Artists Proof Studio, left to right: Motsamai Thabane, Sara-Aimee Verity, Charles Thabiso Kholobeng
Photo: David Southwood
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William Kentridge. Photo: Marc Shoul
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William Kentridge, untitled, drawing for „Black Box/Chambre Noire“, 2005. Photo: John Hodgkiss. Deutsche Guggenheim. © William Kentridge
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Studio Kentridge
Photo: David Southwood © William Kentridge/ Courtesy Goodman Gallery Cape Town
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Moshekwa Langa in Newton, Johannesburg
Photo: David Southwood
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Moshekwa Langa, Stage, 1997-2009, Installation shot, 53. Venice Biennial
Photo: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra
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David Koloane, Johannesburg 2013
Photo: David Southwood
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David Koloane, Ordinary People II, 2004. Deutsche Bank Collection. Courtesy David Koloane
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Studio David Koloane
© David Koloane, photo: David Southwood
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Maboneng Precinct
Photo: David Southwood
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Kemang Wa Lehulere, Some Deleted Scenes, 2012, Performance
© Kemang Wa Lehulere. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/ Johannesburg
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Kemang Wa Lehulere, Economy of Bodily Movements (Sleep is for the Gifted), 2013, Deutsche Bank Collection © Kemang Wa Lehulere
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Kemang Wa Lehulere, detail from 'Remembering the Future of a Hole as a Verb 1', (Installation/Performance at Kwazulu Natal Society of Arts, Durban, 2010)
Courtesy: the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery
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Simon Gush, Parking Gallery
Photo: David Southwood
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Central part of Johannesburg: Braamfontein
Photo: David Southwood
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As a young man growing up in 1970s’ and 1980s’ Johannesburg, William Kentridge
explored many career possibilities: he participated in the city’s
vibrant theater scene, jobbed in the commercial film industry, worked
on producing drawings and prints for exhibitions, and even tried his
hand at editorial cartooning. Perplexed by the range of his pursuits,
friends jokingly asked when he planned to commit to a single medium. It
happened in his early thirties, says Kentridge, when his wife fell
pregnant with the first child. Suddenly cast in the role of provider,
Kentridge dedicated himself to making art. Drawing on his interest in Russian Constructivism and German Expressionism,
he patiently drew, erased, and then redrew countless charcoal studies
for a stop-animation film that described the fictional lives of two Johannesburg
residents, businessman Soho Eckstein and artist Felix Teitlebaum. When
he was done he titled the finished work, a watershed moment in his
career, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989).
CIRCA Gallery in partnership
with Deutsche BankThe gallery
is concerned with exhibiting important contemporary works of art.
Musical events and lectures also form part of the activities which take
place within its curved walls. The CIRCA building is recognised as one
of Johannesburg’s outstanding architectural landmarks of the North
Western corner of Rosebank.
This area has become South Africa’s preeminent hub for the visual arts.
Born out of a love for Johannesburg, the gallery’s sculptural
architecture is a celebration of art, architecture and living in this
city.
Kentridge
(58) continues to live and work in Johannesburg, a sprawling, agitated
city of 4.5 million residents founded in 1886 after the discovery of
gold. He keeps two studios: one is at Arts on Main, a cultural precinct
in the central city, while his more intimate drawing studio is at his
Houghton home, a few blocks from Nelson Mandela’s
former home —Kentridge’s father, a lawyer, represented Mandela in the
1960s. Kentridge has repeatedly depicted Johannesburg in his work, most
recently in his newest film, Other Faces (2011).
Kentridge is not alone in routinely making Johannesburg a key subject of his art. In June of this year, la maison rouge, a Paris-based private art foundation and museum, hosted My Joburg,
a city-themed group exhibition focusing on Johannesburg. Spanning four
generations of mostly South African artists and encompassing a wide
variety of media—from small woodcarvings, photographs and eccentric
hand-drawn maps to large sculptural installations and Kentridge's new
film—the exhibition offered the most comprehensive survey yet of
Johannesburg as both a locale for art-making and source of artistic
inspiration.
Some fifty artists were included in My Joburg, among them Moshekwa Langa (38), whose 1995 debut exhibition at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg in many ways heralded the improvised and expressionistic sculptural practice of Dineo Seshee Bopape and Nicholas Hlobo,
both important young Johannesburg artists. Dividing his time between
Amsterdam and Johannesburg, Langa makes work with materials at his
immediate disposal. His layered and cryptic assemblages present a
density of references and meanings that deny easy decoding. His work is
a valuable counterpoint to the considered documentary photography of David Goldblatt,
for instance. Goldblatt (82) has emerged as Johannesburg’s key visual
archivist. “For me Joburg is like an itch,” says Goldblatt of his
unstinting interest in photographing his home city. “Every now and then
I have to scratch it. It comes and goes in different parts of the body
so I scratch here, I scratch there, but seldom in the same place
twice.”
David Koloane, the influential draftsman, printmaker,
and painter who in 1977 co-founded the now defunct Federated Union of
Black Artists (FUBA) Gallery, also photographs Johannesburg, albeit to
different ends. Born in Johannesburg in 1938, Koloane’s jagged and
expressionistic works, many depicting Johannesburg, are partly inspired
by his own photographs. Well known for his recurring use of cityscapes
and stray dogs (the latter a potent symbol of the role of crime,
violence and missing security in the narrative of city life), his work
possesses a high degree of subtlety that owes to his consistent use of
metaphor and abstraction as a way to address the psychological effects
of apartheid on especially the urban poor. Mentored by Bill Ainslie, founder and director of the Johannesburg Art Foundation,
where Kentridge also studied, Koloane early on rejected the demands of
a parochial white art market on black artists. Rather than produce
formally naïve pictures of “carefree,” “happy,” and “musical” black
subjects, Koloane worked in an abstracted manner, allowing gestural
mark-making as much agency in his work as figural description, which
remains a constant in his practice.
Koloane’s Fordsburg studio is a short walk from the Artist Proof Studios
(APS) in Newtown. Like Kentridge, Koloane is a regular at this
community- based print shop, founded in 1991. Two years ago he
contributed a lithograph to a portfolio released by APS at the Joburg Art Fair,
an important marketplace founded in 2008. At this year’s fair APS
exhibited a striking soft-ground etching by young printmaker Ziyanda
Majozi. The print depicted her friend, the lesbian rights activist and
photographer Zanele Muholi, whose portrait archive of black lesbians shown at documenta 13 generated significant attention.
Born in Durban but long a resident of Johannesburg, Muholi (41) learned the basics of photography at the Market Photo Workshop.
Founded in 1989 by Goldblatt, and based very near APS, the aim of this
teaching institution is simple: to make photography accessible to a
broader demographic than apartheid-era South Africa once allowed. Aside
from Muholi, key graduates of this photography school include Jodi Bieber, whose iconic portrait of Bibi Aisha,
a young Afghan woman mutilated by her husband during Taliban rule, was
featured on the cover of “Time” magazine in August 2010. Despite the
popular uptake of photography by a younger generation, it may be
surprising to learn that Johannesburg has no commercial gallery devoted
solely to the medium. The city’s patrician elites—there are 23,400
millionaires in Johannesburg, more than Cairo (12,300) and Lagos
(9,800) combined—still mostly hanker after paintings depicting empty
landscapes and tribal cliché.
Frustrated by the small and
conservative local art market, young artists emerging out of the city’s
dance studios, art schools, and drama departments are variously
working—either alone, but more often than not in collaboration—on
thematically charged site-specific performances. Kemang Wa Lehulere
(29) is emerging as one of the key artists among this new generation of
South African artists. Prolific both in his personal capacity and as a
collaborator, Lehulere’s personal practice encompasses drawing, video,
performance, and sculptural installation; he uses these media to
explore the gaps between biographical narrative and collective history,
highlighting the contradictions that occur in the confrontation between
amnesia and archive. His recent work addresses notions of erasure
through performative gestures that envision the body simultaneously as
both an archive in the process of disintegration and a site of writing
and performing of future narratives.
Like Kentridge, Lehulere’s
art career was prefaced by a stint jobbing as an actor. As an
adolescent growing up in Cape Town, Lehulere appeared in numerous small
roles on television. However, his ambitions as a mature actor were
frustrated when he was told that his mixed-race identity prevented him
from credibly playing a black actor. So he began to draw, write
scripts, work on collaborative projects with Cape Town friends, as well
as orchestrate live art performances. In 2008, Lehulere decided to
enroll in fine art studies at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg (where Kentridge studied politics and African history in
the 1970s). While he regrets the decision to study—“I feel like it took
a lot out of me, and I didn’t receive much”—he is less ambivalent about
his decision to move to Johannesburg. “The city is crazy and its energy
is addictive,” says Lehulere, whose wall-sized drawings earned him the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in June. Works by Lehulere and Koloane will be part of The Circle Walked Casually, an exhibition curated by Victoria Noorthoorn at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle.
Although
now better known for his drawing installations, which combine
figurative and abstract compositions with fragments of text (“When the
walls fall, so do the writings on them,” read a line of text on the
drawing he created for “My Joburg”), Lehulere was ambivalent about
exhibiting his early drawings. Originally conceived as storyboards for
his scripts for unrealized film works, he credits Johannesburg curator Gabi Ngcobo,
a long-time collaborator he met in Cape Town, with shifting his
attitude. One evening, while visiting the artist, Ngcobo saw some of
his drawings on the floor. She asked if she could put them on a show.
“Initially I was skeptical because I didn’t have much confidence in
them,” Lehulere told curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist last year. When he saw
them up on a gallery wall, his sense of their potential shifted.
While living in Cape Town, Lehulere and Ngcobo were both members of Gugulective, an artist-led group; when they moved to Johannesburg, they continued to work collaboratively under the banner of the Center for Historical Reenactments. A mobile platform for exhibition making and engagement founded by Ngcobo, its members include Donna Kukama,
a multimedia artist working in performance, video, text, and sound
installation. In 2011, Lehulere and Ngcobo oversaw a multi-form event
commemorating Gito Baloi,
the Mozambican-born musician murdered at a traffic intersection in
2004. The event included the production of a large mural commemorating
Baloi’s life, a performance by Lehulere, and a T-shirt printing
workshop overseen by the Keleketla! Library.
Founded
in 2008, this independent library and media arts project is situated in
a former military bartracks on the eastern edge of the old CBD, in
Doornfontein, long a site of musical and cultural experiment. As with
the nearby Parking Gallery, a self-described “malleable” artist-run project space founded by Simon Gush,
an artist with a deep interest in the city’s labor movements, the
library offers a muchneeded recreational space in a densely inhabited
part of the city with no municipal library. “One element that emerged
from the beginning was to combine all the founders’ previous
experiences, collectively as DJs, writers, designers, and emcees, with
that of library managers,” says Rangoato Hlasane,
a cofounder of Keleketla! Library. Five years on and the library is a
site of imaginative resistance in a city marked by unlovely commercial
sprawl.
While Johannesburg has consistently been dismissed as ugly—novelist Olive Schreiner described it as “hell,” Winston Churchill thought it “Monte Carlo superimposed on Sodom and Gomorrah,” and journalist Lewis Nkosi
likened it to a barren desert— the city inspires devotion and rapture
by its artist inhabitants. “I am sometimes so relieved when I am away,”
admits Kentridge, “but it is also necessary to get back. Everybody who
lives here has a strong love-hate relationship with the city. There are
some parts that are intolerable and some parts that are fantastic.” It
is the awkward balancing of these two poles that lends the art coming
out of contemporary Johannesburg its remarkable urgency and momentum.
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