Berni Searle is exhibitiong at Frac Lorraine, Metz, France

Berni Searle, Snow White, 2001 : Double vidéo projection. Production Forum for African Arts, pour l’exposition Authentic, Ex-centric, 49ème Biennale de Venise (2001) © L’artiste.

METZ.- Berni Searle works with lens-based media—photography, video, and film —to stage narratives connected to history, memory, and place. While her work is intertwined with South African history that has emerged from a “life apart” (apartheid), her poetic and abstract imagery transcends the specific to address ideas about belonging and displacement in various contexts. The exhibition is on view from May 20th until September 18th, 2011 at Frac Lorraine, Metz, France. She questions tirelessly the self and the other, examining the elements of her own identity shaped by successive cross-fertilizations: a “composite identity” based on “creolization”―a notion dear to Edouard Glissant’s heart. Begun in the early 1990s, Searle’s work (installations, videos, and photographs) is poetically political. Nourished by personal mythologies, it questions memories and memory (About to forget, 2005), underscoring the dynamics of human relations, the dissolution of family ties, and the arbitrary character of racial, religious, and gender categories. Searle often works with her own body, upon which experiences and memories are inscribed and expressed (Snow White, 2001; Mute, 2008). Violence and suffering are rarely shown outright. Rather, they burst forth from the sumptuous image whose lyrical and esthetic qualities are imbued with dramatic intensity (Vapour, 2004; Moonlight, 2010). Without ever slipping into pathos, Berni Searle creates a polysemic, disturbing, intimately personal, and profoundly universal work――an ode to humanity in which everyone is what she or he has built. Berni Searle was born in 1964 in Cape Town, South Africa, where she continues to live and work. She graduated from the Cape Town University in 1995. Since 1999, her work has been featured in numerous solo and collective exhibitions in South Africa, the U.S., and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Biennales of 2001 and 2005

South African artist Kendell Geers @ Basel Art Fair

KENDELL GEERS AT ART 42 BASEL ART UNLIMITED
15 June 2011
Launched in 2000, Art Unlimited is Art Basel's pioneering exhibition platform for projects that transcend the classical art-show stand - including video projections, large-scale installations, massive sculptures and live performances. Selected by the Art Basel Committee, it has been curated since its inception by Geneva curator Simon Lamunière.

Kendell Geers's Hanging Piece (1993) alludes to acts of violence carried out by young people who suspended rocks from motorway bridges at car windscreen height during apar theid South Africa, targeting any car passing beneath. The installation references this indiscriminate violence and the regime that ignited it, while also remarking on the essence of human nature when placed in extreme circumstances.
 

A sculpture by South African artist Nicholas Hlobo is snapped up at the Venice Biennale

Arsenale dragon is returning to Africa

Sculpture by Johannesburg-based artist Nicholas Hlobo bought by head of sportswear company Puma

By Cristina Ruiz | Web only
Published online 3 Jun 11 (News)

Nicholas Hlobo's "Iimpundulu Zonke Ziyandilandela (All the Lightning Birds Are After Me)" is flying back to Africa

VENICE. A giant rubber dragon created for the Venice Biennale by the South African artist Nicholas Hlobo has been bought by the German collector Jochen Zeitz, who is chairman and chief executive of the sportswear company Puma.

The work, which is made of tyre inner tubes, is currently installed in the Arsenale at the heart of “Illuminazioni”, the exhibition organised by Bice Curiger. The creature is shown in flight with wings extended and its long tail rolled up in coils behind it. Red ribbons, which have been stitched throughout the dragon's body, stretch down to the ground underneath it.

The sculpture was bought for Zeitz by Mark Coetzee, the curator of his personal collection as well as chief curator of Puma Creative, who described it as "the highlight" of the art on display in Venice this week. "I know that this will become a seminal piece for the artist and the Jochen Zeitz Collection," said Coetzee.

The dragon will soon go on display in a museum in Africa, although Coetzee declined to give further details. He would also not reveal the price paid for the work but said that a sculpture by the artist of similar size would normally sell for around $250,000.

Hlobo, who is participating in the biennale for the first time, currently has work on show in several Venetian venues. As well as his dragon in the Arsenale, an enormous dying mutant quilted from an assortment of materials including leather collected from the streets of Johannesburg is on display at the Palazzo Grassi as part of “The World Belongs to You” (until 31 December) drawn from the collection of French billionaire François Pinault.

A rubber creature festooned with ribbons, which recalls a giant squid is on show at the Palazzo Papadopoli as part of an exhibition of artists shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize founded by Ukrainian collector Victor Pinchuk.

Hlobo says he drew his inspiration for the Arsenale dragon from many sources. "I looked at a lot of paintings by Tintoretto and found that many of them had birds in them," he said.

The title of the piece in the artist's native Xhosa language is Iimpundulu Zonke Ziyandilandela (All the Lightning Birds Are After Me). This refers to a song about a mythological creature, which "at times presents itself as a bird and at times as a handsome young man, but only to women," said Hlobo.

Jane Alexander exhibiting in Brussels at La Centrale Electrique

Jane Alexander - Security

www.lacentraleelectrique.be

La Centrale électrique à Bruxelles, De Elektriciteitscentrale in Brussels - European Centre for Contemporary Art

Figures and Fictions opens at the V & A

LONDON.- The first UK exhibition of contemporary South African photography from the last ten years is shown at the V&A from April 12 through July 17, 2011. Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography features over 150 works by some of the most exciting and inventive photographers living and working in South Africa today.

The exhibition presents the vibrant and sophisticated photographic culture that has emerged in post-apartheid South Africa. The works on display respond to the country’s powerful rethinking of issues of identity across race, gender, class and politics. The photographs depict people within their individual, family and community lives, practicing religious customs, observing social rituals, wearing street fashion or existing on the fringes of society. All the photographers question what it is to be human at this time in South Africa.

The 17 photographers in the exhibition range from established practitioners David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng, mid-career stars Pieter Hugo and Zwelethu Mthethwa to a new generation, fresh to the international stage, including Zanele Muholi and Hassan and Husain Essop. Each photographer is represented by one or more series that imaginatively question the conventions of portraiture, ethnographic studies or documentary photography.

Co-curator Martin Barnes said: “This exhibition shows the range and variety of politically-engaged fine art photography arising from a captivating period in South Africa’s history. These photographers are at the forefront of photography emerging anywhere in the world today and we are delighted to gather them all together for this first major exhibition showcase of the contemporary South African scene.”

All aspects of life including sex, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, occupation and class were regulated by law until the end of Apartheid rule in South Africa in 1994. For nearly 50 years the separation of races was enforced, with people categorised into ‘black’, ‘white’ and ‘coloured’. As the first wave of post-apartheid euphoria has begun to fade, the country’s photographers are responding to the challenges of establishing a pure democracy in South Africa’s fascinating and fraught political context. Many of the works represent subjects who compose themselves for the camera, asserting new-found dignity and distinction.

Some works in the exhibition reference the types of anthropological study that was historically used to classify people into fixed racial and ethnic groups after photography arrived in South Africa in 1840. In the struggle against Apartheid, photography was used by activists as a documentary medium and contemporary South African photographers self-consciously engage with this history by documenting South African life but also inviting the viewer to read their own stories into the works.

Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now at MoMA

The exhibition Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, drawn entirely from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, brings together nearly 100 prints, posters, books, and wall stencils by approximately 30 artists and collectives from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art that demonstrate the unusual reach, range, and impact of printmaking in South Africa during and after a period of political upheaval. From the earliest print, a 1965 linoleum cut by Azaria Mbatha, to screenprinted posters created during the height of the antiapartheid movement, to recent works by a younger generation that investigate a multiplicity of formats in the wake of apartheid, these works are striking examples of printed art as a tool for social, political, and personal expression. The exhibition is on view from March 23 to August 14, 2011. Among the artists included are Bitterkomix, Kudzanai Chiurai, Sandile Goje, William Kentridge, Senzeni Marasela, John Muafangejo, Cameron Platter, Claudette Schreuders, and Sue Williamson, with the majority of works and artists on view for the first time at MoMA and many for the first time within a U.S. museum. The exhibition Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now is organized by Judith B. Hecker, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, The Museum of Modern Art.

Claudette Schreuders, The Couple from Crying in Public. 2003. One from a series of nine lithographs with chine collé, composition: 13 x 9 3/16" (33 x 23.4 cm) Publisher and printer: The Artists’ Press, White River, South Africa. Edition: 30. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century © 2011 Claudette Schreuders.

Irma Stern sets new world record!

Irma Stern's 'Arab Prince' sells for over R 30 million at Bonhams auction house in London this evening, setting a new world record for work of art sold at auction by this artist.