Johannesburg Pop Up Exhibition

un voile with pillar forms part of Dennis’ body of work, conditions, which is centred around the spherical globe, an idealised figure of the planet in Western cosmology which is seamless, smooth, unitary and knowable. Counter to this image of the world, Dennis proposes a series of transformations of the sphere, stretching and distorting the model in order to find space for other worlds, other world possibilities.

Dennis’ explorations of a more awkward language to overwrite the globe builds on feminist, Marxist and postcolonial theorists whose work troubles the singular perspectives of the planet. This series takes the terrestrial globe as a starting point and performs a series of simple transformations: doubling, halving, substitutions. These prepared globes become instruments for considering other planetary possibilities.

“In 2006 William Kentridge was commissioned to stage Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera based on Gogol’s The Nose (first performed in January 1930 at Leningrad’s Maly Opera Theatre) at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. More than three years passed before the premiere: years in which numerous works relating to Gogol’s story were produced.

These works, in their abundance, document the diversity and brilliance of Kentridge’s forms of artistic expression.” - Sabine Schaschl Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 satirical story, The Nose, tells how Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov of St Petersburg, wakes up one day to discover that his nose has left his face. Horrified by its absence he sets out in search of his nose and when he eventually finds it, not only does his nose deny having belonged to Kovalyov but it is also wearing the uniform of a State Councillor - a political rank higher than Kovalyov himself.

Kentridge’s stately portrait, in Indian ink, evokes the haughty superiority of Kovalyov’s nemesis, his own nose, dressed in uniform.

The work Six Seconds shows a young girl in the Nyagazambu refugee camp, captured moments after she learned that her parents had been killed by the Hutu militia. Jaar’s encounter with the girl lasted just six seconds before she disappeared from view. For the artist, “the ‘out of focus’ quality of this image acts as a metaphor for my incapacity to represent a certain reality. In a way, I feel that every work of art about another subject is always out of focus.” Six Seconds is about the difficulties of representing trauma and inspiring empathy in a work of art. It relies on poetry and beauty to communicate loss and dignify its subject.

Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981, Cape Town) is a Johannesburg based artist whose works in multiple mediums (including film installation, video, photography, collage and painting) attempt to engage critically with the instability of images and the politics of representation. 

Subotzky has exhibited in a number of important international exhibitions, including most recently Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at the Barbican in London (2020), Inheritance: Recent Video Art from Africa at the Fowler Museum (UCLA) in Los Angeles (2019) and Ex Africa invarious venues in Brazil (2017-18).

His award-winning Ponte City project (co-authored with Patrick Waterhouse) was presented at Art Basel Unlimited in 2018. The full exhibition and archive of this project has since been acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will be the subject of a monographic exhibition there in 2021.

Italian-born, South African master sculptor Edoardo Villa’s works draw on the elements of an abstract language from the character of the surrounding natural scene, speaking convincingly of the experience of Africa. His work also explores the human form and condition, as well as the technological transformation that was overtaking modern life in the 1960s. Villa is often referred to, as one of the most important sculptors in the South African art canon and his work is present in institutions across the country.

Villa’s work beautifully expresses his uncompromising humanism in virile male presences and sensuous female figures rendered with a lover’s touch. Throughout his artistic journey he leavened earnest themes with lightness, interspersed declamatory public statements with intimate domestic whispers.

Villa’s use of Cubist and Constructivist techniques and his creative use of steel, exploring the possibilities of bent and welded metal, characterised his “break with descriptive conventions”. In line with Cubism, he became interested in traditional African sculpture, and a “new formal language” that appreciated the geometric forms in much African sculpture (Maurice and Dodd, 2009). During the 1960’s, Villa’s work engaged in a “dialogue between constructed steel and sculpture modeled for casting”. Villa’s work featured on the Sao Paolo Biennale and he had the honour of representing South Africa at the Venice Biennale multiple times.

In 2019, the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa opened William Kentridge’s acclaimed exhibition Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture, which is the first exhibition to internationally address the artists’ output as a sculptor. The exhibition highlights Kentridge’s longstanding improvisation in handling the medium of three-dimensional form, presenting objects cast in bronze that see their origin in props from his theatre productions and operas, as well as images from his widely known charcoal-based film animations.  

Kentridge is admired for the simplicity and the immediacy of the images that he creates. As an extension from the iconic erasure-based charcoal drawings of Drawings for Projection, Kentridge began to explore other techniques that would reduce the amount of intentionality and control over a medium and it’s subject. The act of tearing black paper, leaving the final shapes that are formed up to chance, suggests how expressive an artist can be to create shapes that a viewer can apprehend as an image or an object. These shapes could then come to life as a bronze sculpture, as seen in Jug.

Megaphone Man and Jug are examples of Kentridge’s earlier explorations. in the medium of bronze. Made in the same manner as the game of puppets he would play with his children on their birthdays, where puppets are created out of found objects around the house, these bronzes are born out of improvisation and a way of working without expectation or the pressure of an end result.

Despite his use of parody and a sarcastic bite, Robert Hodgins was nevertheless principally known as a sardonic wit, a great raconteur, and a superb painter of the theatre of life. With excellent instinct for colour and the properties of paint, he developed a figurative style which showcased his command of both satire and irony. While many of the artist’s works might have an underlying melancholy - or a tart social commentary - present in them, he certainly thought of himself as just as flawed as other human beings and chose to make his viewers “laugh at ourselves, even if ruefully.”

Oltmann explores dynamics between humans, animals and plants, highlighting features of armour, protection and disguise. By introducing defensive characteristics such as bristles, quills and thorns as well as engaging with interspecies protective strategies of mimicry, deception and aposematism, he teases the borders between human and nonhuman, presence and absence, fantastic and real.

Between the late 19th and early 20th century, albums of pressed flowers were among the most popular souvenirs on offer for tourists and pilgrims visiting the Holy Land from countries in Europe and North America. Typically comprising of dried petals and additional plants placed in flower-shaped arrangements, the albums noted the places where specimens had been collected and preserved in resin: “Jerusalem,” “Jericho,” “Tiberias,” and more. Corresponding to the cities and biblical sites already familiar to the Western tourist, such categorizations were informed by a distinctly romantic and religious view of the area.

Based on an extended research of pressed-flower albums in the archive of the American Colony in Jerusalem, Guez’s latest series examines the link between nature and culture, copy and origin. As with some of his previous projects focused on local landscape and vegetation, it tackles the ways in which a landscape, explicitly or implicitly, is subjugated to Orientalist precepts and made to conform to a Western eye, style and taste.

As later examination has shown, plants in the albums do not necessarily correspond to the locations cited bellow, and are sometimes cultured species unrelated to their purported local botanical landscape. In addition, botanical denominations are frequently replaced by literary ones – as with the anemone, which the albums identify as the ‘Lillie of the field,’ known from the Bible.