The artist has said, “painting should be about getting lost finding oneself or finding oneself getting lost. But for me painting has always been, above all, a lover: I have a bond with it that comes from a fascination of the senses and, at the same time, the loss of the senses. Painting is the gesture that comes before the decision, the insecurity brought to economy.” Calzolari currently lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

DOR GUEZ

Samira’s story is a starting point for Guez’s artwork and the Christian-Palestinian Archive project (CPA). Guez founded the CPA, 2006 after discovering a suitcase filled with old photographs and documents at his grandparent’s home in Lod. His family’s photographs were the first pillar of the archive. Today the CPA is an independent entity containing thousands of digital images from Christian-Palestinians across the world. The CPA gathers photographs through open calls.

Samira tells the story of Dor Guez's grandmother, Samira Monayer, using archival materials from 1938 and 1958 and manipulated to become what the artist calls “scanograms.” Each image documents significant events before the family was expelled from Jaffa, forced to relocate to Lod, Amman, Cyprus, Cairo, and London. Two of the scanograms depict Samira’s wedding in Lod’s ghetto, 1949. It was the first Palestinian wedding after the Palestinian exodus from land claimed by Israel (known as al-Nakba, “the catastrophe”). 

Alongside Samira in the exhibition is a studio photograph of Jacob, Samira’s future husband, Tel Aviv, 1942. Jacob is depicted in a highly stylised fashion that was the trend at the time. He wears American styled clothes and the set presents a fantasy scene, signalling the beginning of errosian to Palestinian culture. 

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.

KAPWANI KIWANGA

In Desire Paths research into town planning, aerial photography and other records relating specifically to Apartheid era townships results in a discovery of desire paths; routes carved out by human will and need that goes against the rigid grid of the installed infrastructure. Printed onto cotton fabric that undulates over the mesh grid, these graphics offer an aerial view on the movements of individuals through Soweto, Langa, District Six and the Cape Flats.

DONALD MOFFETT

Both of these works are part of an ongoing body of resin paintings first exhibited in Donald Moffett’s show Any Fallow Field (2016) and in his most recent exhibition Ill (Nature Paintings) (2019)  at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. One of the new resin paintings in the first of these exhibitions was unique in that it resembled a biological spore. Since then, Donald has continued to experiment with this shape in his recent work.  In a continued examination of humanity’s occasionally destructive relationship with nature, Moffett in recent years has further explored his long-time interest in biology and, while his resin paintings evoke organic forms, their sharp edges and perforated surfaces also the works with an ominous, violent and political undercurrent.