The Africa Focus section at last week’s Armory put a spotlight on the hipness, salability and energy of contemporary African art. This synchs with the success of last month’s Cape Town Art Fair, a maturing fair with a focus this year on transcontinental practice. The viability of African art has been gaining momentum in recent years, and this traction can only bode well for our local art industry.
Meanwhile, student protests in the major South African universities are ongoing. Calls for decolonising the universities are mixed with frustrations around access, language and anti-black structures. Students at the University of Cape Town hauled out paintings from nearby residencies and burned them after clashes with private security. Along with colonial artworks, several artworks by Keresemose Richard Baholo, an anti-Apartheid artist, were inadvertently burned. The ensuing social media fracas, with attendant racial slurs, really brought home how art here still has political meaning, though it is mobilised very differently by different groups.
The tension between these two extremes, art fairs and art burnings, seem to define our local art world as we struggle between defining our futures and working through our fractured past.
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama at Stevenson, Johannesburg
Zanele Muholi has been an important voice in the black LGBTI community over the last decade, documenting the struggles, pride and wounds of a community often under siege. In a self-reflective mood, Muholi turn the camera on herself. Tymon Smith considers the power of these images in the context of Muholi’s ongoing practice. They are an important shift, he suggests, to keep the conversation moving forward.
50/50 at New Church Museum, Cape Town
The New Church Museum is a complicated space: it’s a public museum holding regular curated shows mostly drawn from the private collection of its benefactor. The most recent offering curated by art historian Rory Bester focuses on visual repetition. In a contrapuntal argument, Thuli Gamedze asks whose knowledge and history is being privileged by these repetitions.
Minnette Vári: Of Darkness and of Light at Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg
Minnette Vári’s midcareer retrospective brings together several famous works from the 1990s with her more recent practice. Using her own body and sexuality Vári investigates Afrikaner Nationalism and the rhetorics of the Apartheid state. Kira Kemper thinks her work is familiar and often iconic, yet still deeply moving.
An interview with Cameron Platter
On a lighter note, though no less political, Roxy Kawitzky interviews artist Cameron Platter on the occasion of his most recent show. They talk Žižek, cheese snacks, energy drinks and modernist sculpture.
Online exclusive, published on artreview.com on 10 March 2016.
