Kudzanai Chiurai’s practice visualises history and its tendency for repetition. The cyclical nature of history is as much a subject as Colonial and Post-Colonial southern Africa and its governance. He shows us history outside of the limitations of linearity and its related belief of progression or digression. This representation is particularly potent within the African context, largely because its position as ‘inferior’ within the binaries of First World and Third world — and White and Black — relies upon the belief that Africa and Africans are connected to the ancient past, while the West has been portrayed as having a monopoly on modernity and postmodernity. [Read more…]
The Aggressively Uncategorizable Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen: Ballenesque
at Fahey/Klein Gallery (through June 16, 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot
Ballenesque: Roger Ballen: A Retrospective
by Roger Ballen and Robert JC Young
Thames & Hudson, 336 pp., $80.00
Sometimes an artist’s style is so aggressively uncategorizable, so interdisciplinary and outside conventions, that it defies not only genre, but any meaningful comparisons to history or peer — and their name simply becomes its own adjective. Meet US/South African artist Roger Ballen, whose sui generis style of photography-based practices has been dubbed Ballenesque, because there’s literally no better way to describe it. Of course, in this case, Ballen himself began referring to his own work that way fairly early on, in the 1990s, and honestly he has a point. [Read more…]
Roger Ballen’s Visceral & Phantasmagorical Outland
In her review of the Roger Ballen retrospective, “Ballenesque,” at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles (through June 16, 2018), Shana Nys Dambrot tells us, “in the last three decades, Ballen’s instincts became more and more fantastical, his poetic and surrealist impulses gaining momentum and eventually taking over his storytelling impulse in the name of fiction and allegory.”
The exhibition is a must see, and to double down on its delightfully troubling aesthetic — and to get a truly visceral sense of Ballen’s taste for the fantasitical, the grossly poetic and the apocalyptically surreal — check out his 2015 short, Outland:
A Song To “Mama Africa,” Miriam Makeba, From Jain
“Makeba,” from the Zanaka release:
A Word With Performa 17 Artists Kemang Wa Lehulere & Nicholas Hlobo
I cut my skin to liberate the splinter, at Connelly Theater, East Village;
umBhovuzo: The Parable of the Sower, at Harlem Parish, Harlem
Part of Performa Biennial, NYC
by Robin Scher
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” begins Charles Dickens’ epic A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens goes on to describe the novel’s period, set against the French Revolution, as an age of “wisdom” and “foolishness.” The context may have changed since those words were written, but the sentiment remains true. Here we are in 2017, arguably more conscious than ever to the plights of the dispossessed, yet somehow still stuck in the mires of narrow mindedness. Why do we seem doomed to repeat the errors of our ways? How can we better draw on lessons from history? In November, at New York’s Performa Biennial, these were questions at the heart of at least two South African artists’ commissioned performances. [Read more…]
Stories of Desolation, Dystopia And Joyous Dance
Simphiwe Ndzube’s Bhabharosi
at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (through October 14, 2017)
By Lorraine Heitzman
Simphiwe Ndzube, in his bold debut at the Nicodim Gallery, has produced a personal and political tragicomedy that is an insightful commentary on the human condition. Set against the backdrop of South Africa where Ndzube was born, Bhabharosi tells the timely story of the hero’s journey that is steeped in the colors and customs of his birthplace but speaks to universal themes. His fresh perspective resonates with a vocabulary that is both witty and visually stunning. [Read more…]