DÁ FALA

Dineo Seshee Bopape, Kudzanai Chiurai, Georgina Gratrix, Andrew Gilbert, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Gerald Machona, Gerhard Marx, Meleko Mokgosi, Athi-Patra Ruga.   In 1968 the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah pub­lished a brutal and vis­ceral novel of (then) con­tem­po­rary, post-Inde­pen­dent Ghana, titled “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born”. Armah recounts an unnamed man’s strug­gle in a soci­ety rotten to the core, a result of the after­math of colo­nial­ism, and the fail­ures of the new regime. A dream deferred…

The exhi­bi­tion The Beautyful Ones takes as its start­ing point Armah’s utopian lament for a better Africa, and the ongo­ing prob­lem­at­ics of the rep­re­senta­tion of the con­ti­nent, espe­cially in the pop­u­lar Euro­pean imag­ina­tion. Africa is often per­ceived as a mono­lithic entity, whilst the complexity of its mul­ti­ple real­i­ties, histo­ries, narra­tives and voices are often lost.

For The Beautyful Ones, South African curator Storm Janse van Rensburg has brought together nine young interna­tional artists: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Kudzanai Chiu­rai, Georgina Gra­trix, Andrew Gilbert, Kilu­anji Kia Henda, Ger­ald Machona, Ger­hard Marx, Meleko Mokgosi and Athi-Patri Ruga. Orig­inat­ing from Angola, Botswana, Scot­land, South Africa and Zimbabwe, they are now oper­at­ing, working and liv­ing between many places, but with a common thread link­ing them and aspects of their practice to South­ern Africa. Exemplary of a gen­er­a­tion of con­tem­po­rary artists that are mobile, and whose practices resists easy clas­sifica­tion, the exhi­bi­tion includes a selec­tion of works that connects to the artists’ social and polit­ical real­i­ties, entan­gled with their per­sonal lived expe­r­i­ences.

On the one hand, the exhi­bi­tion might sug­gest that these are ‘The Beautyful Ones’ yearned for by Armah, whilst on the other hand some artists per­haps pre­sents ideas and real­i­ties that ques­tions, if indeed, the dream is not deferred once again.

The Beautyful Ones
An exhibition curated by Storm Janse van Rensburg
20 April – 6 July 2013, Berlin
Opening reception:
Friday, 19 April, 18.00 – 21.00
 

'Mutilado' by Bofa da CaraClaudia Cristovao, Nastio Mosquito
GhostBusters I [from nightmare to memory]
A Project by SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and Iwalewa -Haus Bayreuth

SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
Richardstraße 43/44
12055 Berlin, Germany

The exhibition project GhostBusters [from nightmare to memory] features the work of two outstanding young artists: Claudia Cristovão and Nástio Mosquito. The projects’ concept derives from the metaphor of Africa as a phantom in the post-colonial, post-socialist and post-war mind, explored and imagined by the artists in very different ways. The artworks (video-work, installation and photography) deal with imagination as aesthetic practice, approaching different layers of memory and (imagined) history. One of the leading ideas is the exploration of (absent) memories in the cultural archive, of visual tropes in the wasteland of the bizarre and the uncanny.

Nástio Mosquito and Claudia Cristovão have both been born in Angola in the 1970s. While Claudia Cristovão later moved to Portugal and the Netherlands, Nástio Mosquito returned to live and work in Angola after some years abroad. Both artists explore the project theme in individual but complementary ways. The question of origin and belonging is one of their common topics, widening the imagination of the phantom Africa. The question of a possible future – also as artist in and from Africa – is also questioned alongside the project.

The project GhostBusters [from nightmare to memory] starts in September 2011 in Berlin at SAVVY Contemporary and continues in April 2012 with GhostBusters II [from memory to vision] at Iwalewa-Haus in Bayreuth. Both artists stay in Berlin and Bayreuth for short-term residencies to be able to develop a relationship to the exhibition-spaces as well as the cities. Time and space are given to explore the phantoms within the respective urban-scape of the cities, thus finding a way to find tracks and traces of dreams and nightmares in both imaginary and real space. The real and the mental space work as analogon within the whole project. Especially the peripheries of both spaces with their forgotten and obscure places are considered. The artist’s exercises of re-membering thus unlock and unpack the (inner) marginal landscapes.