Cities in transition at Fried Contemporary Art Gallery & Studio

CITIES IN TRANSITION

29 July - 22 August 2010

Titus Matiyane ^. Eric Duplan ^. Lucas Thobejane

Review by Fransi Philips on the exhibition

This exhibition of recent work of Titus Matiyane, Eric Duplan and Lucas Thobejane reflects on South African cities in transition and provide a pertinent picture of culture in the making and the state of the world, its ideologies and power structures. As the celebrated author, JG Ballard (2001:33), remarked, cities are ‘the scar tissue of history’ and carry within and on them the traces of historical, ideological and world changes. Although visually on the outside cities seem like impersonal mounds of concrete, tar and technology, they are the repositories of the makings and doings of human beings and have been created in the image of humankind - as such becoming anthropomorphic spaces.

In South Africa inner city areas and the rural areas surrounding cities reflect the harsh realities of everyday life as well as the processes of globalisation and internationalisation, evident in conditions of people-on-the-move, homelessness, violence and even xenophobia. Very different in style an approach, the artworks on exhibition “map” and depict the contemporary city in transition. Yet, in a certain sense such mapping is always provisional and subjective, since cities and especially third-world spaces have become compounds of diverse cultures, experiences, nationalities and economies, and reflect cultures that are continuously changing. Donald (in Westwood and Williams 1997:181) goes so far as to argue that the city ‘is a place that is everywhere and nowhere, a place you cannot get to from here. Sooner or later … the effort of mapping is interrupted by an encounter with the unmappable.’

Having been territorialised under the apartheid regime of segregation and living in Attridgeville just outside Pretoria, Titus Matiyane embarks on a kind of symbolic remapping of these histories in his panoramas of the cities of world. In his rendering of panoramas of cities and the surrounding rural areas from a bird's-eye view, Matiyane imaginatively reworks and represent commercially available tourist and Google maps. In the map on exhibition, Panorama of Limpopo province with soccer stadiums (2010), the landscape is flattened out into a subjective city picturesque adorned with its most famous markers as well as the soccer stadiums that featured so prominently in the recent Fifa World Cup events.

Notions of the imaginary, myth and memory have always been central to the articulation of the psychospace of the city, just as the sociological imagination is continually recast in the changing realm of new technologies which has fundamentally altered the ontology of the city as space of travel, mobility and transitivity. Eric Duplan’s mapping of the city becomes a form of individualist symbolic language that in abstract way relates to journey, discovery and road, always probing deeper and peeling off and stripping the layers of the city. His work deals with a kind of posturban condition where life in the city is a restless, disrupting state of being in-between places or liminality.

Lucas Thobejane’s work speaks about contemporary conditions of living in small towns and villages. His hybrid creatures - half-man, half-animal - are wretched, creolised players in the survival game where third-world necessities such as clean water and work intermingle with the imposing presence of global technologies and ideologies.

Sources quoted

Ballard, J G. 2001. Welcome to the virtual city, in Urban myth. Tate, The art magazine 24 (Spring):33.

Westwood, S and Williams, J (eds). 1997. Imagining cities: scripts, signs, memory. London/New York: Routledge.