pink marks of a land surveyor, referencing the occupation of colonial explorers and settlers that horribly abused both landscape and people.

DAVID KOLOANE

Koloane is held as an authority figure for African artists. This reverence stems from his dedication to his artistic practice as well as his other cultural endeavors including writing, curating and establishing spaces for artists of colour to be mentored and grow. Beyond these actions, his temperament empowered friendly engagements within the framework of his resoluteness.

MATEO LÓPEZ

Mateo López’ practice is guided by an interest in art as a means of engaging with questions of repair, defined by his ongoing search to build and shape a different future - a process which unfolds into diverse references from Latin American art, architecture, design and education.

In the collage series The waste of my time López repurposes unused materials in his studio. The latest works in this series were made in the artist’s New York studio just before lockdown in 2020, using cardboard, acrylic paint and grommet.

López draws inspiration from an anecdote on Josef Albers at Bauhaus Preliminary Class in 1923, which encapsulates his playful and paired down approach. As told by López: “Albers entered the classroom with a bundle of newspaper under his arm. ‘Ladies and gentleman’, he said, ‘we are poor and not rich. We cannot afford to waste materials or time. Every piece of work has a starting material, and therefore we must examine the nature of this material. I would like you to take these newspapers in hand and make something more out of them than what they are at present. If you can do so without any accessories, such as cutters, scissors or glue, all the better.”

SAM NHLENGETHWA

Over the course of his career, Sam Nhlengethwa’s ongoing Interiors series has become an important space for the artist to pay various tributes, bringing cultural icons into conversation with his practice and each other. The painting-collage works comprise an eclectic constellation of references and are presented together as their own contained interior space.

YINKA SHONIBARE CBE RA

The Hybrid Sculpture series sees classical European sculptures of goddesses drawn from Greek and Roman mythology hand-painted with Shonibare’s signature Dutch wax batik patterns, their heads replaced with replicas of African masks complimentary to the figure’s associated myths. Each mask has been drawn from a prominent twentieth century artist’s collection.

HANK WILLIS THOMAS

Employing the visual language and terminology of mass media, and appropriating symbols and images from popular culture, Hank Willis Thomas’ work seeks to question and subvert established definitions and positions with regards to personal identity and the narrative of race. It is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race. His work combines history, new media and photo theory as a form of investigation.

SUE WILLIAMSON

Truth Games highlights the most important cases investigated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Each piece pictures an accuser, a defender, and an image of the event in question. Evidence taken from press reports summarises the accusations and defence. These texts are printed on slats obscuring sections of the work. In order to see hidden parts of the images, viewers must slide the slats across the work to uncover what is beneath. Is the truth finally coming out or is it still hidden?

Frederick Jansen was the victim of mob violence in 1980 in the squatter camp of Crossroads, Cape Town, when his small truck was stoned, overturned and set alight. He died the following day. Afrika Hlapo was jailed for his part in the killing.  Seeking reconciliation. Hlapo, said his intention had been to seek a better world for South Africa. He received amnesty from the TRC in 1999, and expressed his desire to meet with the Jansen family, a request refused by Jansen’s widow, Pearl.