National Wake: Walk In Africa 1979-81

19.09.2013 | por franciscabagulho | África do Sul, apartheid, punk

Nik Bärtsch’s RONIN: A banda de jazz zen-funk apresenta novo álbum, “LIVE” (ECM), na África Austral

Música ritual japonesa, sons clássicos, espaço arquitectónico, improvisação, funk – elementos que se entrelaçam metodicamente, porém de forma artística e harmoniosa, pelo quarteto suíço Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin.

A banda Ronin, constituída em 2001 e liderada pelo compositor e pianista Nik Bärtsch, natural de Zurique, é dotada de um som idiossincrático forte. Com o baterista Kaspar Rast, Sha nos clarinetes baixo/contrabaixo e sax alto e Thomy Jordi no baixo. Cada membro do grupo dispõe de enorme controlo e visão não só em relação aos sons que ele próprio produz mas também às sonoridades que surgem da combinação com os restantes instrumentos. É aqui que os instrumentos se fundem como componentes de uma orquestra sinfónica, ao mesmo tempo que acompanham a visão estética da música ritual groove.

Com uma presença irresistível no palco, e distinguida pelo Wall Street Journal como um dos seis melhores espectáculos ao vivo em 2011, a Ronin conta agora com o apoio da Pro Helvetia, a Fundação Suíça para a Cultura, para fazer chegar ao Cape Town Jazz Festival, Joanesburgo, Durban, Suazilândia e Moçambique a energia hipnotizante que caracteriza as suas actuações ao vivo. A banda oferecerá ainda vários workshops que se realizarão em locais seleccionados.

“Isso demonstra bem a versatilidade e a franqueza da chamada música moderna que não se 
impõe limites mas visa talvez romper as fronteiras existentes.” Hans-Jurgen von Osterhausen, Jazzpodium (Alemanha).

CIDADE DO CABO
Sexta, 5 de Abril de 2013 | 19h00
Cape Town International Jazz Festival
Cape Town International Convention Centre
Moses Molelekwa Stage
Ingresso de um dia R440
www.capetownjazzfest.com

Workshop:
6 de Abril | 16h00
Sala VOC, 3º Andar, Cape Sun
Por inscrição

JOANESBURGO
Segunda, 8 de Abril | 19h30
The Music Room, 8º andar do Edifício University Corner, Universidade Wits, Jorrisen Street, Braamfontein.
R50 Bilhetes à venda no local; entrada livre para estudantes.
Estacionamento subterrâneo disponível no Edifício University Corner. Entrada localizada na Jorrisen Street

DURBAN
Quarta, 10 de Abril de 2013 | 18h00
The Centre for Jazz and Popular Music
Campus Howard College da UKZN
Estudantes R10 | Pensionistas R20 | Adultos R35

MALKERNS
Suazilândia Quinta, 11 de Abril | 20h00
House on Fire, Malandela’s Complex Malkerns
E 70 Bilhetes à venda no local
www.house-on-fire.com

MAPUTO
Moçambique Sábado, 13 de Abril | 20h30
Centro Cultural Franco Moçambicano – Auditório CCFM
Avenida Samora Machel, 468 Maputo
Público em geral 250 Mt, Membros do CCFM 150Mt
www.ccfmoz.com

03.04.2013 | por herminiobovino | África do Sul, jazz, Moçambique, música, Zen-Funk

‘Rise and Fall of Apartheid’ - Images That Preserve History, and Make It

Photography is the common language of modern history. It’s everywhere; and everyone, in some way, understands it.

No institution presents and parses that language with more skill and force than the International Center of Photography when in peak form, which is the form it’s in for “Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life.”

This isn’t an emotional outcry of an exhibition, a tragedy-to-triumph aria, which it could easily have been. It’s dramatic, for sure, but in a measured, nuanced, knotty way, like a long, complex sentence with many digressive clauses and a logic sometimes hard to follow. With more than 500 photographs, supplemented by books, magazines, posters and films and spread over two floors, the show can’t help but be overwhelming. But it’s pitched as much to the mind as to the heart.

On the one hand, it’s a grand narrative of stirring sights: ardent faces, agitated bodies, camaraderie, clenched fists, funerals. It’s also a disquisition on the ordinariness of good and evil, on how people in a particular time and place encounter and partake of both and go on with their lives, no matter what.

Organized by Okwui Enwezor, an adjunct curator at the center, and Rory Bester, a South African art historian, the show is based on the idea that modern South African photography began in 1948, with the legalizing of apartheid — compulsory racial segregation — by a white-led national government.

Until then, the story goes, photography had primarily commercial and ethnological uses; after that year it became an issue-specific industry, a political weapon in a civil rights war that went on for more than four decades.

The pre-1948 photography in the show has, of course, a political dimension too. Early in the exhibition we see images of white Afrikaners re-enacting their mythical 17th-century journey from Europe to South Africa, which they claim as their divinely promised land. And although intended to have scientific validity, the carefully posed portrait photographs, some dating to the early 1920s, in A. M. Duggan-Cronin’s 11-volume “Bantu Tribes of South Africa,” likewise combine fact and fantasy. Valuable as field photographs, they also promote a vision of black South Africans as actors in an ethnographic theater, living in a perpetual yesterday.

But as this show suggests, theater became an important element in both apartheid-era politics and photography, as in pictures of the Women’s Defense of the Constitution league, known as the Black Sash, in the mid 1950s. A coalition of white women opposed to apartheid, its members staged choreographed protests, standing, impeccably dressed, in silent formation, all wearing identical black sashes over one shoulder.

This is how they appear, holding placards on the steps of Johannesburg City Hall, in an enlarged 1956 photo dominating the first floor. They make an unforgettable sight. And while their performance — that’s what it is — may have been directed toward a street audience, it was also calculatedly photogenic.

At the time the Black Sash was conceived, organized anti-apartheid activity was based on principles of Gandhian nonviolence. This was not to last. In 1960, at a demonstration against the law requiring blacks to carry identifying passbooks, police killed 69 unarmed black protesters in the township of Sharpeville, 30 miles south of Johannesburg. Everything changed.

Nelson Mandela, already a veteran activist, proposed a move to armed struggle. Popular violence erupted. In the dramaturgy of resistance the raised fist became the new symbol of black purpose and solidarity. And photography became the primary means of spreading that gesture wide.

In 1976, in Soweto, a black township that is now part of Johannesburg, police opened fire on high school students protesting the enforced use of Afrikaans in their classes. Photographers were there.

One of them, Sam Nzima, took a picture of the first person killed, 13-year-old Hector Pieterson, cradled in the arms of a fellow student. The picture appeared in print the next day, quickly spreading throughout South Africa and beyond it and inflaming anti-apartheid sentiment around the world.

Another photographer, Peter Magubane, was also at the protest, as he had been at countless others since the 1950s. His picture of the mass funeral following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 had immense impact at the time; his coverage of the Soweto uprising virtually defined the pictorial genre that came to be called struggle photography.

In general the show refrains from designating saints and sinners in the stories it tells. But if there’s a single photographer-hero, Mr. Magubane is it. Time and again he put himself in the line of fire and came away with history. The South African government retaliated. In 1969 he was arrested, placed in solitary for 18 months and banned from using a camera for five years. Other arrests and harassments followed.

Not all his images, though, are of combat. From 1960 comes a shot of a young black couple dancing in a Johannesburg nightclub, and one of a tense Miss South Africa, also black, minutes before she won her title. Such pictures represent the flip side of struggle photography, and the show makes a point of emphasizing them — demonstrating that even in conditions of political duress, modern, cosmopolitan black urban life flourished. It was documented in popular magazines like Drum, where, in the 1950s, Mr. Magubane and other great photojournalists — Ernest Cole, Bob Gosani and the German-born Jürgen Schadeberg — got their start.

According to Mr. Enwezor and Mr. Bester, however, not all the work in the show qualifies as photojournalism. They cite two other genres. In one, which they call engaged photography, political content is kept oblique, even inaccessible, until the contextual meaning of the image is revealed.

A 1993 shot, by the celebrated artist David Goldblatt, of a leafy bush by the side of a road could be of any bush anywhere, until you read the caption and learn that you’re looking at a remnant, preserved in a botanical garden in Cape Town, of a bramble hedge planted in 1660 by South Africa’s first Dutch settlers specifically to separate themselves from the indigenous population.

Social documentary forms the next category, exemplified by work produced, beginning in the 1980s, by the multiracial collective agency Afrapix. Afrapix photographers — among them Lesley Lawson, Chris Ledochowski, Santu Mofokeng, Guy Tillim and Paul Weinberg — tended to concentrate on politically driven series of images rather than going after single, emotionally punchy, frontline news shots.

Afrapix expanded in the bloody years leading up to the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990. Two years later it dissolved, partly as result of internal conflict but also because financing for anti-apartheid initiatives decreased.

Technically the struggle was over. With Mr. Mandela’s election as president on the horizon, optimism, not criticism, was the preferred tone of the day.

If this show had been done 20 years ago, it might have ended on an upbeat note. But enough time has passed for realism, if not quite disillusionment, to set in. Significantly Mr. Mandela’s 1994 election passes without fanfare; just a few images in a small gallery. Within the densely layered, winding panorama the curators have laid out, it’s just another event in the story of a country still suffering the long-term effects of institutionalized racism.

Poverty is rife. Class privilege thrives. Conflict, interracial and black-on-black, simmers, flaring up hideously last month when the police killed striking workers at a platinum mine some 70 miles away from Johannesburg.

What’s left for photography at present, it seems, are backward looks and disappointments. At least that’s what the show’s younger photographers, Sabelo Mlangeni and Thabiso Sekgala, both born in the 1980s, focus on. Mr. Mlangeni shoots half-empty cities and their listless, probably jobless residents. Mr. Sekgala turns his eye on crumbling homelands, apartheid-created settlements meant to confine and isolate blacks. In the past they were places to escape from; in a rootless present they’re viewed with nostalgia. Over all, these are disheartening visions of everyday life.

They are part, however, of a far-from-everyday exhibition. It’s not a smooth and easy read. Its direction can be confusing; some of its images are underexplained, some of its themes are overwritten. But the material brought together is rich, its arrangements provocative and its ideas morally probing. In short, it’s really something to see, and I urge you to.

 

source: The New York Times

25.09.2012 | por herminiobovino | África do Sul, apartheid, fotografia, fotojornalismo

Grande Reportagem "A Herança de Mandela" na RTP1 e RTP África

No próximo dia 14, pelas 21h00 (logo a seguir ao telejornal, é transmitida em simultâneo na RTP1 e na RTPÁfrica uma grande reportagem dedicada à herança humanitária de Nelson Mandela. Um trabalho inserido no programa semanal da RTP1 “Linha da Frente”.

A HERANÇA DE MANDELA  é assinada pelo jornalista e escritor António Mateus, autor do livro  MANDELA - A construção de um Homem  (Oficina do Livro) e que acompanhou Nelson Mandela durante uma década enquanto correspondente estrangeiro destacado na África do Sul.

SINOPSE:
Um testemunho de vida sobre alguém que se tornou um dos símbolos mundiais do último século  e que utilizou o exemplo da descolonização portuguesa para transformar um país à beira da guerra civil em símbolo de reconciliação e tolerância entre quem pensa diferente.
A HERANÇA DE MANDELA relata a forma como Madiba (nome como é conhecido afectuosamente pelos mais próximos) se transformou primeiro a si próprio, como ser humano, para tirar depois o melhor de todos à sua volta.
Pela primeira vez, uma equipa de reportagem filmou a última prisão de Mandela (Victor Verster, que funciona até hoje como cadeia de alta segurança, alojando mais de dois mil sentenciados.
Inclui ainda, entre outras, entrevistas com Ahmed Kathrada (o melhor amigo de Mandela ainda vivo e seu companheiro de prisão em Robben Island), de Albie Sachs (juiz vítima de atentado), Roelof Meyer (negociador-chefe do último governo branco) e Graça Machel (sua mulher).
Com imagem de Manuel dos Santos e edição de Pedro Pessoa, uma reportagem assinada por António Mateus e que é resultado de três anos de investigação documental e de registos de som, fotografia e vídeo.

07.12.2011 | por joanapires | África do Sul, Mandela

Tumi and the volume - La Tête Savante

The official music video for the first track on Tumi and the volume’s third album, Pick A Dream. Directed by Tiago Correia-Paulo and Khalid Shamis. Illustrations by Hyppolite and taken from the Pick A Dream booklet.

05.12.2011 | por franciscabagulho | África do Sul, música, Tumi and the volume

África do Sul - hoje

Fellow South Africans, Please spread the “Black Tuesday” message by the National Press Club. We call on South Africans to wear black on Tuesday to protest at the Protection of Information Bill. This is when the National Assembly will be voting on the controversial bill. SANEF is mobilizing editors to be in Parliament. We will all be wearing black. Various organizations including Shout have come out in support of the call to wear black. We have had thousands of messages of support today. Let’s make our voices heard. We also call on newspapers to blank/black out some reports on Tuesday to highlight the dangers of the bill. Electronic media should bleep some reports and interviews. We welcome confirmation that some media houses will be doing this. The Press Club also supports pickets which are being planned by the Right2Know campaign. Let’s all stand up and make a difference. Say NO to censorship. Say YES to free speech and media freedom.

22.11.2011 | por martamestre | África do Sul, Black Tuesday

Oportunidade para ver 'O Cristo Negro', na Cidade do Cabo

Em homenagem ao artista e activista político Ronald Harrison, a Iziko National Gallery na Cidade do Cabo apresenta desde o dia 2 de Julho a polémica pintura “O Cristo Negro” (The Black Christ) realizada em 1962, e que foi banida pelo governo do “apartheid” em África do Sul.

A pintura é uma re-interpretação da crucificação de Jesus de Nazaré. No trabalho de Harrison, a figura de Cristo é representado como Chefe Albert Luthuli, então presidente do Congresso Nacional Africano, e nomeado para o Prémio Nobel da Paz (1960). Os soldados romanos para o direito de Luthuli são retratados como o ex-primeiro-ministro apartheid Hendrik Verwoerd e Ministro do Parlamento Balthazar Johannes Vorster.
“O Cristo Negro” (The Black Christ) pertence desde 1997 às colecções dos museus Iziko.


10.07.2011 | por martamestre | África do Sul, Cidade do Cabo, Ronald Harrison, The Black Christ

O caçador de sombras, Santu Mofokeng

Próximo dia 17 de junho as 18h,
Angela Ferreira, artista, Thierry Hoquet, filósofo, Griselda Pollock, historiadora e crítica de arte, e Santu Mofokeng, artista, participam no colóquio “Art, histoire, politique : interactions et réflexions contemporaines” no Jeu de Paume (Paris).
Esta programação surge no âmbito da exposição “Chasseur d’ombres” do sul-africano Santu Mofokeng, que está patente até ao dia 25 de Setembro de 2011.

“Avec un choix de plus de 200 images (photographies et diaporamas), des textes et des documents, cette rétrospective consacrée à Santu Mofokeng propose, pour la première fois en Europe, une sélection sans précédent des essais photographiques qu’il a réalisés ces trente dernières années.
Les essais de Mofokeng (dont certains, toujours en cours, l’occupent depuis de nombreuses années) donnent à voir successivement le Soweto de sa jeunesse, ses études sur la vie quotidienne dans les fermes et dans les townships – notamment celles sur les représentations de soi et les histoires familiales des Noirs d’Afrique du Sud –, des images plus récentes consécutives à ses recherches sur les rituels religieux, enfin des paysages, parmi lesquels le projet Radiant Landscapes, spécialement réalisé pour cette exposition.”

15.06.2011 | por martamestre | África do Sul, Fotografia Africana, Santu Mofokeng

Wondering in the Afropolis

Special Tour with Gabi Ngcobo and Christiane König

A conversation between curator and director of the Centre for Historical Re-enactment, Johannesburg, South Africa and film and media scholar Christiane König about and in the exhibition Afropolis (Iwalewa-Haus).

Gabi Ngcobo is a Johannesburg based curator. Projects include collaborative and individual projects: Second to None at the South African National Gallery, Olvida quen soy/ Erase me from who I am at CAAM, Canary Islands, 2006, Titled/Untitled, a curatorial collaboration with Gugulective collective and Scratching the Surface Vol.1 at the AVA Gallery, Cape Town. In 2010 Ngcobo co-curated rope-a-dope: to win a losing war at Cabinet, New York, Second Coming, a curatorial collaboration at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and Just How Cold Was It? At ‘6-8 Months’ project space, New York City.  She recently co-founded the “Center for Historical Reenactments” (CHR) an independent platform based in Johannesburg. At CHR she curated “PASS-AGES: references & footnotes” and an ongoing project titled Xenoglossia, a research project.

Christiane König, Ph.D., is assistent professor at the Anglo-American Institute, History Department, Cologne University. Her main fields of interest are Film Theory and History, Media Theory and Archaeology, digital cultures, biological and informational Cybernetics, Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Gender and Queer Studies.

See more on www.christianekoenig.de

 

Mo 06 May 2011, 6pm

Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Germany

02.06.2011 | por nadinesiegert | África do Sul, afropolis, curator, exhibition, Gabi Ncgobo

"Asinamali" by Tumi and The Volume

from the Album “Pick a Dream”

20.05.2011 | por franciscabagulho | África do Sul, hip hop

Mine - Films and Videos of South-African artists

10.02.2011 - 06.03.2011

Iwalewa-Haus, Bayreuth (Germany)


Die Ausstellung „Mine” zeigt Filme und Videos von KünstlerInnenaus Südafrika. Der Titel spielt sowohl auf den Untertagebau in den südafrikanischen Minen an, als auch auf das „Abtragen“ verschiedener Schichten und Facetten des eigenen „Selbst“.

Die ausgewählten Arbeiten zeigen eine große Bandbreite an Themen und künstlerischen Strategien – allen gemeinsam ist jedoch eine Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Subjektivität. Zudem sind die KünstlerInnen in ihren Arbeiten stets präsent, als Person, Schauspieler, Modell, Beobachter, Interviewer oder Anstifter.

„Mine“ sondiert verschiedene Möglichkeiten der Selbstpositionierung vor dem Hintergrund gesellschaftlicher Verwerfungen (nicht nur) im südlichen Afrika. Die beteiligten KünstlerInnen sind:

Bridget Baker, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Doris Bloom, Jaques Coetzer, Teboho Edkins, Simon Gush, Dorothee Kreutzfelt, William Kentridge, Donna Kukama, Michael McCarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi, Cedric Nunn, Robin Rhode, Berni Searle, Lerato Shadi, Penny Siopis, Gregg Smith, Johan Thom und Minette Vari.

Kuration: Abrie Furie

Vernissage: Donnerstag 10. Februar 2011, 19 Uhr



08.02.2011 | por nadinesiegert | África do Sul, arte contemporânea, video

“As Áfricas de Pancho Guedes” - abertura dia 17 de Dezembro, Lisboa

São cerca de 500 obras da colecção de arte africana do grande arquitecto português Amâncio (Pancho) Guedes, em exposição no Mercado de Santa Clara, em Lisboa!

As chamadas artes plásticas, a arte popular e o artesanato, os objectos tradicionais com destino ritual ou de uso quotidiano coexistem na colecção de Pancho Guedes, reunida ao longo de uma intensa vida profissional passada em Moçambique e na África do Sul.

Organizada pela Câmara Municipal de Lisboa/Gabinete Lisboa Encruzilhada de Mundos e comissariada por Alexandre Pomar e Rui Mateus Pereira.

29.11.2010 | por martamestre | África do Sul, arte moçambicana, arte popular, artesanato, Colecção Pancho Guedes

Ruy Duarte de Carvalho

a tristeza é imensa com a morte do nosso grande amigo. a ele devemos o início do Buala, pensado na viagem que fizemos o ano passado pela Africa do Sul.

 

podem ler aqui uma pequena descrição de alguns momentos.

vinburg, áfrica do sul, setembro 2009vinburg, áfrica do sul, setembro 2009

 

o contador relutente, perfil de Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, escrito por José Vegar em 2001

12.08.2010 | por martalanca | África do Sul, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho