Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2006: Churchill Madikida

Like Father Like Son?

Churchill Madikida is the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2006. The award entails a solo exhibition of his new work, which opened at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in June 2006 and thereafter travels to major centres throughout South Africa. It ends its run at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg in July 2007.

Like Father Like Son?

Churchill Madikida grew up without a biological father, and his exhibition sets out t o explore what happens to sons who grow up without their fathers.

It is widely acknowledged that children need structure, security, stability and attachment to develop and flourish. But modern society presents many challenges to the environments of children through occurrences such as high divorce rates, new family structures, increased mobility, women's liberation, and poverty.

Fathers are cited more than mothers in issues such as psychological maladjustment, substance abuse, depression and behavioral problems, according to research done by Ronald Rohner, director of the Centre for the Study of Parental Acceptance and Rejection in the School of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut, and his colleague Robert Veneziano. They also found that a father's love helps prevent the development of these problems and can also contribute to a child's good physical health.

Drawing from his own personal experience, the works on this exhibition engage with Madikida's complex family history. Like Father Like Son? explores the differences and commonalities with members of Madikida's family and especially his father who he recently met for the first time in 32 years. The artworks provide an insight into how growing up without his biological father may have shaped his sense of being, his relationships and even perhaps his perception of the world.

He attempts to share his struggles in trying to understand and overcome growing up without a biological father. For Madikida this process includes dealing and acknowledging shortcomings and wrongs of the past and mostly offering forgiveness and moving forward.

Churchill Madikida

Born in Butterworth in the Eastern Cape in 1973, Madikida lives and works in Johannesburg. Until recently he was the Collections Curator at Constitution Hill, but left his post to work full–time as an artist.

He held his first solo exhibition, Liminal states, at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2003. His second, Interminable limbo, and third Status were shown at Michael Stevenson in 2004 and 2005. His work frequently explores the contemporary implications of Xhosa traditions, particularly the initiation ritual of circumcision, in media including video, photography and live performance.

Madikida was one of the selectors for the 2004 Brett Kebble Art Awards, and was included as curator and artist on the major group exhibition Personal affects: power and poetics in contemporary South African art at the Museum for African Art and the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York (2004), This group exhibition also traveled to The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu in 2006. Also in 2006 Madikida showed on Olvida Quien Soy – Erase me from who I am at the Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In 2003 he was the joint

Exhibition: Word Forms and Language Shapes 1975-2007

Word Forms and Language Shapes 1975-2007 is a mid-career retrospective of work by the internationally acclaimed South African artist, Willem Boshoff (b.1951).

The exhibition, curated by Warren Siebrits, opens on 25 September 2007 at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg and runs until 1 December.

Arguably South Africa's leading conceptual artist, Boshoff is a sculptor fascinated by the forms of words and the shape of language. Included in the exhibition is his seminal work, KYKAFRIKAANS (1977-1980), a series of 100 concrete poems created on a manual typewriter consisting of forms and shapes derived by the artist using the Afrikaans language.

Another work on the show is Boshoff's much acclaimed Blind Alphabet (1991-ongoing), which comprises a series of intricately carved wooden sculptures, shaped by the artist to impart the meanings of archaic and lost words. The forms and corresponding Braille definitions make it impossible for a sighted person to fully grasp the work's complexity, unless aided by someone who can read Braille.

Boshoff has remained a pacifist his whole life and has always felt wars and violence to be morally unjustifiable. During the mid- to late-1970s he refused to serve in the South African Defence Force (SADF) on moral and ethical grounds. Bangboek (1978-1981), another work on the show, is a cryptic and coded record of this time in the artist's life, written in miniature text.

Cryptic scripts and the writing of dictionaries on various subjects have been an ongoing fascination for Boshoff, as evident in works such as Skynbord (1977-79), a dictionary of colour; 370-Day Project (1982-1983), an autobiography of a year of the artist's life recorded in symbols carved and incised on 370 different species of wood; Gaia Project (1988-91), a dictionary of South African soils; and Garden of Words (1982-2007), an ongoing study and dictionary of over 15,000 South African plant names.

Aspects of social injustice and prejudice, particularly as a result of colonialism and empire building, are also recurring themes in Boshoff's oeuvre, particularly over the last decade. In this respect he has spent much time researching graveyard and memorial sites related to the South African War (1899-1902) (formerly known as the Anglo-Boer War). One work by Boshoff dealing with the South African War is 32,000 Darling Little Nuisances (2003), which records and honours the memory of 32,000 children under the age of fifteen who died during this war, mostly while prisoners of war in concentration camps.

Significant among Boshoff's most recent works are those focusing on the implications of the crisis in the Middle East after the events of 11 September 2001. Pivotal works in this regard are Flag I & Flag II (2003), War & Peace (2004), Serial Killer (2004), What is Our Oil Doing Under Their Sand? (2004) and Hiroshima Shadows (2007).

Word Forms and Language Shapes 1975-2007 is complemented by a catalogue, which includes a lengthy interview with Boshoff, providing invaluable insight into the circumstances and events that have inspired and shaped his artistic vision. It includes reproductions of 42 pivotal artworks selected by Siebrits to highlight the evolution of the artist's rich and diverse creative and conceptual art language. The catalogue has been specifically designed to help high school and university learners with their research.

Exhibition: All Gold is Gold

All Gold is Gold is Beverley Price's first solo exhibition. Consisting of large and small objects, it brings together her ideas and work over the last seven years to promote jewellery as art.

Price lives and works in Johannesburg. Trained as a jeweller in Israel and London, she completed her post-graduate fine arts studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2002. Price exhibits abr oad in Germany, the UK and New York, and is also a curator and public speaker on the topic of jewellery as art. In addition, she has been involved with the organisation of the annual Jewellery Indaba in Cape Town.

Price's particular interest is to stimulate the development of a hybrid style of jewellery that fuses indigenous South African adornment forms with conventional Western jewellery practices. She is also interested in promoting a jewellery expression that carries a distinctly South African flavour.

Some years ago Price set a goal for her work: she wanted to make a form of jewellery that conveys value without using precious minerals, like diamonds. To this end she began developing the idea of using foil to frame images, such as those from the magazine Drum and South African product labels, combining the foiled units to make jewellery. Her intention, as she puts it, "was to make a story round the neck - like a silent movie."

Price has cut a unique path in art, both here and abroad, as there are not that many jewelers who consider themselves as artists. All Gold is Gold is on at the Standard Bank Gallery from 31 July - 1 September 2007.

Exhibition: Corporeal Prospects

Corporeal Prospects showcases a range of new and earlier work by Christine Dixie. In addition to works made during her Advanced Diploma and Masters studies, the exhibition includes works from previous solo shows, such as FrontTears (1997–1998), Track (2000) and Hide (2002). Corporeal Prospects also includes a new body of works, ’Parturient Prospects’, which will debut at the 2007 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.

Dixie’s innovative art embraces feminist concerns, as well as critical interrogations of the colonial landscape tradition and its relation to histories of dispossession in South Africa. ’Parturient Prospects’ focuses on representations of maternity that bring together both her interest in issues around landscape and how gender identity is constructed.

In Corporeal Prospects Dixie uses traditional printmaking techniques, such as woodcut, alongside found objects and digital prints in an inventive exploration of her interests.

A lecturer in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Dixie is a South African artist whose innovative and sophisticated works are becoming increasingly recognised as highly significant. A printmaker with particular skills in etching, she is also an artist who extends the boundaries of her medium by working in installation, or by using a variety of matrixes and materials.

Responses to Dixie’s works on the part of critics and academics have been enthusiastic. Brenda Atkinson described her ’Thresholds’ series, which was exhibited as part of FrontTears, as "a compelling clutch of liminal image–spaces", and noted how the show as a whole addressed "the unspoken politics and erotics that whisper in the dust of towns like [Nieu Bethesda]" and offered "a psychosexual counterpoint to the history of colonial landscape art" (Mail & Guardian, January 9–15 1998). David Bunn, speaking at the opening of FrontTears, commented that in the "meticulous prints" of Dixie, "we have entered a post–landscape moment, a new idiom in which some of South Africa’s most radically interesting artists work". And Kathryn Smith wrote of Hide at the Millenium Gallery: "Two boys stand sentry at the east end of Millenium, one holding a gun, the other a golden lamb. It’s almost hard to believe they’re etchings. More naturalist than realist, they form a compelling presence in the white room. Such is the control over the medium that Christine Dixie manages to exert" (Arthrob, May 2005).

Corporeal Prospects is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by David Bunn and Brenda Schmahmann. It runs at the Standard Bank Gallery from 31 July–1 September 2007.

Twisting Sisters: The art of master weaving sisal

In recent years women in Swaziland have transformed their traditional craft of basket weaving into a vehicle for artistic expression. At the forefront of this transformation has been Tintsaba Crafts, winner of Swaziland’s prestigious Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2006.

Tintsaba have trained over 750 craftswomen to produce a wide range of traditional and innovative crafts, including baskets, which are graded according to their technical and artistic qualities. Only a few basket weavers – the Master Weavers – produce Collector’s grade work. Twisting Sisters consists of a selection of Collector’s grade baskets, as well as natural and silver jewellery.

Historically, basket–weaving skills in Swaziland have been handed down from mother to daughter and handcrafts were made for use in the home. Recognizing the skills and creativity of the Swazi people, Tintsaba established a Rural Development Project in 1985 in the Northern Hhohho region of Swaziland to train women’s groups to produce and market quality crafts. The project, which enables women to earn income to supplement the family budget without having to leave their families, has been an outstanding success, producing a wide range of items, including baskets, trays, natural jewellery and woven sisal disks for Tintsaba’s silver jewellery.

The baskets and jewellery on exhibition in Twisting Sisters are woven from sisal, a weed in Swaziland, using a fine coiling technique. In making these products, every step is carried out by hand since machine prepared sisal yields inferior results. A time–consuming art, a basket measuring 17 cm takes about 30 hours to weave.

In grading each basket, a number of criteria are applied, such as the size of the shape, symmetry, colour combination and effort, and the grades used are ’Trainee’, ’Market’, ’Craft’ and ’Gallery’. Only about 20 out of 300 basket weavers, the Master Weavers, produce work in the Gallery or Collector’s grade. These baskets are considered to be technically perfect with stunning and intricate designs.

Of the thousand baskets or "titja" produced for Tintsaba each year, the best are photographed, numbered and catalogued. These Special Collection Baskets are considered to be works of art.

Some women take to becoming a Master Weaver in a short time, possibly due to growing up with a mother who is an excellent basket maker, from whom they learn the art of spinning the sisal from an early age. While crafts were formerly made by older women, or those with disabilities, it is now educated women who are at the forefront of craft development.

Tintsaba has developed the fine coiling technique used in the production of the baskets to make small disks, which are used in what is known as "natural jewellery". Some of the discs are used for making jewellery with a silver frame. In 2003 Tintsaba was featured on the TV show, Top Billing, showcasing some of their jewellery.

Coinciding with the exhibition, Tintsaba will host an online auction of Collector’s grade baskets. Interested persons are invited to visit www.tintsaba.com for further information.

Karel Nel - Lost light: fugitive images from deep space

An intriguing and absorbing exhibition, Lost Light is on at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg from 13 April - 26 May 2007.

Much of Karel Nel’s most recent work has been informed by vast, faint emanations from deep space, transient images of light, infrared, radio or x-ray that left their source millions of years ago. Telescopes capture these emanations as they approach Earth, which become forever lost to our gaze once they pass the planet.

Nel’s involvement with astronomy as subject matter for his art began after his 2002 Status of Dust exhibition in New York, when he was approached by Nick Scoville, an eminent astronomer, to join a team of thirty of the world’s top astronomers as their resident artist for the Cosmos Project. The purpose of this ambitious project is to map two squar e degrees of the universe.

Over the last four years Nel has spent time with the Cosmos team at the Rose Planetarium, New York; the University of Kyoto, Japan; the Max Planck Institute’s Ringberg castle, Germany, and the University of Honolulu, Hawaii.

Nel has also paid successive visits to observatories on the 13,000-foot high volcano, Mauna Kea, on the big island of Hawaii, where the project’s land-based observations are made with the Subaru telescope. These observations are correlated with data received for the project by the space-based Hubble telescope. The work of the team is to make sense of, and interpret, the complex array of data in relation to what they already know about galaxy formation, large scale structures, the mapping of dark matter, halo-modeling, stellar dust and the lensing of light.

In Lost Light the primary focus is on Nel’s work resulting from his engagement with both the ideas and images generated by the Cosmos Project. His large folding screens refer to the evanescent images approaching us from deep space. These fleeting images are perceived and captured in a more permanent form, and to do so, Nel uses salt and 540 million year-old black carboniferous dust, both primordial substances.

While the Lost Light works constitute the central interest of the exhibition, Nel’s large-scale drawings from two other fascinating projects – In the Presence of Leaves and Status of Dust – are also on view.

In his quest to know the world, Nel is intensely preoccupied with nature and the environment. In In the Presence of Leaves he pays tribute to the beauty and value of trees, many of which are today threatened because of environmental degradation. To make the works in the series, Nel travelled extensively to collect some of the largest leaves on the planet. These include the famous Coco de Mer palms from the Seychelles; Baobab fibre from Morandava in Madagascar; and the Pandanus leaves of Rabal, New Ireland and Micronesia. Once in Nel’s studio, these huge leaves – he calls them “extraordinary examples of engineering” – were used as points of departure for his investigations into nature and the ecological dilemmas of our time, as in his series, Elegies to the Forests.

Status of Dust comprises a series of works dealing with what Nel calls “the forensic nature of our time.” By this he means that we can only see so much with the naked eye, and that it is only through deeper analytical investigation that we can access more information and precise data.

In making the works for Status of Dust, Nel collected and used a variety of site-specific materials, such as red ochres from ancient open-cast mines in South Africa; yellow and white pigment from the Transkei; sheets of baobab fibre from Madagascar; and carboniferous dust of dinosaurs and tree ferns laid down millions of years ago on Gondwanaland, the huge landmass that split into the continents that we know today.

Two works from Status of Dust are made from earth gathered from Ground Zero in New York after the catastrophic events of September 11. Nel was in fact in New York until just four days before 9/11, working as Artist in Residence at the Ampersand Foundation studio, just a few blocks away from the Twin Towers. In January 2002 he returned to the city, where he collected the earth from Ground Zero. As Nel explains, “the matter itself contains molecular memory of those events encoded in it; events which shook New York, the world and changed the ground rules of human trust and interaction for the coming century.”

Nel is as much a collector as he is an artist. Over a number of years now, he has made expeditions across the Pacific, which has amplified his respect for, and understanding of, the people of the region and their strategies to conserve their way of life and to deal with the challenges of globalization. Nel’s collection of objects from Irian Jaya, Papua New Guinea and the Solomons will be shown as a companion exhibition to Lost Light, and is entitled Oceanic Values: currencies of the Pacific.

An Associate Professor of Fine Art at the University of the Wiwatersrand, Nel is a highly perceptive and creatively intelligent artist whose work is a rich source of information about important aspects of the world and the universe. The content of his work makes for a unique contribution to South African and global art, and he has much to offer by way of sensitizing us to our surroundings.

Exhibition: Invoice

Photographer: Santu Mofokeng

Invoice is an exhibition of the work of Santu Mofokeng, one of South Africa’s foremost photographers. Mofokeng is held in the highest regard by almost everyone involved with photography. According to international curator Simon Njami, he is ”one of the most important photographers of his generation”, and acclaimed photographer David Golblatt has said that his ”photographs of life and landscape in southern Africa are amongst the finest that we have.”

Mofokeng’s photographic career began in 1973 when, while still at school, he started working as a street-photographer to make money. He subsequently came to understand photography’s subversive potential when he saw pictures of the June 16 uprising in which he was a participant. In the mid-1980s he joined the Afrapix Collective, an independent photographic agency that played a leading role in documenting popular resistance against apartheid. While with Afrapix, and also as a photographer with the newspaper, New Nation, Mofokeng exhibited an independent approach, producing images that were not overtly political. What he shaped instead was a broader story about urban black life under apartheid.

The exhibition, a survey show rather than a retrospective, includes photographs from virtually all of Mofokeng’s major bodies of work produced between 1982 and 2006, and is a landmark event designed to coincide with the photographer’s 50th year. On show are images of life in townships, from the point of view of an insider and resident, and those from The Bloemhof Portfolio, which tell of the lives of tenant farmers in rural Bloemhof. Also included in the exhibition are photographs from a body of work on rituals performed by followers of the Zionist Apostolic faith at the Motouleng Caves in the Free State. Artist and author Sue Williamson has described these photographs as being among the ”most beautiful in the South African canon”. The most recent photographs in this series are of Mofokeng’s brother, Ishmael, shortly before his death from Aids.

In recent years, Mofokeng has turned his attention to landscape. The urban landscape and the phenomenon of the billboard are investigated in the series, Landscape and Ideology. Generally, Mofokeng uses landscape to ”try to inform debates that are happening in this country around landscapes, monuments and memory.” In working on landscape for the body of work called Chasing Shadows, Mofokeng has, however, not restricted himself to South Africa, seeking out places around the world in an attempt ”to explore the banality of horror.” Sites visited include Auschwitz, Hanoi and a concentration camp for ”natives” in the Free State.

Mofokeng has been acknowledged for his photographic work, not only locally, but also in the international art world. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and has exhibited extensively in Europe and elsewhere. In 2002 he was one of four South African artists selected by curator Okwui Enwezor to exhibit on Documenta 11 in Germany. Recently he has participated in the international travelling exhibition, Africa Remix (2004-6). In 2004 he was chosen as one of ten leading photographers in the world to participate in Beijing’s Forbidden City International Photography Festival. Mofokeng has had solo exhibitions of his work in New York and Johannesburg.

Invoice has been realised through partnerships with Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg, Autograph ABP, London, IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town and Standard Bank.

David Lurie: Table Mountain

Table Mountain an exhibition by South African born photographer David Lurie, captures, in stark black and white, the diverse lives of those who dwell in the shadow of this iconic landmark.

As Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool has noted: "Table Mountain is beyond question the quintessential symbol of the Cape...Yet, despite this recognition, [its] significance to those who make their home in its various shadows remains obscure and unexplored...This magnificent book by David Lurie has decisively altered this state of affairs. The beautiful, haunting, incisive, original and unforgettable images in this book unveil the endless permutations of everyday life that gets played out under the impervious gaze of Table Mountain." (Quoted on http://bell-roberts.com)