Goodman Gallery and blank projects are delighted to introduce a collaborative exhibition over Johannesburg’s art season titled ‘alluvium’. With both galleries dedicated to a crosspollination of artistic voices and building a resilient ecosystem, this show enacts the idea of collaboration as a practice. 

‘Goodman Gallery X blank projects: alluvium’ takes its cue from the loose clay, sand and earth that is deposited by running water or a stream. Considering ideas around debris as the composition itself, the exhibition incorporates artists across both gallery programmes to explore how artists can gather discarded materials or ephemeral notions into a composition. Through this, psychogeographic cartographies are formed, mapping out and remixing strategies for engaging with and interrogating the world. 

Ghada Amer (b. 1963, Cairo) 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. Recognising both that women are taught to model behaviours 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. 

‘MY BODY IS MINE’ forms part of a larger body of work in which Amer works for the first time with Egyptian textile craft, deploying the voices of Eastern and Western feminist activists within a series of new abstract works: transforming powerful statements by Simone de Beauvoir - “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” - and Amina Sboui - “my body belongs to me and it does not represent the honour of anyone” into bold geometric formations that reference the ubiquitous QR code form, a recent visual language that has replaced printed text. 

2022/23 saw a major retrospective of Amer’s work titled ‘A Woman’s Voice Is Revolution’, organised by Mucem, it was hosted across three venues in Marseille. Group shows and biennials include: the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and the Venice Biennales of 1999 (where she won the UNESCO Prize), 2005 and 2007. Amer’s mid-career retrospective was held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2008. 

Collections include: The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and the Samsung Museum, Seoul.

The works of David Koloane, donna Kukama, Misheck Masamvu, Lerato Shadi, Jeremy Wafer, Clive van den Berg and James Webb consider sociopolitical and material debris, pointing to their entanglement with emotional wellbeing, historical narratives and the imaginaries that develop around land and landscape. Through the photographs, found objects, layered paint and the inclusion of unconventional art materials such as oil and coffee present across their works, they bring to the surface messy contradictions in how value systems are formed, their persistence and how these are projected into the world. 

Following the thread of conceptual materiality, Ghada Amer and Kresiah Mukwazhi apply it to their engagement with the female body and how under patriarchal systems it is leveraged as a site of contestation, power dynamics and resistance. Mukwazhi’s bra straps stitched on canvas and Amer’s textile work speak to a defiance and reclamation of agency. Naama Tsabar, too, transforms textiles, modifying the natural characteristics of material to shift our worldviews and expose the hidden systems that guide them.

Following the thread of conceptual materiality, Ghada Amer and Kresiah Mukwazhi apply it to their engagement with the female body and how under patriarchal systems it is leveraged as a site of contestation, power dynamics and resistance. Mukwazhi’s bra straps stitched on canvas and Amer’s textile work speak to a defiance and reclamation of agency. Naama Tsabar, too, transforms textiles, modifying the natural characteristics of material to shift our worldviews and expose the hidden systems that guide them.

Misheck Masamvu (b. 1980, Penhalonga) is widely regarded as one of the leading painters in his home country with his work exploring and commenting on the socio-political setting of post-independence Zimbabwe. Trained in Germany, Masamvu continues to live and work in Zimbabwe which provides rich inspiration for his gestural painting. 

‘Sweet Tooth’ forms part of a body of work that combines striking colour with a distinct expressionist style to establish a grammar of chaotic compositions, gestural brushwork and perpetually altered or mutated figures often depicted in states of flux or transformation.

Notable solo and group exhibitions include ‘Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics’, The Institutum, Singapore (2024); ‘Inside Out’, Fondation Grandpour l’Art, Geneva (2022); ‘Witness: Afro Perspectives’, El Espacio 23, Miami (2020); ‘Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection’, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami (2020); and ‘Two Together’, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2020). 

Museum exhibitions and biennales include The ‘t’ is silent, 8th Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem (2022); STILL ALIVE, 5th Aichi Triennale, Aichi (2022), NIRIN, 22nd Sydney Biennale, Sydney (2020), the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016).

Selected collections include: A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town; Braunsfelder Family Collection, Cologne; COMMA Foundation, Brussels; Igal Ahouvi Art Collection, Tel Aviv; Khouri Art Foundation, Dubai; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Pigozzi Collection, Geneva; Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo; Ueshima Museum, Tokyo; United States National Embassies Permanent Collection, Washington DC; X Museum, Beijing; and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town.

Kresiah Mukwazhi (b.1992, Harare). Working with textile collage, installation, performance and video, Mukwazhi examines the politicisation and instrumentalization of the female body as a contested site upon which the power dynamics of patriarchal society are played out. In recent works, she explores the underlying structures of systemic gender-based violence and deconstructs narratives that marginalise women in Zimbabwean society. By challenging cultural norms of femininity and taboos related to female agency, Mukwazhi highlights the importance of addressing latent forms of patriarchy. Her practice is an expression of her commitment to solidarity, empowerment, and care for marginalised communities and strives to provide a platform for resistance and self-empowerment.

‘Chenuramakwara’ is composed of hundreds of bra straps stretched across and stitched to canvas. Working with this conceptually loaded material to evoke the associated ideas of sex and control, Mukwazhi challenges the cultural norms and taboos imposed on women and their bodies in order to address latent forms of patriarchy and structural violence. She states: “In my work I refer to those unsung indigenous acts or rituals that show feminine power and the deep connection that women have to the land. When a woman, especially an older woman, strips down her clothes angrily, the land hears her and stops the rain until she is appeased. This is where the bra or undergarment comes to represent a form of resistance and a medium to bring such empowering knowledge to light.”

Gerda Scheepers (b.1979, Tzaneen). By applying imagery as short-hand for both her own art making process or specific (cultural) signs and figurations, Gerda Scheepers explores the medium of painting. Content and formal elements of painting are remixed through cut, copy and paste with the results actively pursuing ambiguity. Her paintings, as well as her sculptures, operate like devices for containment that, ultimately crucially, fail to contain. Scheepers delves into the techniques of collage and decoupage, using them as visual and linguistic instruments to disrupt the continuum of the familiar and enable a continuum between apparently disparate registers. Simultaneously, she employs collage as a tool to didactically, and sometimes humorously, imitate the brutal fragmentation brought on by life’s daily efforts. In Scheepers’ words, “the studio functions somehow as a capsule, where possibilities and restrictions play themselves out.”

About Scheepers’ paintings, Keely Shinners writes: “These works, primarily made from acrylic and acrylic inks on canvas, take pleasure in being under covers. They operate in the world of nostalgia. [...] At first glance, Scheepers’ paintings may appear to be mono- or dichromatic. Upon closer inspection, however, one notices several laminae hidden underneath the surface colour.”

Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953, Durban, South Africa) works across sculpture, photography, video and drawing, exploring the politics and poetics of place. Rooted in South Africa’s social, cultural and political geography, his work engages issues of land and territory, particularly themes of location, dislocation, possession and dispossession.

According to critic Sean O’Toole, Wafer’s practice is “striking in its responsiveness to the particularities of South Africa’s land” (This is no place for lovely pictures, 2022). Indeed, throughout his forty-year career, Wafer has employed topographic and oceanic references to consider the geological and sociohistorical realities and imaginaries that surround his sites of investigation. This body of work stems from Wafer’s decades-long exploration of dislocation, memory and materiality. 

Solo exhibitions: Arc, Goodman Gallery, London (2022); Index, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2017); Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2014); Structure: Avenues and barriers of Power, a retrospective at KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009). 

Group exhibitions: Centre of Gravity, The Old Soap Works, Bristol (2020); Ampersand, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2019); Everywhere but Here, Cite International des Arts, Paris (2017); What remains is Tomorrow, The Pavilion of South Africa at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2015); Witness, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014); Views of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of Air and Space, Washington DC. (2013); and 20: Two Decades of South African Sculpture, NIROX Foundation, the Cradle of Humankind, (2010). 

Wafer’s work features in the following public collections: the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC; South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Johannesburg Art Gallery. 

Wafer lives and works between London and Johannesburg.