EXHIBITIONS CURATED BY ELFRIEDE DREYER

 

9 February - 9 July 2011

 

Fried Contemporary Art Gallery & Studio

Like life, artistic activity is an entity of which its appearances, structures, models and purposes advance in relation to historical time, period and social context. The curator problematises these phenomena and present them conceptually and aesthetically in a dedicated space in order to produce and generate comment there upon. French curator and philosopher Nicholas Bourriaud (1998) phrases this process as one where artists as postmodernists position  their practice in modernity, accompanied by a series of modifications in a space whose modernity was inherited.

 

The curated series of exhibitions, Designs, entails an exploration of the way we as human beings and as South Africans live and ‘design’ our lives from within societies, as well as of how we operate in time, history and contexts. As in previous curated projects, the concept for the exhibitions was grounded in my ongoing academic research on discourses in world making and utopia construction, as well as in the generative practices of curatorship. The curatorial conception of the exhibitions was positioned in the present moment in time in Africa - specifically South Africa, described by art theorists as a time when new African art histories are being produced, labelled 'post-Africanism' or 'African modernity'. In Africa new patterns of living have been induced by the evolution of the globalising world, which have led to the institution of cosmopolitan cultures and nomadic lifestyles, induced by new-age communication technologies. Bourriaud (1998) quotes Louis  Althusser as philosophising that one always catches the world's train on the move, in support of his statement that "the artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him[/her] ... and catches the world on the move: he[/she] is a tenant of culture, to borrow Michel de Certeau's expression." Similarly, the curatorial view in Designs is that postmodern artworks reflect designs on the  lives and times lived - including designs on our relationship with the natural world, of ourselves and others - and create idiosyncratic forms and patterns that open up a space for better understanding ourselves, our culture and the world around us.

 

The exhibitions were curated as a series of four exhibitions covering a period of four months from 9 February to 28 May 2011. The individual titles of the four exhibitions are Designs of time, Designs of living, Designs of self and Designs of nature. The exhibitions comprised the work of 19 artists and 107 artworks and each exhibition was accompanied by a digital catalogue and a curatorial essay. A digital catalogue and an educational programme accompanied the exhibition, consisting of several walkabouts provided  to schools, students and the public in general. My affiliation with the University of Pretoria is stated in the catalogue. The Designs exhibitions have proven to have served a strong educational function in that over the period of four months hordes of students and learners from over Pretoria flocked to the exhibitions, and will be exhibited at KKNK 2012.