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STREETLIGHTS | JOHANNESBURG

Opening Thursday 9 September at 5:30pm, the exhibition STREETLIGHTS | JOHANNESBURG is the culmination of a project that set out to understand and explore the city through the way it is illuminated. The project mapped the infrastructure that provides this illumination and is made up of two components.

The first component will be the website VAUGHN SADIE | STREETLIGHTS which archives and maps a small percentage of the streetlights in the city. The website will bring about a new way of perceiving Johannesburg and will be activated the day of the opening.

The second component comprised a series of workshops entitled performing the streetlamp. These workshopsexplored and responded to the use of artificial light in public space and the impact each has on social practice. The workshops culminated in a series of temporary interventions in an area of Fordsburg, Johannesburg, and the documentation of the interventions will be exhibited.

Now open: NARCISO ROAD, ELDORADO PARK

As the outcome of his three-month internship at the Bag Factory, Raymond Marlowe is showcasing two new series of portraiture inspired by his home town of Eldorado Park.

In the first, entitled Beautiful Women and their Children, Marlowe explores the phenomenon that women considered highly desirable in the community often turn out to be the mothers of many children by different fathers.

In his second series, Bekeer (which refers to Born-Again Christians),he depicts men and woman of faith whose dress style and behaviour depart from stereotypes of Coloured South Africans.

With thanks to the Arts & Culture Trust and the Vodacom Foundation

May Contain Nuts

The Bag Factory Artist’s Studios celebrated its last 20 years in July with

May Contain Nuts

The exhibition featured all our current studio artists:

Lester Adams, Reshma Chhiba, Nadine Hutton,  Diana Hyslop, David Koloane, Kagiso Pat Mautloa, Sam Nhlengethwa, Thenjiwe Nkosi, Richard Penn, Lerato Shadi, Myer Taub, and Mary Wafer

At the same time:

The current international artists-in-residence Jonas Staal and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei presented their research project The Missing Link. The Missing Link, consisting of an intervention in public space and a textual intervention, proposes an analysis of capitalism as a sophisticated continuation of the apartheid ideology.

Previous show: An exhibition by artists in residence

Visiting artists Ruben Abels (Netherlands), Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum (Botswana/USA) and Iris Vetter (Netherlands) showed three coinciding presentations entitled (respectively) Part of Joburg, Tactics of Desire, and Still and Moving. Their exhibition ran until 24 June 2010. This exhibition was supported by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund.

Border Farm

Border Farm, an exhibition conceptualized by Thenjiwe Nkosi, which features videos and writing by migrant farm works on the South African/Zimbabwe national border, opened at the Bag Factory at 5.30pm on Wednesday, 14 April 2010. The show features works by Nkosi, Raymond Marlowe and the Maroi Farm Art and Drama Group.

Nkosi has been participating in a group project called Living In-Between, based in Musina, in Limpopo Province – the last town before the Zimbabwean border. Due to its ongoing history as a mining town surrounded by several productive farms, Musina’s population is largely comprised of migrants. The community of Maroi farm is made up of both Zimbabwean and South African farm workers.

Through a series of workshops held by Nkosi and Marlowe, along with Tapiwa Marovatsanga, Michelle Harris and Daniel Browde, a group of farm workers from Maroi Farm have been taking photographs, filming and writing about their experiences. Through their experiences one sees a confluence of contemporary issues and questions about national borders and their impact on individuals and communities – particularly communities under pressure. The idea of belonging is central to how self and group identities operate in situations of dislocation.

New Studio Artists

We are thrilled to welcome Lerato Shadi and Mary Wafer to the Bag Factory as studio artists.

Lerato Shadi, who graduated with a Diploma in Fine Art from the University of Johannesburg, is known for her track-stopping performances and has participated in numerous group shows, including last year’s Self/Not Self at Brodie Stevenson Gallery and The Double Body: Being in Space at the UJ’s FADA Gallery.

Mary Wafer graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2007. Her large-scale paintings capture the eerie melancholy of emptied out urban spaces. Last year she had a solo exhibition, The frontier is never somewhere else, at Brodie/Stevenson, and this year she will be exhibiting in solo shows at the KZNSA in Durban and at Blank Projects in Cape Town. In her KZNSA exhibition, No Closer to the Truth, she presents two new series of paintings. The first series of small and intimate works are portraits and still lives of mercenaries and gun nuts and their weapon collections and kit. The second series is an investigation into Durban architecture and the harbour. ‘One of the recurring threads in my work is the notion of visibility and invisibility, concrete and conceptual visibility, evidence of citizenship, ways of belonging to and possessing the physical and imagined spaces we occupy,’ says Wafer. ‘Painting is a conceptual practice that operates as a platform for investigating social and urban realities. It offers the possibility of both building up complex layers of meaning and signification, and at the same time the possibility of subtraction and distillation, enabling suggestions of real and imaged absences and presences.’

Current residency artists

We will be joined in April and May 2010 by Pamela Phatismo Sunstrum (Botswana/USA) and Ruben Abels and Iris Vetter (Holland).

Iris Vetter <irisvetter.com> is a photographer based in Amsterdam, who studied at the Academy of the Arts Constantijn Huygens, Kampen, and the Academy St Joost, Breda. Recent exhibitions include Everyday is not like everyday: The 120^th day, Queensday, NL, Foam at TNT, Amsterdam. ‘As a photographer I find I am balancing on the border between art and photography. I am primarily interested in social interactions and human behaviour,’ writes Vetter. ‘Up until now I have mostly worked in my own personal environment. Photographing my own “backyard” so to speak. I deliberately chose to do this because I didn’t want to be “dazzled by the exotic”, instead learning to look closely at aspects of Dutch culture and human behavior. At this moment I feel that I would like widen my view and open up my work to a different perspective.

Ruben Abels is also based in Amsterdam. Since 1999 he has been working together with Adam Oostenbrink in an atelier called DesignArbeid. He studied at Academy of the Arts Constantijn Huygens, Kampen, KHB Weissensee, Berlin and the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, as well as participating in an exchange programme with the University of Central England, Birmingham. Recent exhibitions have included 5’45” mother thinks 15’ at de Ring in Epe, M2 in P////AKT in Amsterdam and What makes Berlin addictive in Shanghai. ‘I am primarily interested in what I like to call Public Participatory Art. By this I mean starting a project and creating an artwork together with the inhabitants of a given communtiy (locals),’ writes Abels. ‘More and more I come to the conclusion that creating an artwork not only means to create a reflective piece of work. It can also help in designing social cohesion, create self-awareness of the participants and result in a feeling of ownership of communities. I am searching for the border between public participation and autonomous, independent art. In the Netherlands this approach and way of working is still very much to be developed! Artists generally assume that their own independence is lost as soon as they start working in co-operations with audiences or locals. In South Africa there are more artists active and doing research on these kinds of public participatory artforms…’

Pamela Phatismo Sunstrum <pamelaphatismosunstrum.com>was born in Botswana and lives in Baltimore in the United States. She obtained her BA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she is currently an adjunct professor. Recent group shows have included Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Images since 1970 at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, Georgia, and New InSight at Art Chicago. ‘In my work I allude to my own experiences in travel and migration as a way of understanding my shifting, trans-national cultural identity,’ writes Sunstrum. ‘I am interested in cultural residue: those things we carry that connect us to a place or to a person; those traces that are communicated – as story, as ritual, as “mouth music” – and are transmitted between bodies and across landscapes. In my work I respond to these moments by replicating myself – creating simultaneous or alternate selves and simultaneous worlds in order to gaze at myself… and give myself things to keep or carry, receive or transmit. My work often navigates between and negotiates with pre-conceived notions of blackness and Africanity.’