SAarts Emerging

OUTLET PROJECT ROOM

2008-04-14T21:22:00.005+02:00

Outlet is an ulterior spacial initiative, focusing primarily on alternative artistic practices; a project room of sorts that allows artists, designers and the like to explore their more experimental tendencies. The space is situated inside a seemingly innocuous, proverbially indiscreet, projector room, outside the old painting hall of Tshwane University of Technology arts faculty. This project room is the brainchild of South African conceptualist, and recent Spier contemporary winner, Abrie Fourie.

Outlet opened in 2003 and has had a prolific history, sporting the exploits of artists such as Gerhard Marx, Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, Sean Slemon, Johan Thom, Sue Williamson and Marcus Neustetter. Many of the SAartsEmerging artists have also exhibited in this space, such as Bronwyn Lace, Simon Gush, Nathaniel Stern, Colleen Alborough, and Shane de Lange.

Abrie has recently moved to Germany and passed over the reigns of the Outlet gallery to Ingozi Disco co-founder and fellow SAartsEmerging member Shane de Lange. The first show to be hosted by Outlet this year will be "Marvelous World"; an installation of works by Guy du Toit, Richard John Forbes, Sarel Petrus, and Paul Cooper. Marvelous World opens on April 19th at 14:00. For more information refer to http://outletprojectroom.blogspot.com/ or email ingozidisco@gmail.com

URBANSTRETCH

2008-03-24T22:36:00.003+02:00

Opening Wednesday 26th March 6pm-8pm
Closing Saturday 12th April

Young street artists from various disciplines have been given the opportunity to work, explore and exhibit their ideas for “immoderate public art”. Their intention was to stay away from the more traditional public art ideals; the type of work that would be funded and encouraged in the real world of judging panels and politics. The public art has not been made, the visualizations are being exhibited: sketches of process, studies and plans. The gallery has become an environment to experiment and collaborate; a place where contemporary street culture, traditional artistic practice and “pie-in-the-sky” ideals overlap and coalesce.
Curated by Leigh-Anne Niehaus and Murray Turpin.

Participating Artists:
Black Koki and 351073
Elbowgrease
Kenny Sonono
Phillemon Hlungwani
Rhett Martyn
Satta Collective

With graffiti intervention by Rasty.
Supported by Art Bank Jobrug and Red Bull

The Premises at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre
Loveday Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, South Africa
www.onair.co.za/thepremises
thepremises@onair.co.za
Gallery Hours -
Tuesday - Saturday
10h00 - 17h00

PUSHPLAY>> Exhibition of Emerging Video Art @ The Bag Factory

2008-03-10T12:55:00.003+02:00

The Bag Factory and SAartsEmerging.org present

PUSHPLAY>>

Opens: 12 March 2008 @ 6 for 6:30
Closes: 14 March

10 Mahlathini St, Fordsburg, Johannesburg

a selection of video art by up-and-coming South African artists. The exhibition, to be opened on 12 March 2008, runs in conjunction with the Johannesburg Art Fair to be launched on the 13March 2008.

SAartsEmerging.org is a collaborative web platform which promotes the work of South African artists though feature reviews, exhibition advertisements and other news links following the career paths of its associated artists. SAartsEmerging.org has an open call for applications to join the website.

The Bag Factory welcomes 'Push Play' as part of its exhibition programme which aims to further the needs of the local Johannesburg art scene.

'Push Play' is SAartsEmerging.org's fourth physical manifestation having exhibited previously in Johannesburg, Cape Town and most recently in February as part of the fringe of the Rotterdam Art Fair.

Line up includes: Lester Adams, Nina Barnett, Shane de Lange, Anthea Moys, Anthea Pokroy, Rat Western, Dean Henning and Rike Sitas and a live performance by MTKIDU and Ismail Farouk.

Enquiries:
Rat Western
rat@bagfactoryart.org.za
+27 72 802 9447
www.bagfactoryart.org.za
www.saartsemerging.org

10 Mahlathini St Fordsburg: Map

SAartsEmerging in Rotterdam

2008-01-25T17:12:00.000+02:00

Lester Adams

2008-01-11T14:20:00.000+02:00

“What I am trying to do is tell a story. My work often tries to access situations and circumstance by way of the material itself. A rewriting of a biological imperative and history.” Lester Adams

Adams is compelled by stories, the stranger and more mysterious the better. Biological anomalies, destinies written by DNA, the factual and the fictitious, all knitted together in a sensitive and sophisticated aesthetic.

Adams has “discovered” creatures, circumstances and legends that he draws from historical, geographical and biological research. His love of these oddities likens him to an explorer, a rogue discoverer of rare information that is available to everyone, but sought by few.

His work stems from this detailed inventory of stories, linked to each other by a sense of a utopian/dystopian binary. To look at a work in its final form, there is little indication of the intense narrative and conflict it symbolizes. Adams creates pristine and immaculate icons that evolve from a voracious study of the abnormal and the unfortunate. He calls this process “a baroque distillation”, a method that both concentrates the essence of his stories and their particularities, and pays homage to their dramatic and indulgent elements.

The stripping away of a narrative into a singular and signifying entity is a daring and sometimes contradictory action. The meaning and value that lies in the story may be lost to the viewer, though the art object may be attractive and compelling. This attraction and mysterious concealment creates a conflicted response. One is drawn to Adam’s work because of its cleanly constructed and authentic form, and distanced by the hidden significance of the clearly symbolic objects. He enjoys and encourages this push-pull dynamic. It mirrors his own relationship to his narrative subjects.

14s in 25fps in 14m, Negotiate: Intervention, Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2004

Adams speaks of his works as signposts - indicators of the tragic, the obscure and the fatal that lie beneath the surface of saturated perfection. This twisted relationship suggests the essential faults and oddities present in life are accentuated and heightened as flawlessness is sought. Searching for this extreme might manifest in excessive breeding of a species for their unique quality with aberrant side effects, or the hunting to extinction of an elusive animal for its legendary features. In each case, there is an obsession with the control of beauty that has captivated humans for centuries. Adams expresses this dynamic through his own obsession with the unnatural, dystopic entities and stories that arise in these circumstances.

This notion of significant objects is seen clearly in Sins of the Father’s. This minimal, cleanly executed work indicates the binaries of perfection and fault, without giving away its tragic narrative. The focus of this work is a cloudlike shape of Karakul fur, a material that is harvested from lamb fetuses. Though there is no surrounding text or information, the vivid tangibility of the material and its ethereal presentation give a sense of the weight and moral implication held in this article.

Sins of the Father's, SAartsEmerging Exhibition, The Bag Factory, 2006

There is always an immaculate finish and essential truth-to-materials present in Adam’s work. He will not settle for a merely convincing representation of the object he is memorializing. In his creative process, he sources the genuine article from his chosen narrative, adding another layer to the investigative method he has wholeheartedly adopted. This enhances the importance and authenticity of the work, and conveys the message of the truth in the legendary. The acquirement of these objects, animals or materials, often comes at the cost of the article’s life, or involves accessing industries that are usually avoided for their unsavory nature. Adams speaks of sourcing these materials as both thrilling and traumatic – it is as if he must go through a ritual of a compelling and upsetting nature to incite this reaction from his audience.

This need for the genuine object indicates another aspect of Adam’s process, the creation of the relic. His works indicate the idea of fragments, precious pieces of a sacred entity that are venerated and memorialized. This relic-like quality places them in a fine balance, between the mysterious and legendary, and the brutally real.

Deep Roller has an air of the divine, the untouchable. Tumbler pigeons, frozen mid-fall, are placed sequence-like above one another. Their stagnant poses indicate the falling stages of a bird bred to tumble in this way, with the ultimate consequence of fatality. The immaculate beauty of the birds, their mysterious origin, and the undeniable truth of their authenticity all contribute to the aura of a relic they exude.

Deep Roller, Positive Pulse, Sun City, 2007

Deep Roller, SAartsemerging Cape, Vega Brand communications School, 2007

Adam's latest work is currently on the Impossible Monsters show at David Brodie's new gallery Art Extra. For more information go to http://www.artextra.co.za/

Written by: Nina Barnett

mtkidu and friends live....

2007-12-18T12:32:00.000+02:00

Interruption

2007-11-06T20:44:00.001+02:00

Anthea Moys

'Interruption'

to be opened by Prof. Penny Siopis... and other surprises

In fulfillment of Master's in Fine Arts

Saturday 10 November 2007, for one night only!

6:30 for 7pm

Intermission: 195 Jeppe Street, Lister Medical Building, 18th Floor

Safe parking via entrance Bree Street (turn right at big blue parking sign after crossing Kruis Street)

Map: www.intermission.co.za

Cash bar

Bring binoculars if you own them.

Anthea 084-822-6577 or anthea.moys@gmail.com

Alastair 083-561-8536

Art Extra

2007-10-25T09:23:00.001+02:00

Art Extra is a contemporary art gallery opening in Johannesburg
on 7 November 2007 at 6 pm with a curated group show

Impossible Monsters

Location - 373 Jan Smuts Ave, Craighall, Johannesburg

Map/Directions - go to www.artextra.co.za

OR

email info@artextra.co.z a and we will send you a map

For any other queries please call David Brodie 082 552 3143

A Look Away issue 6: Now Out

2007-09-27T14:59:00.000+02:00

A Look Away is a fine arts and design magazine from Pretoria and SAarts Artist, Shane De Lange, is it's art coordinator. It showcases up and coming artists of all types and from all spheres of influence and in the last year and a half has become a great vehicle for contemporary culture.

This issue's cover has been specially designed by another SAarts Artist, Asha Zero and the mag includes a feature article on Bronwyn Lace.

A Look Away retails for only R25 and is available at various book stores and galleries in Pretoria, Johannesburg and Cape Town. For more information on where to get a copy or for back issues please contact the A Look Away Team: alookaway@pasiwa.co.za

SAarts Emerging Artist wins New Media Award and Exhibits in Austria

2007-09-27T12:22:00.000+02:00

Ismail Farouk was recently awarded the SABC Highway Africa New Media Award (Individual category) for his collaborative work, with Dutch/Iranian web guru Babak Fakhamzadeh, sowetouprisings.com.

Farouk is also currently exhibiting his work 'Rock Sale' at the Unfair Trade exhibition opening at the Neue Galerie in Austria. The Unfair Trade Exhibition attempts to draw attention to fair trade, above all fair exchange. This exhibition on the subject of global "Un/fair Trade" does not only show art works dealing with this theme, but collaborates with scientists from the fields of economics, sociology and cultural theory. In addition to the curated works, the exhibition also boast an online component. Participants are invited to contribute thoughts, opinions and art work on the subject of "Un/fair Trade" on the Net. At the same time, these texts, opinions and art works will be projected into the museum.

HAVE CITY WILL PLAY

2007-09-23T10:01:00.000+02:00

SAarts Emerging Artist Anthea Moys, brings Have City Will Play to Johannesburg next week end 29 September 2007. If you are interested in assisting marshaling the games on the day (shooting people with water pistols, throwing balls at them, judging karaoke etc.) Please contact Anthea at: anthea.moys@gmail.com.

HAVE CITY WILL PLAY
invites you to a day of playing games in your CITY!

"Have City Will Play" in conjunction with CIT:Y Festival and Arts Alive invites you to come and play in the streets of Newtown! On Saturday the 29th of September "Have City Will Play" will begin at 10am at Museum Africa with a discussion series on playing, gaming and performance art within public space given by the organisers- Anthea Moys and Tegan Bristow (see below for more info). After this, attendees will be invited to play one (or both) of two games on offer: "Shoot me if you can" or "The Nonsensical Obstacle Course Race".

So! The games will begin at 13:00 and continue throughout the afternoon, but come early as there are limited prizes and limited number of spaces available for each game. As prizes we are giving away full meals at Moyo, theatre tickets for any show at the Market Theatre, tickets to the Arts Alive concert on Saturday night featuring the likes of Giles Peterson, plus lots of fun stuff from the CIT:Y festival. Dress comfortably- no dresses or skirts please as tree climbing and ball dodging is involved! Its free so put on a hat and some sun cream, bring friends and come play!

SEE MAP attached for more info

WHATS THIS ALL ABOUT?

Johannesburg is one of the most dangerous cities in the world, making Johannesburg people 'car people'. When last did you just go for a walk in the city? Have City Will Play is about negotiating this chaos and perceived danger of Jozi through negotiating the city space in an engaging manner through the playing of a game. Have City Will Play is taking advantage of the safe and car free zone in central Newtown created by the Arts Alive Festival to engage in play in this public space. Newtown is seen as a practicing grounds as I hope to extend this project into other areas of town over the years to come.

Have City Will Play is part of an ongoing project, which I began as an investigation into the notion of play within various kinds of performance within public space. This project is kindly sponsored by the NAC (National Arts Council) and will be included in a solo exhibition to take place in November this year.

More Info: anthea.moys@gmail.com

Night Journey by Colleen Alborough on at Wits Medical School Adler Museum

2007-09-20T15:15:00.000+02:00

The video installation Night Journey by Colleen Alborough is currently on show at Wits Medical School Campus at The Adler Museum of Medicine. The exhibition runs until the end of October 2007.

Hours of the gallery: Mon - Fri, 10am - 4pm.

A walkabout will be held by the artist on 5 October 2007, 1-10pm.

SAarts Artist in Art South Africa: Latest Edition, Spring

2007-09-05T12:12:00.000+02:00

Haunted Territory

COLLEEN ALBOROUGH BALANCES SUBJECTIVE ARTISTIC EXPRESSION WHILE STILL ENGAGING THE VIEWER IN AN EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL MANNER, WRITES CATHERINE GREEN

Colleen Alborough is Art South Africa's ninth Bright Young Thing for 2007

www.artsouthafrica.com

Work in Progress : An exhibition of young artists

2007-09-03T10:41:00.000+02:00

Calling all young and emerging artists to enter a work for the upcoming exhibition ‘Work in Progress.’ This exhibition, which has been conceptualised and is curated by Anthea Pokroy; Candice Hirson and Louise Ross, looks at the idea of the emerging artist as a 'work in progress.'

The exhibition will be held at 105A Heather Rd, Athol on the 24^th of September and is a site specific one-night only event.

The Criteria for entry are as follows:

· Artists may enter individual or group works

· Artists may enter up to 3 works

· Any medium

· Any size

· Entry must be made through an email to one of the following addresses: louweeza@gmail.com; antheapokroy@gmail.com; hirsonc@gmail.com

· Entry must consist of a photograph, still frame or proposal

· Artists must include a description of their work, artist’s statement and price

· A fee of R20 must be paid when the work is delivered

· The Artist is responsible for getting their work to the exhibition space, if however you are having a problem with this then please speak to Louise, Candice or Anthea

· If equipment is required the artist must supply it

· All entries must be submitted by the 7^th of September

· All work must be delivered to the above address on the 23^rd of September between 10:00-14:00.

Disclaimer: The organisers have the right to select whatever work they may choose, the organisers will not be held responsible for any damage, theft, loss and so on and so forth that may occur before, during or after the show.

Anthea Pokroy

Candice Hirson

Louise Ross

Together In Electric Dreams: Rike Sitas & Dean Henning

2007-08-06T09:54:00.000+02:00

by Alexander Sudheim

“I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision / And I will sing, waiting for the gift of sound and vision” intones David Bowie in an alien baritone on “Low”, his 1977 landmark Brian Eno-produced album of downtempo electro-noir experimentation. Had the Thin White Duke uttered these words in 2007 he could well have been describing the anticipation of a performance by Dean Henning and Rike Sitas where one is, quite literally, waiting for the gift of sound and vision. Soon the spell is cast: once the listeners/viewers are drawn into the inimitable and inscrutable instrumental and electronic soundscapes created by Captain Asthma (Henning) and the equally dreamy and disturbing somnambulist cinema courtesy of Rike Sitas it becomes immediately clear that the gifts of sound and vision have been bestowed upon the audience in great abundance. Whether performing under the aegis of their Durban-based underground audio-visual initiative Rustpunk or within the wider collaboration with other artists and musicians that is The Sound of And Band, Captain Asthma and Rike Sitas never fail to astound with the combination of technical complexity and lyrical simplicity that anchors their work.

Captain Asthma’s philosophy of music is remarkably analogous to Dr. Frankenstein’s philosophy of undertaking: both pillage and co-opt with gleeful abandon to create from disparate elements an astonishing new creature that amounts to so much more than a sum of its parts. In both instances the entity they bring to life is both terrifying and tender; a lumbering monster with a heart pure as the driven snow. Blending samples, found sounds, rewired toy instruments, self-generated beats and whatever other aural detritus floats his way, watching Captain Asthma in action is a vicariously vertiginous business where at any given moment the taut miniscus of order could be punctured by chaos and pull you right down with it. In similar fashion is Rike Sitas’ oeuvre both temptress and torturer: the apparently random weave of her visual tapestry is as likely to caress in inordinately sensual manner as it is to chafe the most delicate parts in ways both excruciating and exhilirating.

The knockout blow delivered to both eyes and ears by the combined trajectory of Captain Asthma’s sound sculptures and Rike Sitas' moving images reaches new heights of sophistication and cohesion in their acclaimed installation simply entitled “a city”. Debuting at the KZNSA Gallery in 2006, the work was an instant hit, seducing scores of viewers/participants with its unprecedented marriage of science and beauty. Generally most people get their kicks in the former realm by reading about black holes and those in the latter by gazing at, say, paintings by Mark Rothko. Of course there’s a profound sense of mystery common to both of these yet somehow in “a city” it seems to have never been so deftly conjoined on one screen; on one set of speakers. By and large, science is about the desire to wrestle mystery into submission with the intellect whereas beauty involves allowing the intellect to submit to the fundamental ineffability of mystery. Naturally the dividing line is nowhere near as rigid as this, but nowhere has the Cartesian dualism of the two become so effortlessly enmeshed as in this installation by Henning and Sitas.

Hardly effortless though. Ask Henning how he made that big metal box thing with all the buttons that allow people to control the environment they see and hear and you get an answer involving phrases like “contacts are split into two groups with each linked to a separate contact sheet... these sheets had to be traced to figure out which connections had to be made for the alphanumeric characters (A to Z and 0 to 9) which ended in a matrix of sorts for which I had to solder all the buttons”. Or try asking how the person viewing the installation personally manipulates sounds, backgrounds and characters by pushing the buttons? “Backgrounds load the interstitial, load the new horizon line data, invoke the scaling/placing routine to move the characters about, then kill the interstitial. There are four sound layers: pushing a button randomly chooses one, kills the existing sound there (if there is one) and loads a new randomly chosen one”, comes the blithe reply. In English, somebody? And Sitas, what was her role? Says Henning: “She filmed and conceived everything and described each tableau to me. I just physically made it happen”. Never mind multi-media: this is more like ultra-media.

In an era where the word “installation” evokes images of information-age existential angst involving batteries of televisions and random barrages of images to make some hackneyed statement about desensitisation, Henning and Sitas have created something deceptively simple, disarming, beautiful and bewildering. Raw footage hand-enhanced frame-by-frame with myriad sonic and visual layers and components all capable of being mutated into infinite configurations, “a city” ensures that it will never be the same twice. And if that isn’t science and beauty both angling for the truth it’s hard to imagine what is.

Together the two artists also curated the explosive “Intersection” edition of storied Durban multi-media arts blast Red Eye and produced a perplexing opus in the form of a series of framed damaged narratives which was exhibited at Durban venue Home before being showcased at the lecturers’ exhibition at Vega, Durban and the saartsemerging show in Cape Town.

Though the essence of the Sitas/Henning odyssey through the lachrymose depths and glittering arcs of sound and vision remains a unified enterprise, on occasion their path bifurcates and each investigates separate directions specific to their chosen medium. On this front Sitas has featured as a prominent collaborator with acclaimed choreographer Jay Pather, creating interactive video elements for his works “Republic”; “Paradise” and his contribution to the seminal Dance Umbrella event at Constitution Hill. She has also exhibited at Cape Town’s AVA and written in arts journals about contemporaries Dineo Bopape and Vaughn Sadie.

New Site (More or Less)

2007-08-06T09:37:00.000+02:00

Welcome Everyone, to the more or less completed new site for SAarts. We are still experiencing a few glitches with the archive which will be ironed out in the next few days. We have decided to move the site from wordpress to blogger as the group has found blogger more user friendly and the administration wishes to encourage more postings by those who have been featured in the past and those artists who’s work is lined up for the near future. Look out for new activities, opportunities and discussion sessions happening soon.

Site Under Construction

2007-08-03T12:03:00.000+02:00

We are currently switching SAarts Emerging over to a new site with Blogger. The site is still under construction but feel free to browse our past posts and join us on Monday for the new revamped site.

Sun City: Positive

2007-06-27T15:16:00.000+02:00

This past month, nine of the SAarts Emerging artists were fortunate enough to be featured on the continent’s largest and most ambitious Aids fund raising initiative to date, Sun International’s POSI+IVE.

The exhibition, which opened at Sun City’s Hall of Treasures on the 16th of June, was created to showcase work from internationally renowned South African artists, as well as some of South Africa’s emerging artists.

The line up of artists included Andries J Botha; Anton Kannemeyer; Athi-Patra Ruga; Babak Fakhamzadeh; Berni Searle; Brett Murray; Bronwyn Lace; Churchill Madikida; Clive van den Burg; Colbert Mashile; David Koloane; Dianne Victor; Donna Kukuma; Doung Anwar Jahangeer; Frances Goodman; Gerhard Marx; Hentie van der Merwe; Ismail Farouk; Jill Trappler; Jo Ractliffe; Joachim Schönfeldt; Johan Thom; Julia Teale; Kagiso Pat Mautloa; Kathryn Smith; Konrad Weltz; Lawrence Lemoana; Lester Adams; Luan Nel; Marco Cianfanelli; Minnette Vári; Nadine Hutton; Paul Emmanuel; Penny Siopis; Peter Schütz; Pieter Hugo; Rat Western; Robert Hodgins; Sabelo Mlangeni; Sam Nhlengethwa; Samson Mudzunga; Santu Mofekeng; Senzeni Marasela; Simon Gush; Sue Williamson; Tracey Rose; Willem Boshoff; William Kentridge; Zach Taljaard; Zanele Muholi and Zwelethu Mthethwa.

Some Images from the show:

Zach Taljaard’s The Kiss

We Can Not Continue to Die Like This
Ismail Farouk with Babak Fakhamzadeh

Hierachy of Colour, Lawrence Lemoana

8/5, Bronwyn Lace
Ranger Circle, Simon Gush

Deep Roller, Lester Adams

The Tarot of Johannesburg, Rat Western

MTKidu: the End of the Begining

2007-05-08T21:24:00.000+02:00

by Shane De Lange

The electronic music scene in South Africa seems to be booming right now, with quality productions from Max Normal, Real Estate Agents (aka Constructus), Lark, and Jacob Israel generating positive results. Given the high calibre of these already established electronica artists, it seems difficult to imagine how another group could enter into the fray. However, thanks to all the publicity that Mtkidu have been attracting lately with their performances and exhibitions, it is clear that South Africa’s underground cultural scene has got a new member to contend with.

I first noticed Mtkidu about a year ago whilst visiting Love and Hate at their studio in Pretoria. There was a copy of TFTD 0.5 laying on one of the tables in the studio that attracted my attention with its peculiar pink cover, sporting a highly stylized and synthetic looking tree, suggestive of the proverbial burning bush. A few weeks later, Love and Hate held an exhibition, called New Suburbia at the Platform on 18th gallery in Pretoria, which exhibited some of Mtkidu’s illustrations. Mtkidu also played a live beat construction set on the opening night of New Suburbia that made many of the visitors, including myself, stare in astonishment and take notice. A few months later, I had the opportunity to join Love and Hate for their next exhibition, which was held at the Moja Modern gallery in Johannesburg. My involvement in this event, called the Inevitable Exhibition, eventually allowed me to make contact with Mtkidu. Thanks to this ‘inevitable meeting’, I managed to get Mtkidu to perform at my solo show, called Anticube, hosted by Gordart in Melville during December last year. This short history has allowed me to develop a close relationship with Mtkidu, which affords me the opportunity to elaborate on their work here.

Mtkidu are a Johannesburg based ‘blip-hop’ collective comprising Murray Turpin (MT) and Richard Nesbit (KIDU). Together this Team Uncool, as they like to be called, is known for their live beat constructions and multimedia manipulations, which have developed a cult following in certain cultural circles in Pretoria and Johannesburg. These constructions and manipulations form the basis of Mtkidu’s performances, forming a small part of their dark and whacky idiom. Mtkidu’s happenings are pivotally connected to their other artistic endeavours, and it is important to note that Mtkidu’s work is experienced most effectively in various contexts. Mtkidu employ a plethora of mediums and formats to create their work, ranging from graphic illustrations, digital animations, internet blogs and web sites, live DJ sets, interactive CD box-sets, improvised performances and happenings, and all kinds of marketing, such as buttons, badges, stickers, stencils, and pamphlets.

Murray and Nick played a few modest gigs together before the formation of Mtkidu, most notably the “Secret Parties” that were held at the Horror Café and Carfax in Johannesburg. Mtkidu’s first official performance took place at the trendy Berlin Bar in Melville during July 2005, and it was a typically low-key, underground, ‘dope-beats’ affair. They would go on to have regular appearances at various events and venues around Johannesburg, practically becoming residents at Fuel Café and Tokyo Star. Key amongst these happenings was Mtkidu’s performances at art exhibitions organized by Love and Hate, which gradually extended their support base.

Despite the furor surrounding Mtkidu’s underground events, it was the limited release in May 2006 of TFTD 0.5 (Tales from the Dark: Version Five), their first studio album, that finally began to manifest results for the collective. This album was seen as a breakthrough by many connoisseurs in Johannesburg’s artistic community, simply because it managed to do away with many historical constructs and border-limitations; most notably those that separate fine art, illustration, graphic design, and multimedia (digital animations, interactive interfaces, electronic compositions, et cetera).

Mtkidu’s penchant for cross-pollination can be attributed to the fact that MT is a trained artist (Honours, Wits University) and KIDU studied graphic design (Degree, Wits Tech), and both of them have dabbled extensively with music in the past. Murray was a DJ for many years, spinning the decks with rather conservative hip hop beats under the guise of “Undersound”. Nick has been in various bands, playing guitar and singing for the “Shirley Temples”. So, it is understandable that Mtkidu tend to hybridize graphic design, sound, and art so effortlessly. Mtkidu can be seen as a chimera that agitates conservative perspectives about art, design, and music; specializations that have been isolated by institutions throughout history, causing redundant boundaries to be constructed. The introduction and development of new media has offered a way out of these boundaries and constraints, and Mtkidu are surely a pioneering duo in this respect.

A major feature of TFTD 0.5 is its strong emphasis on ‘multi-media’; blurring the distinctions between Mtkidu’s live performances, web sites and blogs, art exhibitions, collaborations, marketing, interfaces, music and other saleable publications. This is not to say that all traditions must be discarded; the point is that Mtkidu has managed to find a relevant use for traditional mediums within the virtual spaces of ‘new media’, paying homage to the digital medina.

Mtkidu’s process is extremely progressive, tossing any notions of specialization away, feeling free to use any medium that strikes their fancy. Firstly, audio manipulation is done with a laptop, sampler, CDJ’s, Kaoss pads, turntables, and a Casio keyboard. These machines help compose the soundtrack to the world of TFTD 0.5, both in its live and recorded manifestations. Secondly, graphic elements, such as comics and websites, are introduced to convey the visual concepts surrounding TFTD 0.5. Thirdly, audio experiments with cued animations are regularly performed in front of a live audience (simple two-dimensional animations are made using Macromedia Flash). And lastly, Mtkidu manages to conjoin all these projects, mediums, and disciplines under a banner of a pseudo-corporation called Team Uncool, which is also their recording label and art consultancy. This approach to capitalism is fairly reminiscent of Asha Zero’s Roadkillvisiontoiletries, or Matthew Herbert’s “Country X” and Radioboy projects, and adds to the socio-political element characteristics of their work.

TFTD 0.5 was the first production released by Team Uncool, and it contains a number of digital compositions in the form of an interactive Flash presentation, which gives a concise introduction to Mtkidu’s worldview. There are seven tracks on the CD that can be described as a mixture of Hip Hop, Drum and Bass, Electronica, Brit-Pop, classic arcade game noises, and a combination of familiar sounds that are reminiscent of childhood (swings, children playing, and birds singing). The sound that comes from this creepy combination of noises can be compared a prospective collaboration between Aphex Twin and Alphaville, or a concert with Richard Devine and Foreigner in a huge gaming arcade. The interactive presentation on the CD also enhances the ubiquitous experience of TFTD 0.5; creating a strong sense of nostalgia in relation to the past, present, and future. The interface is deliberately obscured in order to increase this sense of ambiguity in relation to society’s borders, geographical positioning, and temporal paradoxes. The album is an amalgamation of Mtkidu’s subversive ideas relating to societal constructs, stereotypes and institutions i.e. white people listen to Alternative and Metal and black people listen to Hip Hop and House. Their point is that these distinctions are severely limiting and unnecessary, obstructing the development of art and design in South Africa.

TFTD 0.5 can be described as a satire about the current socio-political climate within South Africa, specifically in relation to the transition from Apartheid to the ‘New South Africa’. Issues such as crime, poverty, and change seem to be addressed in a humorous and serious manner. This confusing situation is addressed by the digital comic book of TFTD 0.5, which can be viewed with the enhanced features on the CD. The comic evokes Mtkidu’s vision of a simulated environment based on life growing up in South Africa’s transitional period.

The comic depicts a troubled young boy called Klein Baas (meaning young master - a call-back to the Apartheid era) who lives in the inner city of Johannesburg. He is constantly struggling to understand the odd contradictions that surround him in his post-apartheid world: he sees his domestic worker as a mother because his mother is too busy with her advertising job, and he constantly makes Manichean distinctions between the city and the suburbs. Klein Baas is the alter-ego for both MT and KIDU, both having been seemingly unaware of the events of 1994 because they were too young to understand the reasoning behind those events. TFTD 0.5, from the perspective of Klein Baas, asks a few simple questions: what would life be like in 1994? Am I responsible for what my forefathers have done? Am I South African if I am white? Who comes up with these distinctions, taboos and stereotypes? It is a play on George Orwell’s “1984” in the context of South Africa during 1994.

Mtkidu uses technology and the effects of the media, such as television and the internet, to approach these issues in an almost Futurist, avant-garde manner. The only way Klein Baas manages to cope with his schizophrenic life is to play video games on a cartridge based console, which is once again a flashback to the early 90s (Nintendo and Sega consoles were very popular at that time). At one point in the comic Klein Baas manages to get his hands on a very special game cartridge, called TFTD 0.5, which he stole from a second-hand shop owned by a man named Paul Kruger. When Klein Baas inserts the game cartridge into his gaming console he is transported into an alternate universe. This dimension is called “dark continent” and forms the environment of TFTD 0.5; an immixture of The Never-ending Story, The Ring, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz. The only difference is that Doris is a boy named Klein Baas growing up in post-apartheid South Africa.

All the features included on TFTD 0.5 aids in linking Mtkidu’s art, design, performances, and marketing. The spectator is converted into an information pattern, skipping networks, penetrating vibrant, anime inspired, two-dimensional domains, in dark and lively spaces. Mtkidu, Team Uncool, TFTD 0.5; all these identifications form an absorbing display of quirky and sinister visuals, combined with hauntingly funny sounds, and an extremely addictive concept founded on MT and KIDU’s lived lives, growing up in a multi-cultural, multi-faceted, and multi-mediated South Africa.

TFTD 0.5 is analogous to Mtkidu’s historical and futurist, altruistic and self-conscious viewpoint on South Africa; a schizophrenic attempt to portray the tenebrous and lucid geographies that comprise South Africa. Mtkidu prove that South Africa is certainly an interesting place to live; a veritable well spring of sources and influences for artists to draw back on and express themselves, streaming with a multitude of possibilities, despite the economic and social problems that still plague the country.

Recently Mtkidu closed the book on TFTD 0.5, stopping all performances and halting every manifestation of the project after a few arduous months touring the country with their Nike sponsorship. However, TFTD 0.5 is only the first of many chapters that will be released by Mtkidu. TFTD 0.6 is already being advertised on Mtkidu’s blog, and the next chapter should be released soon, which will introduce new characters to the TFTD galaxy, namely Nandi (Klein Baas’s love interest) and Shaka Zulu (Nandi’s Father). For now Mt and Kidu are focussing on their respective solo careers. MT has had two solo exhibitions this year, at Moja Modern and the Premises. KIDU is hard at work with his band called Doris, and collaborations with Mtkidu’s VJ known as CHINXXX.

For more information about Mtkidu and their upcoming events visit their blog at www.myspace.com/mtkidu.

SAarts Cape Town Manifestation 2007

2007-03-20T21:20:00.000+02:00

As part of XCape, Cape 07’s artists-led fringe exhibition, SAarts will exhibit works by selected artists and writers who have been featured on the site in the past year as well as artists to be featured in 2007.

The SAarts Emerging Exhibition: Cape Town 2007
will open on the
27th of March at
Vega, The Brand Communications School,
2nd Floor Satbel Building
Cnr De Smidt & Somerset, Green Point,
Cape Town

If you are in the area please join us for the opening at 6pm on the 27th or for the two workshops we will be giving on the 28th and 29th of March from 10am till 12pm.

Artists to be featured on the exhibition include:

Zach Taljaard: A Boy and his Toys

2007-01-26T19:41:00.000+02:00

Zach Taljaard with his work The Kiss (in progress.)

Zach Taljaard is forever, in my head, the boy who plays with dolls. I first met Taljaard, who hails from the Eastern Cape, when he started his residency at the Bag Factory in August last year. For this period, he was paired with the most unlikely companion, Arash Hanaei from Iran.

Arash Hanaei Autopsy ii by Arash Hanaei

The two, whose appearances seem to represent very dissimilar versions of masculinity, struck up an interesting synergy in their way of working. And although the two had other methods in common (identity issues and a sense of humour), what was the most interesting and unusual commonality was that they both ‘played’ with dolls.

This sense of ‘play’ is evident in all Taljaard’s work and by this I do not necessarily mean that it is completely light hearted. Taljaard’s early work dealt with childhood memories, self realization though experiences, disillusionment, growing up as a male - a boy blushing, strained by a pair of boxing gloves, a child superhero about to dive head first to the ground, a baby poised on a ladder.

Taljaard’s entry, What Goes Up, for the PPC Young Sculptors Award Exhibition in 2000 was described as ‘an exercise in technical virtuosity if there ever was one’ This statement can be used to sum up most of his work which is labour intensive and beautifully crafted.

‘My later works then looked at the objects we give children to play with,’ says Taljaard. ‘How children through game playing become these objects. Plastic motorbikes, guns, teddy bears and a rugby ball become stereotypes for the male identity.’

What Goes Up, 2000

Toy I, Toy ii, Toy iii

On the surface, Taljaard’s work borrows from Pop Art but there is always an underlying current – a long adult shadow falling across the jungle gym on a hot day.

Sometimes this shadow is sinister as in the case of Initiation ritual: our little secret, 2003 but more often it is a subtler melancholy - the inevitable disillusionment of childhood – that one must grow older, ‘be a man’ and that this journey is fraught with potential/inevitable failure.

Initiation ritual: our little secret 2003

http://www.artthrob.co.za/03aug/reviews/grahamstown.html

Taljaard’s latest work examines the complexity of masculine identity. ‘CON/FRONT”, Taljaard’s solo show at the National Arts Festival 2006 was exhibited in Fort Selwyn, an old fort guarding over Grahamstown. The fort was built as a watch and signal tower during the frontier wars and today is a national monument.

‘This evidently male created space with its function to protect against the ‘enemy’ inspired a body of work which dealt with confrontation.’

Ghost Images, 2006 The Kiss, 2006

Here, Taljaard exhibited three works/installations: Ghost Images, The Kiss and The Match. Working with moulded busts, the aesthetic of ancient classical Greek sculpture and the pop of the present-day, plastic, poseable figurine the artist explores the ‘impressions’ or ‘moulding’ made by society on the individual and the various versions of masculinity portrayed in history from the effeminate classical Greek and the sterile and stoic Roman bust to the camp, plastic G.I. Joe.

The Match (detail)

His work The Match played homage to his earlier work with many symbols of childhood, as used in other works, being represented – this time on a giant game board or miniature playing field. The last battle of the child as he struggles to find his place as a man.

The comparison between his work and the work of Arash Hanaei is interesting, as their common interests demonstrate that the struggle for male identity in our current context is not limited by race, nationality or sexual orientation.

This struggle is by no means new nor is it original, yet what sets Taljaard’s work apart is its almost self-aware but unavoidable innocence.

Artists such as Hentie van der Merwe, Clive van den Berg and Paul Emmanuel have worked with the themes of army life, war and masculinity in specific relation to gay male identity, but Taljaard’s work takes a slightly different angle.

Whilst his predecessors explore these topics in an attempt to position gay male identity somewhere in a blurred field of perceptions around appropriate and inappropriate masculine behavior, Taljaard seems to be ‘trying on’ these ideas in an attempt to find a concept of manhood that best fits his complex man-boy character.

In an almost literal demonstration of this action, Taljaard’s piece The Damage Is Done 2006 (from his Bag Factory residency show Self/destruct) depicts five personas: four life-size, self-portrait busts in different attire and a fifth on a television screen.

Damage is Done; 2006

Of the busts one is shirtless, another dressed in a suit. The third wears a military uniform while the last was based on a Roman emperor.

‘The tradition of portrait busts comes a long way and was usually used to symbolize power and immortalize bravery. These portraits looked all but brave and proud and had a kind of sadness and loss about them. They wore their robes like mill stones around their necks, the weight of centuries of lust for power, destruction and wealth clearly burdening their shoulders.’

But what burdens these figures more, is that none of the personas quite fit. The robes give the impression of dress up; both the garments and the guilt are inherited.

The Damage is Done; 2006

The fifth persona, represented on the television screen, shows the shirtless bust with a projection from a video arcade war plane simulator. The soundtrack is a mix of the game’s own electronic sounds and children laughing as they shoot away at the enemy, lost in playing the game. Guns blazing, the game stops to show their score after the words “Game Over”.

In this video Taljaard returns to the themes of childhood and it is here that the work feels more comfortable with itself – revisiting the accoutrements of adolescence instead of the ill fitting outfits of manhood.

As an emerging artist, Taljaard may still be trying to find his feet and an area of investigation uniquely his own. For now he is resolved to re-examine the questions sometimes asked by others, but he does not appear to rage against these questions and ask why? Rather he plays with the questions, asks them again in slightly different ways and asks, why not?

Zach Taljaard will exhibit ‘APPOSE’, a reworking and a re-examination of some of his previous installations, at gordArt Gallery in February 2007.

SAarts: One Year On.

2007-01-04T14:40:00.000+02:00

On Christmas Eve 2006, SAarts was exactly one year old and what a year it has been. Over the past eleven months the SAarts Team and 8 guest writers have featured 9 emerging artists from Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria and Durban. We have also featured two emerging artist project spaces – Abrie Fourie’s Outlet and Gordon Froud’s Rainforest.

Nathaniel Stern has left for Dublin and Simon Gush will leave for Belgium early in 2007 but will continue to be part of SAarts from afar. In the meantime Rat Western has joined the team and will help maintain the site from SA.

In our second year, we will profile more young and emerging talent and hope to draw some of this from outside the major urban centers. If you would like to submit a proposal please look at the submission rules here: http://saartsemerging.org/submit-work/

Outside the SAarts Emerging Exhibition, 6 October 2006, Fordsburg Artists Studios (A.K.A The Bag Factory)

In October, The Bag Factory hosted our first ever, physical exhibition which featured works by both the monthly profiled artists as well as the writers. As part of this exhibition, a panel discussion was held on the state of emerging art in SA with specific relevance to alternative means of profiling these artists. Guest speakers on the panel were Gordon Froud (Rainforest - Johannesburg); Storm Janse van Rensburg (Young Artist Project - Durban) and Johan Thom who spoke on behalf of Abrie Fourie (Outlet – Pretoria.)

Nathaniel Stern delivers the opening speech. Works by Simon Gush, Rat Western and Shane de Lange in the background.


Gordon Froud and Bie Venter with Altar by Stephan Erasmus	Lester Adams’s work Sins of the Father’s

Vaughn Sadie’s piece, Forbearer of Light with Simon Gush’s Perfect Lovers and Ismail Farouk’s interactive piece soweto uprisings dot com.

For the event SAarts produced a catalogue outlining a little on each artist’s practice and the specific work exhibited on the show.

To celebrate and recap the first year of SAarts we have decided to reproduce some of the information from the catalogue here.

Lester Adams
Lester Adams is an artist living and working in Johannesburg. He has played a curatorial role in a number of projects involving emerging arts, including the Negotiate series at J.A.G, and several shows at the Parking Gallery. His practice as an artist is varied and not subject to any specific medium; Adams’ primary interest is in dystopic and utopic binaries, real or imagined.

His exhibition piece interrogates the biblical abstraction, “sins of the father’s” and how that phrase can be compounded. Constructions of History, Responsibility and Accountability are his concerns. The dominant material used in this work is karakul fur, which is harvested from lamb fetuses.

“Only the flesh comes off me and the flesh goes on like a new suit. Only the needle goes in and the needle comesout and I don’t care, though I try with all my strength to think of Shadrach and Nicola.

But the needle goes in and…

Let me tell you about the city….”

-Jeff Vandermeer, Veniss Underground

Colleen Alborough
Colleen Alborough is an artist living and working in Johannesburg. She completed her BA (Fine Arts) with distinction at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she is currently completing an MA (Fine Arts). In addition to being a digital multimedia artist and visual arts educator, Alborough is a freelancegraphics and web designer and restaurateur.

“I work in a variety of experimental media, focusing on multimedia and experiential installations, which encourage viewers to explore and interact in order to open a narrative. I consider making visual arts more accessible to the general public a high priority.

My work incorporates traditional sculpture, video and animation footage, as well as interactive elements. Its process frequently involves ritualistic, labour-intensive methods, such as felt-making, in an attempt to embody some form of psychic reality. My aim is to push at the boundaries of technology to create installations that communicate and evoke human emotion, asking viewers to question issues of identity, memory, social interactions and accountability. "

Doung Anwar Jahangeer

Doung Anwar Jahangeer is a Mauritian-born, Muslim-raised male of Indian descent, living in Durban. His professional role as an architect imposes its own expectations, and so his work explores the tensions between ‘making space’ (which is in essence functional) and the ‘art’ of making space (which is primarily informed by intuition). His ‘finished’ works may take the form of architectural installation and multi-media, or provocational walks and talks that underscore the inconsistencies and disparateness of the city.

Jahangeer believes in space rather than time, in people rather than capital. People in spaces make places; however these spaces are not neutral and come inscribed with power. A power that still – despite twelve years of democracy in South Africa – effects not only the way that people are perceived and treated, but the way that people feel. It is his aim to expose and deconstruct the myths that perpetuate fear of difference, through the celebration of life that exists in the marginalised - and often unrecognised - ‘spaces of in-between’: freeways, years of democracy in informal settlements, parking-lots…the body.

In the words of the mystic poet Jullalluddin Rumi:

“the beauty of what you are should be the beauty of what you do”.

Shane de Lange
Shane de Lange is an artist living and working in Pretoria, currently completing his MA at Tshwane University of Technology.

De Lange’s work explores contemporary topics like the simulacra, simulation, intertextuality, and the recycling of images and sound.

He is concerned with issues of representation and re-representation, and how they effect our notions of identity: nationality, gender, religion, class, social status or ethnicity. Grand Narratives, and their deconstruction, play an important role in his process, especially pertaining to dualism and contradiction within western society.

A Sentiment to Monumentality, his SAarts piece, is an extremely sentimental group of ‘documents as records.’ Decaying twigs in the street, or the bus ticket that is thrown away – inevitably forgotten – these are the monuments of no-thing lost.

Christo Doherty

Christo Doherty is head of Digital Arts at the Wits School of Arts. He is a photographer, VJ, and sometime conceptualist. He is a founding member of the Art and Technology, Johannesburg website (http://atjoburg.net) and The Upgrade! Joburg, one node in a global network of art & technology creatives. These grew out of his informal, weekly ‘Digital Soiree’ initiative at Wits.

On exhibit for SAarts are photos from Doherty’s ongoing photographic investigation into the iconography of crime-security-paranoia in post-Apartheid South Africa. These are block mounted in grid formation.

Stephan Erasmus
Stephan Erasmus is a practicing artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. His arts process often encrypts/decrypts texts, and translates them into physical form, resulting in artist books or visual poetry.

Erasmus works primarily with paper, and the act of writing, transforming and transfiguring The Word into compositions, by replacing letters or spaces with illustrated or formalistic elements. He appropriates texts from various sources such as popular or classical songs, poetry, plays, and biblical text. He attempts to hide the sentimentality in each selected text, making them secret letters to a muse.

His work exhibited at SAarts, Altar, is made of 2000 match sticks, each with one “ism” written on all four sides. For Erasmus, such words denote states of being, systems of belief, and schools of thought and practice. The fragile matchsticks, together, form an alter, and allude to parallels between the way we live and the way we pray.

Ismail Farouk
Ismail Farouk is an urban geographer and artist working in major urban renewal projects in Johannesburg. He provides specialised urban project-research focusing on spatial, social and economic networks and processes of participation as an alternative methodology to urban regeneration. Farouk’s interest in urban dynamics stems from his Geographic and Fine Art background at Wits University where he explored creative responses to the unfair logic of exchanges which characterises the developing world today.

For the SAartsEmerging exhibition, Farouk is presenting his online collaborative application called soweto uprisings dot com. soweto uprisings dot com is presented by The Hector Pieterson Research Project and is a creation of Ismail Farouk and Babak Fakhamzadeh. The application maps the various routes of the Soweto uprisings by geotagging their locations using Google Maps and Flickr. The application also returns relevant Google Blogsearch results, Wikipedia articles and other website material geotagged in the Soweto area. The content loads dynamically from these external sources so the site is continually evolving.

The Soweto 1976 Uprisings remain a highly contested issue. The complexity of the day’s events is reflected through the myriad of books published, each wishing to legitimize ‘their’ version of the day - soweto uprisings dot com was created as a living digital archive. Anyone can participate by submitting a picture, location, path, narrative, blog, website or counter memory.

http://sowetouprisings.com

Simon Gush
Simon Gush was born in Pietermaritzburg. South Africa in 1981. He lives and works in Johannesburg, where he has been living since 2000. In 2003 he completed his BAFA at the University of the Witwatersrand, which culminated with a solo show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. He is a practicing artist. As part of his practice he has collaborated on numerous projects facilitating the development of emerging arts in Johannesburg. His artistic practice is varied including video, installation and actions.

In 2004 Simon co-founded the artist collective aThirdparty, to curate and facilitate Negotiate. He currently runs the Parking Gallery located in inner city Johannesburg and is a co-founder of saartsemerging.org.

The particular climatic conditions of South Africa, extreme heat and harsh sunlight, is a fact that Simon Gush is made particularly aware of, being of a typically European physique, white skin, light eyes. These circumstances led to his interest in the use of ceiling fans.

His work Perfect Lovers references the work of the same name by Felix Gonzales-Torres. The work comprises of two ceilings fans installedvery low so that the blades of the fan rotate just above the head of the audience. The proximity of the fans to the audience and to each other turns them into potentially dangerous objects. The fans displaced, hanging too low, talk about violence, the absence and the vulnerability of the body. The work looks at the anxiety and fear of love in the context of a politicized society devastated by Aids.

Dean Henning and Rike Sitas
Memories of times gone by would not be the same without the specific characteristics of the faded photographs that captured them. Would a 20’s film star look the same if preserved in 5 Megapixel 16-bit color?

Human memory works in much the same way. The further back we look, the more blurry the details become.

Digital photography has none of these limitations. As long as the file is kept safe, the image information will never degrade. Decay is an attempt to create a digital environment to store images where they will be vulnerable to forces of decay.

The process of deterioration is automated and requires no human intervention; no one will be spending late nights using Photoshop. The server itself destroys the image through stains and convolution matrices. The speed of this process is also determined by how often it is viewed. Each view on the site takes the image “out of storage”, exposing it to potential decay. The more viewings, the more decay.

The digital environment will be a website, where other exhibition participants and exhibition viewers will be given access to upload their own images and stories. During the course of the exhibition, the images and stories will go through a digital process of decay.

This process can be seen by anyone who visits the site.
http://www.thesoundofand.co.za/decay/

Abrie Fourie: Outlet
Outlet gallery, the brainchild of Abrie Fourie, is situated on the arts campus of the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria. It is a converted projection booth above a large hall on the northern corner of the campus. But as Fourie points out, as you climb the stairs to the little room, the size and shape of the gallery demand that artists deliberately use the space. “Outlet is about the space and how you show certain things in it.”

Outlet was launched in March 2003; Abrie felt Pretoria suffered from a derth of experimental art spaces. “You sometimes have to just do things he explains. The gallery was also inspired by Fourie’s experience of artist-owned galleries in Europe and America. In his view these galleries, often housed in apartments or even passage-ways of private houses, play an essential role in developing both artistic and curatorial careers. Typically, young curators start off by getting some experience in established galleries and then begin to do their own thing by launching their own galleries. Once they get listed, they can start to play an important role on the arts scene. For young artists, these galleries are an opportunity to present the pick of their work without the costs or connections which the established galleries exact. Fourie also recognised the potential for establishing links with the international art scene through a gallery such as Outlet. "Many of the young artists who are doing really interesting work in cities like Berlin would really like to get over here; but there are no openings at the established galleries and museums. Independent spaces like Outlet can provide the platform for such artists to visit South Africa and to create new work.”

“Outlet is not a place for sale” Fourie declares.
“Unlike any of the commercial galleries I don’t charge a rental for the space. Artists are not here to pay rent. Outlet works by people coming to me and saying what they want to do and we negotiate about it. The point is to make things happen!”

Many of the artists featured during the SAarts exhibitionhave also had the opportunity to interact with Outlet: Simon Gush, Nathaniel Stern, Bronwyn Lace, Johan Thom, Asha Zero and Shane de Lange.

Gordon Froud:Rainforest
On returning to Johannesburg in 2003 after teaching in London for 4-1/2 years, Gordon Froud opened gordart Gallery, Melville, Johannesburg. The main thrust of this gallery has been to fill the needs of underexposed and unrepresented artists. It is a developmental space affording new, mostly young artists who need exposure in the professional realm. gordart has showcased over 30 artists, many of whom have gone on to win major awards - Berco Wilsenach and Lawrence Lemoana, for example, won the ABSA Altelier award and the Gerard Sekoto award, respectively, in 2005.

Through his activities at gordart Gallery, Froud saw a lack of spaces for young and recently graduated artists, a need for platforms that could function as entry points into the Johannesburg Art Scene. Gordon’s post at the University of Johannesburg also showed him that artists fresh out of tertiary institutions do not always have the quantity of work for large solo exhibitions, or the finances to cover those costs. His gallery’s mission was thus extended to deliver exposure for such unknown artists to the art buying public at large.

In Jan 2006, gordart Gallery opened a more intimate ‘white cube’ adjacent to its main exhibit space. ‘The Project Room’ was initially named after its function, a room set aside for Gordon’s project of furthering younger, new and disadvantaged artists. Now known as ‘Rainforest – A Room to Breathe,’ Froud’s satellite gallery is funded by The Broking for Good foundation, an outreach arm of the NOAH brokerage firm. They will cover The Project Room’s exhibition costs for the foreseeable future.

Bronwyn Lace
Bronwyn Lace is an installation artist and teacher, with an interest in developmental and emerging projects. Her tools are scale and space, with an eye towards creating environments into which a viewer may be absorbed. She aims to make work charged and playful, seductive and uncomfortable, while playing up the links between art, physics and nature.

Bronwyn’s contributions to SAarts are as a founding member, curator, writer and editor, and she serves on its board. Her piece on the exhibition, entitled 8/5, uses Phi – the divine proportion – to look at science’s interpretation of aesthetics. Her media, including a live fish, fishing line and perspex, are intended to provoke a physiological response to this proposed relationship.

Hannes Olivier
Born in Utrecht, Netherlands in 1980, Hannes Olivier received his BA (FA) from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2002. His work formed part of various group shows, which include the MTN New Contemporaries in 2003 and the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival in 2005.

Olivier’s interests are in biotic relationships, the resultant dynamic of meetings between organic and synthetic materials. He uses light to define the inner or outer boundaries of his sculpture, and as evidence of both a physical and, more importantly, intangible energy presence.

His piece for SAarts, re-union (soet slaap sonder sonde), alludes to the double burial sites (often marked by coupled memorial structures) found in many cemeteries across South Africa. It explores the dual, physical and psychological co-habitation between ‘significant others,’ in life and death.

Hannes is also intrigued by unmarked memorial stones, void of any inscription. He sees these as melancholic, denying the physical representation of a ‘dialogue’ between the living and the dead. He’s fascinated by the language used on these gravesites, which is influenced, and strongly shaped, by religious symbolism and cultural ideology.

re-union (soet slaap sonder sonde) draws on the formal language used in unclaimed, indefinite, commissioned for the KKNK in 2005, and represents Olivier’s believe in the inaptness of rigid physical structures to mediate human experience.

Vaughn Sadie
Vaughn Sadie is a Durban-based artist, who is completing his Masters in Fine Arts at The Durban University of Technology. He has participated in several public art events such as Red Eye at Durban Art Gallery and Negotiate at JAG. More recently he was a participant in the KO Video Festival and Young Artists Project, 2005. He is a lecturer at Vega, The Brand Communications School.

Sadie is interested in light, “with all its metaphorical qualities and practical applications; light besieges our everyday existence, and illuminates the spaces we occupy, effecting our social reality. The nature of light is such that it can be manipulated and altered to illuminate objects and spaces, revealing only the aspects that are deemed suitable or necessary.”

Forbearer of light, his piece for the SAarts exhibition, investigates the layering of unknown histories embedded in everyday objects. Sadie is interested in how we disregard the “memory” of previous owners and narratives, whilst we give our “property” new life. His constructed object- stories are often sentimental reflections on the past.

Nathaniel Stern
Nathaniel Stern is a writer, artist and teacher, who divides his time between fawning over his daughter, writing and blogging, reading, producing art, and more generally making a collaborative ruckus. His media range between multimedia performance, interactive installation, digital and traditional printmaking, and academic texts, but he’s been known to jump, head-long, into new processes without looking first. From November 2006, he’ll be working on a research- and production-based PhD at Trinity College, Dublin, around art, technology and embodiment.

Nathaniel’s contributions to SAarts are as a founding member, web designer, writer and editor, and he serves on its board. Although he is not officially exhibiting on the Emerging Arts show, he will speak at its opening, take part in two panel discussions (one on collecting new media art in South Africa, the other on Social Networks), and will also give an informal presentation on Interactive Video as an emergent medium.

Some of Nathaniel’s URLs:

www.nathanielstern.com
www.atjoburg.net
www.compressionism.net

Rat Western
Rat Western received her Masters in Interactive Media in 2004 from Wits University. She has worked as a freelance designer and lecturer and currently works at the Bag Factory Artist Studios in Fordsburg. She is responsible for the design and maintenance of the organisation’s online material as well as for the writing of a monthly e-newsletter. Western is the latest edition to the SAarts team and is responsible for the catalogue design for the SAarts exhibition 2006.

As an artist, Western’s work examines such themes as memory, urban living and the poignant passage of time and its effects of people and places, but the common focus of her work has always been the art of storytelling. Video and animation dominate her portfolio; this is because of the aspect of time which is fundamental to storytelling. However, in a still image, the suggestion of a narrative outside of the picture interests her greatly too, specifically when the work is photographic and hints at a thread of truth in a way that a painting or drawing can not.

Western’s work Pipe Dream combines an interest in urban decay and the unseen systematic workings of urban living with the voyeuristic photographic observations that stimulate her speculations of an imagined narrative for the lives she observes. The use of pipes represents the inner workings of the beast that is the city and the interrelated networks both physical and ethereal. Manipulated digital photographs of exterior glimpses into the lives of Western’s supposed characters are integrated with these pipes to form a maze of light boxes.

Storm Janse van Rensburg
The Young Artist’s Project (YAP), initiated by Storm Janse van Rensburg in 2002, provides support for emerging artists’ first solo projects, and has featured sixteen artists thus far. It fills an important South African gap by offering support in the form of funding and space, as well as critical engagement, for young creators with a solo exhibition vision.

Housed at the KwaZulu Natal Society of Arts Gallery’s multimedia room, YAP has produced an institutional platform for the presentation of experimental visual arts practice. It allows for artistic freedom without the concerns of having to re-coup money spent.

Over the last four years, YAP’s exhibition programme developed national, as well as local artists, and in 2005 - with a three year funding injection from the Royal Netherlands Embassy - the project had its first seminar and critical writing workshop. After each annual cycle of four artists, a catalogue is produced in which young critics are commissioned to engage with the work.

Artists on the SAartsEmerging exhibition who were also former YAP participants include Colleen Alborough,Doung Anwar Janhangeer, Dean Henning, Rike Sitas, Bronwyn Lace and Vaughn Sadie

Asha Zero
The “Imposter“ portraits of the “WHO AM IS“ series are an attempt by Zero’s imaginary roadkillvisiontoiletries corporation to counter the influence of the Imposter and the “mobilediscoetcetera“ organisation, which formed after the defection of roadkillvisiontoiletries agents Palinki and Broop Nook, who joined the Imposter in a campaign to discredit roadkillvisiontoiletries and the “sunset vending machine“ project (a roadkillvisiontoiletries initiative to distribute poetic merchandise to the general public ). By inserting sets of “original reproductions“ into circulation by means of portrait painting, roadkillvisiontoiletries intends to neutralize the “EPIC DISCOUNT“ merchandise of mobilediscoetcetera.

Attempted translation by SAarts team: Asha is including several “painted collage” pieces from his “imposter” series on the SAarts exhibition. This body of work appropriates found images related to consumer culture, and explores concepts of multiplicity and illusion in contemporary society.

Rat Western: Art of the Story

2006-11-17T21:33:00.000+02:00

by Ismail Farouk

Rat Western’s art is the art of the story. Her stories are almost always beautifully entertaining, and her pursuit is the continual search for new ways to tell an old story. Western is an artist and designer working in the inner city of Johannesburg. Despite the limitations and perceived dangers of living in the inner city, Rat and I are both residents of Highlands, a suburb of Yeoville in the inner city of Johannesburg. We share a home on the last street along the ridge where a dramatic view of the inner city of is visible. It’s also the dark end of the street, at the very top, where activities range from religious to the not so religious. Here packs of dogs roam at night and thugs hide out on the hillside amongst the ever present African indigenous worshippers who seem to form a permanent part of this urban landscape.

Indeed both Western and I are part of an ever increasing network of artists living and working in the inner city of Johannesburg. The inner city offers an affordable alternative lifestyle to the mundane lifestyle offered by life in the suburbs and a greater sense of safety as most suburban resident’s fortress themselves behind high walls.

In many ways the inner city has come to resemble the epitome of white fear. It is a common sight to witness men and women urinating in public. Garbage piles accumulate on street corners as an inconsistent urban management system falters yet again. At night the street lights fail to operate and it is under this darkness which underground criminal networks are perceived to operate amidst a culture mistrust and fear.

The Dark end of the Street, 2006

It is within this inner city context where the stories Western tells come to life. ‘Hound’ (2005) is a graphic tale by Western, inspired by the pack of dogs that run through the suburbs of Yeoville and Bertrams at night. This mixed pack of canines – wild and domestic – can be heard barking and howling as they roam the deserted streets. According to Western, the work arose out of speculation as to what these animals may witness in their late night explorations. It’s a story about a man whose guilt and paranoia over an unnamed crime have led him to believe that the dogs are watching and judging him and that they will ultimately punish him for his actions.

Image from Hound (2006)

View Hound on flickr.com

Shooting images in the inner city of Johannesburg can be a daunting process the best of times. As an urban researcher, I have been photographing aspects of the city for a number of years now and the process never seems to get any easier. Over the years I have developed a range of strategies for safely shooting images in the inner city by becoming an unobtrusive part of the landscape. I photograph images from vantage points or shoot ‘from the hip’ on ground level. Either way, the process can be scary but at times my identity as a tall brown man aides my process as I can easily blend into a multitude of environments.

The inner city subject matter depicted by Western’s work poses a unique set of challenges for her. Being of an extremely reflective skin colour often makes stealth somewhat of a difficult task. Often, Western has little choice and has to resort to completely manufacturing images not only because of the limitations of her identity but because of the pressures at home and because of life style choices associated with responsible parenting.

However, it is exactly this limitation which always seems to give Western the edge in the highly competitive art world. In 2003, Western won the South African leg of the HP Photo competition with images from her series entitled, ‘Small repetitive Actions’ which went on to be exhibited at the international HP competition in Florence, Italy. She later developed this body of work for submission in completion of her Masters degree in digital media at Wits University.

This body of work dealt with every day memories still resonant in physical space and explored this relationship through a series of video works and manipulated photo light boxes which were originally installed in an old dilapidated house on the Wits University campus.

Light box from the ‘Small Repetitive Action’ (2003) series

My favourite image from the ‘Small Repetitive Actions’ series is shown above. The image depicts a seemingly awkward sideward view through a doorway. What I enjoy about the picture is the uncomfortable nature of the doorway. It seems to warp about mid-way along the door frame creating a distorted perspective. On closer inspection, join lines, are visible at this point alluding to the reconstruction. I have been looking at this image for years now and have never questioned its authenticity. Only recently have I found out that the image is a completely manufactured. The wall textures seen in the foreground are fake along with the staircase seen through the door way. What makes the image believable is the use light which seamlessly filters through the house.

More recently, In August 2006, Western won the runner up prize in the annual Sasol New Signatures Art competition. The competition attracts entries nationally and is generally viewed as the largest domestic art competition in South Africa. Western’s award confirmed her competitive edge in the local art scene. Her untitled video entry from the series ‘Nightwatch’ examined the alienation of urban living though the medium of digital animation which was shot from an isolated and voyeuristic perspective. Photographs were manipulated and animated to an original soundtrack also produced by the artist. The images bleed into one another with each new frame referencing something in the last - a TV becomes a street lamp, a car’s headlights melts into the light of a street corner brazier fire. Western’s resourcefulness is truly her best trait. I have personally witnessed the making of the ‘Nightwatch’ animation and the creation of believable night time scenes from completely unrelated day time shots.

In her latest work entitled ‘Waiting,’ Western explores an earlier theme dealing with isolated living in the inner city. ‘Waiting’ is a graphic tale which tells the story of the forgotten inner city pensioners. The graphic tale was recently exhibited at the experimental Parking Gallery in the inner city of Johannesburg.

Today, many parts of the inner city are inhibited by old white pensioners who did not move out of the city during the mass exodus to the Northern suburbs during the 1990’s mainly because of financial constraints. These pensioners live a fearful existence as they are easy targets and often only leave their homes when absolutely necessary. The old white pensioners in the inner city have been forgotten by their families in most cases and after a while they simply fade away with time.

Waiting (Detail) 2006

View Waiting on flickr.com

Working and living with Western has certainly impacted on my worldview. Only now am I starting to realise the importance of personal stories in a time characterised by mistrust amongst urban residents. As little stories like the tale of ‘Waiting’ share the responsibility of bringing out an awareness of the plight of the inner city pensioners and make a small contribution to the achievement of social cohesion amongst the various communities of the inner city.

http://ratwestern.com/
http://inthemidnightkitchen.blogspot.com/

Colleen Alborough

2006-10-19T15:14:00.000+02:00

by Nathaniel Stern

This piece was originally commissioned by Storm Janse van Rensburg for the Young Artist Project catalogue, May 2006. It is re-printed on SAarts with the permission of KZNSA.

Performed through text, video, installation and sound, Colleen Alborough’s work is an invitation into the perilous depths of emotional thought. It asks us to play out the tensions between fear and loss, being and space. Night Journey, her YAP installation, is a tearing at the seams of a labyrinthine mind, and an interrogation of the complexities of our fragility. The work begs us to stumble through walking and waking and wanting and winding, finally, wielding a fleshly comfort in that dark, but beautiful, place we call home: ourselves.

Night Journey, installation at KZNSA

Crossing the threshold into Night Journey can be likened to entering a maze of foreign-but-familiar flesh. As I step through the door, it opens into an 8-meter long corridor of painstakingly hand-made felt, grey in color, and highlighted with feathers, dirt and fractured light. The walls’ softness make them ever so touch-able, but their seemingly dampened soot is utterly repellent. I’m in a meticulously produced womb that is anything but a fetal resting place.

At the end of this woolen birthing canal, I turn almost 180-degrees into another stretch of felt darkness, and the wind pushes me back, restricting my attempts to carry on. Blasts of cool air – no, it’s the sound of a hurricane – are triggered by my stepping through to the next part of the maze.

I recall Alborough as one my students in the Digital Arts Masters Programme at Wits School of the Arts; she was someone who continually strove to use her technological prowess sparingly and keep it hidden from view. Here, she’s co-opted 4 small, passive infrared rangers – the kind we use for our motion detector lights and house alarm systems – which are perched atop her long corridors. These, and a hidden video camera, all communicate with custom-built computer software that drives 2 video projections and 3 soundtracks throughout her installation, triggered on and off when participants are in the ‘hot spots’ of Alborough’s tangled space.

It’s not only the materiality and interactivity of the work that make Night Journey such an embodied experience, but also its obvious, labour-intensive nature. I can’t help but to imagine the ritual of its production, the meditative and, paradoxically, obsessive-compulsive personality behind such a detailed installation. Allborough’s noisy mess of an artwork sounds a cadence of organization – grid-like but misshapen, her carefully constructed pathways are strewn with detritus.

Night Journey, detail of installation at KZNSA

As I continue down the deserted halls, Night Journey persists in blasting me with the sonic wind of an oncoming downpour, and I see trickles of light, candles burning, behind its walls. It feels like I’m trapped in an Edgar Allan Poe story: the glowing sticks lead me down a dark corridor; the felt becomes an unbearably thick wall of brick; my heart is pounding.

Vision becomes haptic, and I’m engulfed by affection. I don’t mean affection as in love for the space, but that, like Deleuze’s time-image[i] , Night Journey gives “discourse to the body … the body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself … it is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought … obstinate and stubborn, [the body] forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought.”[ii] Body-sensations become body-thoughts and versa vice; I am, because I am “in an immediate, unfolding relation.”[iii] Night Journey “unfolds in and as [my] bodily intuition of the sheer alienness of these forms.”[iv]

I turn another corner, and I’m hit with an eerie soundtrack – Alborough has used found sound from horror films, safari field recordings, and sound effect CDs, bombarding me with connotatively rich and potent audio that invokes a remembrance of myself at 5-years-old, hiding under the bedcovers. There’s a disfigured and mummified human form asleep in a bed across the way, and a small video projection above her head reveals her nightmares to me. She’s dreaming of crossroads and forlorn paths and fire and children running. She’s driving along a dust road at night, barely illuminated by dim orbs of light; she sees barren trees, long blades of dry grass, hears the squeaking of a tired land-rover and the distant hum of its engine; speed bumps are slowing her already over-loaded journey, and the ill-focused headlights have a dizzying effect on her retinas. As I get closer to our sleeping traveller, I hear her breath, assiduously labouring in and out of exhausted lungs.

Night Journey, details of installation at KZNSA

I re-member bits and pieces of Alborough’s artist statement:

Each day we retreat to our bed … so private, so familiar, so intimate. It lures us with its promise of comfort, protection, and restoration … we can escape the endless traffic, incessant noise and smothering fog, into the oblivion of sleep, transported to other worlds beyond the borders of ordinary perception … the night shuts out our visible reality and gives free rein to our hopes, fantasies, dreams, fears and nightmares.[v]

Is that us asleep in that bed, and why such unrestful sleep? To which world do we belong, I wonder, as I stare and stare.

I eventually walk from behind the bed and towards the final turn, triggering a few too many sounds to take in at once. Is that a young girl I hear praying somewhere off in the distance? I can make out someone tap-tap-typing this story, this story I never meant to tell.

Instead of another long corridor of misshapen walls beyond the bend, the cave in front of me has collapsed into a bed of foam pillows, strips of bandages and gauze piled high and blocking our path; and in the middle, I’m watching a small film of animated text that right now reads, “the fog drifts in / you fade to the distance / headlights flash and shine / down the road”. I swear I see my self of minutes ago, the me looking at the girl in the bed; I swear I see a faded video of myself behind this text, still looking. But that was so long ago, and where was it?

I breathe slowly now, myself, hyperaware of Alborough’s continual reference to that very action. Night Journey asks us, she says, “to breathe through the moment.”[vi] There’s a droning quality to my own lungs’ rhythm; there’s something ‘felt’ in the ‘felt-ness’ of her space that, perhaps inadvertently, both frames and dampens the sounds my body-thoughts make.

My experience of the work is not one of ‘looking’ as a "continual translation into visual language of the kinaesthetic,”[vii] it is one of ‘perception’ as a "total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world.”[viii] This is a “dynamic coupling of body and space”[ix] reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s body-schema. Touch promotes proprioception, and I am touched.

I close my eyes and listen to the most-recently triggered soundtrack. I hear the slow typing, a voice praying for loved ones. Like Colleen (we are all, by now, on a first name basis), I oscillate between feelings; at one moment, I feel the “dreadful sense of being alone and being hunted by those spiritual hounds in the night.”[x] At another, I sense an unresolved attempt to “reconcile an ambivalent … physical and psychical”[xi] relationship with the world.

A calm is perhaps approaching, but not the calm before or after the storm; it’s that calm in the middle, the one where you’re wet and the thunder is loud and your muscles ache, and it’s not that you don’t care about being soaked through to the skin, but that you are part of the rain, and that the rain is part of you.

I can hear other visitors entering and interacting with the space; their shadows intensify my experience of light and dark, as they cast shapes across the walls. Their movements trigger more sound, more video, making me curious as to their experiences, and how similar they are to my own. Do they also wonder what this place is and what it makes them? Are their insides tingling with a fear of loss, worrying about a loss of fears?

What terrible things would happen if we forgot to be afraid?

I wonder: perhaps Night Journey’s mummy is not a pickling corpse; perhaps she’s just healing. Bandaged, but warm, she’s on her way to recovery, and when she wakes, it is not the scary space that has transformed, but rather, it is her. By equally perceiving and producing the world around her, she ‘is’.

Night Journey, detail of installation at KZNSA

Night Journey resonates with mystic odysseys as times of despair mirrored by times of opportunity. At its core, Colleen’s story could be considered an embodiment of Walter Benjamin’s Storyteller: it is not a present force, but only a proposal. Our ‘hero’ has had no adventures as a righteous man, preaching morals and maxims. Rather, Night Journey shares its discoveries in order to give counsel, and provides a space in which listeners encounter themselves.[xii]

[i] And Hansen’s affection-image – see reference for full quotation in footnote 4, below. Note that Night Journey would not be considered a Deleuze time- or Hansen affection-image, per se, but accomplishes affection in a similar way, nonetheless.

[ii] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 173.

[iii] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke. University Press, 2002), 204.

[iv] Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 204.

[v] Colleen Alborough, email interviews by Nathaniel Stern (Johannesburg, South Africa: private digital collection, 2006).

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 99, quoted in Mark Hansen, “Embodying Virtual Reality: Touch and Self-Movement in the Work of Char Davies,” Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender and Culture Vol. 12: Making Sense (2001): 1-2. Found online @ (13 May, 2006).

[viii] Ibid, 100.

[ix] Hansen, “Embodying Virtual Reality”.

[x] Alborough in Stern.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Paraphrased from Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Trans. Harry Zohn and Ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 82-109.

Asha Zero

2006-09-14T17:07:00.000+02:00

by Shane De Lange

I have known Asha for years and I still do not know his ‘real’ name – I only know his brand and the many identities he performs under. His work suggests that the Authentic can be equated with the inside and the notion of the One, and Imitation or Other are outside of that space. Zero, in this context, is the only cipher that can distinguish from, and give support to, the One. The many identities of Asha Zero – Palinki, Broop Nook, and Whatsnibble, to name a few – problematize the inner workings of an individuality-hyped, but mostly fragmented and sometimes indifferent, society. He distinguishes himself from this information based society, and gives support to those compatriots with similar goals.

I recently spoke about Asha Zero’s satirical work at an exhibition opening in the Graskop hotel gallery. This exhibition was coordinated by Abrie Fourie, and showcased works by Asha, Zakkie Eloff, and myself – a schizophrenic grouping at best. I was planning on delivering a rather formal speech, but after a tearjerker by Zakkie’s widow, René, I realized that the best course of action was to speak about Asha from a more personal stance, leaving the academic stuff for another time. My talk attracted more attention than I thought it would, after which I optimistically moved into a kind of question and answer session.

It was at this point that the mood changed because some spectators reacted negatively to Asha’s work, which often incorporates human features, such as eyes and lips, juxtaposed with blood-like red spray paint splatter, corporate logos, and catch phrases. This was perceived as sacrilege, a mutilation of the human form. Many also expressed concern about the depiction of females in Asha’s work, such as in Diskette (below). Asha’s work tends towards open-ended facets and double binds that include ambiguous gender roles and pluralistic identities – things many audiences still feel uncomfortable with.

Diskette, Acrylic on board

Asha and I have spent days waxing lyrical about Spectacular Culture, and how it has saturated the globe in a haze of electronic media that brings traditional notions of identity and autonomy into question. His work ironically pulls from capitalistic and consumerist institutions that invade our lived lives – advertising, tabloids, television dinners, game shows, music videos, cult films, poster and album cover art and soap opera’s. Asha simply accents the ludic nature of these media, in a funny and sometimes juvenile manner, supported by a refined arts sensibility and wit.

One element of Asha’s art that I find intriguing is his sense of composition and the way he places things within the portrait format of his paintings. He always makes his own frames and incorporates them as part of the artwork, so as not to imprison his compositions. He pieces together various materials and parts from a variety of sources - magazines, newspapers, stickers, posters - to construct ambiguous and considered, layered collages. When he is satisfied with this “layout as sketch,” he goes on to paint a replica of it; quite simply, he copies the collage, but into the most traditional of media. By juxtaposing the photo-realistic qualities of magazine gloss images with the cut-up and fragmented nature of collage, Asha draws on the power of pastiche to make the overall effect of the artwork cohere, all tied together with a brush. Trench Jello (below) he balances textured areas with flat color, detailed images with abstract spaces, and plays outline against gestural scribbles (silhouette vs. façade). By “painting collages,” which are constructed from imagery depicting or signifying consumer society, Asha accents the hyperreality and multiplicity he finds in his urban environment.

Trench Jello, Acrylic on board

But Asha’s facsimiles and elaborate collages constructed by counterfeit identities are not restricted to formulae. He is subtle in his choice of colors, often incorporating extensive areas of flat color, or utilizing pattern and repetition to compliment his intricate details. His palette mainly consists of mixed and subdued pastel and grey tones, but he enjoys contrasting these with bright red and stark black hues that straight from the tube, often incorporating gesture, in the form of expressive brushstrokes, random spray, and violent splatters. The pink in Diskette, for example, is fuzzy and the red is harsh, instilling a hyperbolic sense of harmony and aggression. The red drips into the pink to support the composition and create a balance between the positive textured spaces and the flat negative parts of the picture. He compliments this movement with a pattern of diagonal lime green lines that have a retro 80s feel to them. Asha often uses this euro-trash / electro-clash aesthetic with his mock subject.

Zandu Flinker, Acrylic on board

I see these as documents of an information age that is numbed by the schizophrenic sensory experience of city life. He pieces iterative, trans-media processes together in an attempt to negate the detection or reduction of his warped image of Self. Bogus identities are supported by bogus corporations - Roadkillvisiontoiletries and Mobilediscoetcetera –often used to publish drawings, hand-out booklets, and stickers, sometimes music and experimental sound, that further interrogate the anonymous, unpredictable and unknown factors of life, or manipulate established systems such as the art market and gallery space. Asha attempts to reveal the consequences and outcomes of modernity, globalization, and urbanization, using capitalist-consumer orientated tricks and fibs. Power and progress, falsity and imitation, stress and speed, growth and development – these binaries perturb, stimulate and catalyze, and the resultant anxieties are emphasized in Asha’s work.

Whatsnibble, Acrylic on board

Asha communicates a downloaded reality, in the midst of an over-heated consumerist society. He has a special affinity to what I affectionately call the “techno-organic space” of the city - the sporadic growth of the concrete and steel architecture that structures the city, and the media that virulently evolves within its confines. The simulated worlds he creates sit somewhere between the writings of George Orwell and Marshall McLuhan and his works are a wonderfully and purposefully naïve dissection of binaries, like authentic and inauthentic, and specific and unspecific. Asha’s work unthreads the impossibilities of the ‘new’ and the ‘post’, chipping away at what Western Capitalist Domination would have us believe, with the tip of his brush. Ultimately, Asha gives us back the frame of the screen, accentuating a kind of terminal identity, foregrounding its Ones and its Zeroes.

- Shane de Lange