15 July to 5 August 2006

Deep in the heart of winter

An exhibition of mixed-media works, paintings, collages, digital prints, etching, video projections, a short film, sculpture and installations

of

award-winning

South African artists

opens on 15 July at 18h30

Bongi Bengu

Last year I participated in  an International Artist's Workshop in Zambia, in Chaminuka Game Reserve. This was a particularly inspiring experience and for the I found myself using natural materials from the game reserve-leaves and bark to create conceptual landscapes.

This experience was reinforced by

my recent participation in the Workshop in Ngong forest just outside Nairobi in Kenya in March this year.

These series of works represent both decay and renewal and echo my own experiences of homecoming and exile.

Leora Farber: Nemesis II

Made in collaboration with the Johannesburg-based fashion design team Strangelove (Ziemek Pater and Carlo Gibson), Nemesis II comprises 15 photographic panels, dye-cut to resemble a three-way dressing table mirror. Using my body

as a site of intervention, I, as seamstress, appear to be ‘reflected’ in the panels, engaged in the seemingly ‘ordinary’ domestic task of stitching. Clothed in Strangelove’s flesh-coloured leather corset and full-length skirt, the images refer to the Victorian era, in which needlework was considered a skill that virtuous and diligent young ‘ladies’ should possess. The work proposes an analogy between the kinds of repressive values

the Victorian woman was subject to and contemporary Western conventions of feminine beauty. The seamstress stitches not a sampler, but her flesh, which approximates a garment in

the final stages of completion. Her skin, as an external fabric, is being crafted in ways that mirror Western fabrications of 'femininity'. The exaggerated scale of each panel amplifies the intimacy of the act. The repetition and

magnification of the poised needle in each panel is intended to convey a sense of obsessive repetition. Thus, despite her diligent and virtuous quest for 'seamless' physical perfection, the protagonists’ conception of beauty remains simply an ideal.

Wendy Morris:

T a s t e  t h e  W o r l d

 Taste the World is a short drawn film that explores tourism as a form of neo-colonialism.

In structure the film is a parody of the pastoral convention. This literary and secular form of travel describes a journey from a familiar place (home or court), to the ‘wilderness’ (a rural, simpler, primeval setting) and the return home, the traveller transformed by his/her experience. The familiar place in the film is the ‘West’, with its self-certainties of it’s own ‘modernity’, the ‘wilderness’ is that projected onto a ‘pre-modern’ ‘Third World’. The title of the film is taken from a tourist brochure in which European travellers are exhorted to 'taste the world'. The subtext of the advertisement is that the world is out there for 'you' - for the 'you' of the discerning connoisseur, the 'you' of the Eurostacrat with excess leisure-time.  This ‘Third World’ is presented as a borderless consumer domain of unlimited choice: culinary, sexual, economic, cultural. 

Carine Zaayman: Prints and video projection

The works constitute an exploration of Lady Anne Barnard’s life in the Cape Colony as wife of the first British Colonial Secretary, 1797 to 1802. During this period, she spent her time between her official residence at the Castle of Good Hope, and Paradise, an outpost of the VOC, situated on the Eastern slopes of Table Mountain. Throughout her time at the Cape, Lady Anne kept a journal and wrote many letters, especially to the British Secretary of War, Henry Dundas, with whom she maintained a close friendship until his death. Lady Anne is also generally held to be the first white woman to have climbed Table Mountain (via a route approximating the present day Platteklip Gorge trail), in her husband’s pants, and with an entourage of slaves.

As historical figure, Lady Anne embodies a number of contradictions, at once liberal (in view of her colonial context) and a discriminatory slave owner, a pioneer and a socialite. It is this ambiguity that interests me, especially as a kind of cultural ancestor, whose place in history is, like my own, highly contestable.