SAarts: One Year On.

On Christmas Eve 2006, SAarts was exactly one year old and what a year it has been. Over the past eleven months the SAarts Team and 8 guest writers have featured 9 emerging artists from Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria and Durban. We have also featured two emerging artist project spaces – Abrie Fourie’s Outlet and Gordon Froud’s Rainforest.

Nathaniel Stern has left for Dublin and Simon Gush will leave for Belgium early in 2007 but will continue to be part of SAarts from afar. In the meantime Rat Western has joined the team and will help maintain the site from SA.

In our second year, we will profile more young and emerging talent and hope to draw some of this from outside the major urban centers. If you would like to submit a proposal please look at the submission rules here: http://saartsemerging.org/submit-work/

Outside the SAarts Emerging Exhibition, 6 October 2006, Fordsburg Artists Studios (A.K.A The Bag Factory)

In October, The Bag Factory hosted our first ever, physical exhibition which featured works by both the monthly profiled artists as well as the writers. As part of this exhibition, a panel discussion was held on the state of emerging art in SA with specific relevance to alternative means of profiling these artists. Guest speakers on the panel were Gordon Froud (Rainforest - Johannesburg); Storm Janse van Rensburg (Young Artist Project - Durban) and Johan Thom who spoke on behalf of Abrie Fourie (Outlet – Pretoria.)

Nathaniel Stern delivers the opening speech. Works by Simon Gush, Rat Western and Shane de Lange in the background.

Gordon Froud and Bie Venter with Altar by Stephan Erasmus	Lester Adams’s work Sins of the Father’s

Vaughn Sadie’s piece, Forbearer of Light with Simon Gush’s Perfect Lovers and Ismail Farouk’s interactive piece soweto uprisings dot com.

For the event SAarts produced a catalogue outlining a little on each artist’s practice and the specific work exhibited on the show.

To celebrate and recap the first year of SAarts we have decided to reproduce some of the information from the catalogue here.

Lester Adams
Lester Adams is an artist living and working in Johannesburg. He has played a curatorial role in a number of projects involving emerging arts, including the Negotiate series at J.A.G, and several shows at the Parking Gallery. His practice as an artist is varied and not subject to any specific medium; Adams’ primary interest is in dystopic and utopic binaries, real or imagined.

His exhibition piece interrogates the biblical abstraction, “sins of the father’s” and how that phrase can be compounded. Constructions of History, Responsibility and Accountability are his concerns. The dominant material used in this work is karakul fur, which is harvested from lamb fetuses.

“Only the flesh comes off me and the flesh goes on like a new suit. Only the needle goes in and the needle comesout and I don’t care, though I try with all my strength to think of Shadrach and Nicola.

But the needle goes in and…

Let me tell you about the city….”

-Jeff Vandermeer, Veniss Underground

Colleen Alborough
Colleen Alborough is an artist living and working in Johannesburg. She completed her BA (Fine Arts) with distinction at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she is currently completing an MA (Fine Arts). In addition to being a digital multimedia artist and visual arts educator, Alborough is a freelancegraphics and web designer and restaurateur.

“I work in a variety of experimental media, focusing on multimedia and experiential installations, which encourage viewers to explore and interact in order to open a narrative. I consider making visual arts more accessible to the general public a high priority.

My work incorporates traditional sculpture, video and animation footage, as well as interactive elements. Its process frequently involves ritualistic, labour-intensive methods, such as felt-making, in an attempt to embody some form of psychic reality. My aim is to push at the boundaries of technology to create installations that communicate and evoke human emotion, asking viewers to question issues of identity, memory, social interactions and accountability. "

Doung Anwar Jahangeer

Doung Anwar Jahangeer is a Mauritian-born, Muslim-raised male of Indian descent, living in Durban. His professional role as an architect imposes its own expectations, and so his work explores the tensions between ‘making space’ (which is in essence functional) and the ‘art’ of making space (which is primarily informed by intuition). His ‘finished’ works may take the form of architectural installation and multi-media, or provocational walks and talks that underscore the inconsistencies and disparateness of the city.

Jahangeer believes in space rather than time, in people rather than capital. People in spaces make places; however these spaces are not neutral and come inscribed with power. A power that still – despite twelve years of democracy in South Africa – effects not only the way that people are perceived and treated, but the way that people feel. It is his aim to expose and deconstruct the myths that perpetuate fear of difference, through the celebration of life that exists in the marginalised - and often unrecognised - ‘spaces of in-between’: freeways, years of democracy in informal settlements, parking-lots…the body.

In the words of the mystic poet Jullalluddin Rumi:

“the beauty of what you are should be the beauty of what you do”.

Shane de Lange
Shane de Lange is an artist living and working in Pretoria, currently completing his MA at Tshwane University of Technology.

De Lange’s work explores contemporary topics like the simulacra, simulation, intertextuality, and the recycling of images and sound.

He is concerned with issues of representation and re-representation, and how they effect our notions of identity: nationality, gender, religion, class, social status or ethnicity. Grand Narratives, and their deconstruction, play an important role in his process, especially pertaining to dualism and contradiction within western society.

A Sentiment to Monumentality, his SAarts piece, is an extremely sentimental group of ‘documents as records.’ Decaying twigs in the street, or the bus ticket that is thrown away – inevitably forgotten – these are the monuments of no-thing lost.

Christo Doherty

Christo Doherty is head of Digital Arts at the Wits School of Arts. He is a photographer, VJ, and sometime conceptualist. He is a founding member of the Art and Technology, Johannesburg website (http://atjoburg.net) and The Upgrade! Joburg, one node in a global network of art & technology creatives. These grew out of his informal, weekly ‘Digital Soiree’ initiative at Wits.

On exhibit for SAarts are photos from Doherty’s ongoing photographic investigation into the iconography of crime-security-paranoia in post-Apartheid South Africa. These are block mounted in grid formation.

Stephan Erasmus
Stephan Erasmus is a practicing artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. His arts process often encrypts/decrypts texts, and translates them into physical form, resulting in artist books or visual poetry.

Erasmus works primarily with paper, and the act of writing, transforming and transfiguring The Word into compositions, by replacing letters or spaces with illustrated or formalistic elements. He appropriates texts from various sources such as popular or classical songs, poetry, plays, and biblical text. He attempts to hide the sentimentality in each selected text, making them secret letters to a muse.

His work exhibited at SAarts, Altar, is made of 2000 match sticks, each with one “ism” written on all four sides. For Erasmus, such words denote states of being, systems of belief, and schools of thought and practice. The fragile matchsticks, together, form an alter, and allude to parallels between the way we live and the way we pray.

Ismail Farouk
Ismail Farouk is an urban geographer and artist working in major urban renewal projects in Johannesburg. He provides specialised urban project-research focusing on spatial, social and economic networks and processes of participation as an alternative methodology to urban regeneration. Farouk’s interest in urban dynamics stems from his Geographic and Fine Art background at Wits University where he explored creative responses to the unfair logic of exchanges which characterises the developing world today.

For the SAartsEmerging exhibition, Farouk is presenting his online collaborative application called soweto uprisings dot com. soweto uprisings dot com is presented by The Hector Pieterson Research Project and is a creation of Ismail Farouk and Babak Fakhamzadeh. The application maps the various routes of the Soweto uprisings by geotagging their locations using Google Maps and Flickr. The application also returns relevant Google Blogsearch results, Wikipedia articles and other website material geotagged in the Soweto area. The content loads dynamically from these external sources so the site is continually evolving.

The Soweto 1976 Uprisings remain a highly contested issue. The complexity of the day’s events is reflected through the myriad of books published, each wishing to legitimize ‘their’ version of the day - soweto uprisings dot com was created as a living digital archive. Anyone can participate by submitting a picture, location, path, narrative, blog, website or counter memory.

http://sowetouprisings.com

Simon Gush
Simon Gush was born in Pietermaritzburg. South Africa in 1981. He lives and works in Johannesburg, where he has been living since 2000. In 2003 he completed his BAFA at the University of the Witwatersrand, which culminated with a solo show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. He is a practicing artist. As part of his practice he has collaborated on numerous projects facilitating the development of emerging arts in Johannesburg. His artistic practice is varied including video, installation and actions.

In 2004 Simon co-founded the artist collective aThirdparty, to curate and facilitate Negotiate. He currently runs the Parking Gallery located in inner city Johannesburg and is a co-founder of saartsemerging.org.

The particular climatic conditions of South Africa, extreme heat and harsh sunlight, is a fact that Simon Gush is made particularly aware of, being of a typically European physique, white skin, light eyes. These circumstances led to his interest in the use of ceiling fans.

His work Perfect Lovers references the work of the same name by Felix Gonzales-Torres. The work comprises of two ceilings fans installedvery low so that the blades of the fan rotate just above the head of the audience. The proximity of the fans to the audience and to each other turns them into potentially dangerous objects. The fans displaced, hanging too low, talk about violence, the absence and the vulnerability of the body. The work looks at the anxiety and fear of love in the context of a politicized society devastated by Aids.

Dean Henning and Rike Sitas
Memories of times gone by would not be the same without the specific characteristics of the faded photographs that captured them. Would a 20’s film star look the same if preserved in 5 Megapixel 16-bit color?

Human memory works in much the same way. The further back we look, the more blurry the details become.

Digital photography has none of these limitations. As long as the file is kept safe, the image information will never degrade. Decay is an attempt to create a digital environment to store images where they will be vulnerable to forces of decay.

The process of deterioration is automated and requires no human intervention; no one will be spending late nights using Photoshop. The server itself destroys the image through stains and convolution matrices. The speed of this process is also determined by how often it is viewed. Each view on the site takes the image “out of storage”, exposing it to potential decay. The more viewings, the more decay.

The digital environment will be a website, where other exhibition participants and exhibition viewers will be given access to upload their own images and stories. During the course of the exhibition, the images and stories will go through a digital process of decay.

This process can be seen by anyone who visits the site.
http://www.thesoundofand.co.za/decay/

Abrie Fourie: Outlet
Outlet gallery, the brainchild of Abrie Fourie, is situated on the arts campus of the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria. It is a converted projection booth above a large hall on the northern corner of the campus. But as Fourie points out, as you climb the stairs to the little room, the size and shape of the gallery demand that artists deliberately use the space. “Outlet is about the space and how you show certain things in it.”

Outlet was launched in March 2003; Abrie felt Pretoria suffered from a derth of experimental art spaces. “You sometimes have to just do things he explains. The gallery was also inspired by Fourie’s experience of artist-owned galleries in Europe and America. In his view these galleries, often housed in apartments or even passage-ways of private houses, play an essential role in developing both artistic and curatorial careers. Typically, young curators start off by getting some experience in established galleries and then begin to do their own thing by launching their own galleries. Once they get listed, they can start to play an important role on the arts scene. For young artists, these galleries are an opportunity to present the pick of their work without the costs or connections which the established galleries exact. Fourie also recognised the potential for establishing links with the international art scene through a gallery such as Outlet. "Many of the young artists who are doing really interesting work in cities like Berlin would really like to get over here; but there are no openings at the established galleries and museums. Independent spaces like Outlet can provide the platform for such artists to visit South Africa and to create new work.”

“Outlet is not a place for sale” Fourie declares.
“Unlike any of the commercial galleries I don’t charge a rental for the space. Artists are not here to pay rent. Outlet works by people coming to me and saying what they want to do and we negotiate about it. The point is to make things happen!”

Many of the artists featured during the SAarts exhibitionhave also had the opportunity to interact with Outlet: Simon Gush, Nathaniel Stern, Bronwyn Lace, Johan Thom, Asha Zero and Shane de Lange.

Gordon Froud:Rainforest
On returning to Johannesburg in 2003 after teaching in London for 4-1/2 years, Gordon Froud opened gordart Gallery, Melville, Johannesburg. The main thrust of this gallery has been to fill the needs of underexposed and unrepresented artists. It is a developmental space affording new, mostly young artists who need exposure in the professional realm. gordart has showcased over 30 artists, many of whom have gone on to win major awards - Berco Wilsenach and Lawrence Lemoana, for example, won the ABSA Altelier award and the Gerard Sekoto award, respectively, in 2005.

Through his activities at gordart Gallery, Froud saw a lack of spaces for young and recently graduated artists, a need for platforms that could function as entry points into the Johannesburg Art Scene. Gordon’s post at the University of Johannesburg also showed him that artists fresh out of tertiary institutions do not always have the quantity of work for large solo exhibitions, or the finances to cover those costs. His gallery’s mission was thus extended to deliver exposure for such unknown artists to the art buying public at large.

In Jan 2006, gordart Gallery opened a more intimate ‘white cube’ adjacent to its main exhibit space. ‘The Project Room’ was initially named after its function, a room set aside for Gordon’s project of furthering younger, new and disadvantaged artists. Now known as ‘Rainforest – A Room to Breathe,’ Froud’s satellite gallery is funded by The Broking for Good foundation, an outreach arm of the NOAH brokerage firm. They will cover The Project Room’s exhibition costs for the foreseeable future.

Bronwyn Lace
Bronwyn Lace is an installation artist and teacher, with an interest in developmental and emerging projects. Her tools are scale and space, with an eye towards creating environments into which a viewer may be absorbed. She aims to make work charged and playful, seductive and uncomfortable, while playing up the links between art, physics and nature.

Bronwyn’s contributions to SAarts are as a founding member, curator, writer and editor, and she serves on its board. Her piece on the exhibition, entitled 8/5, uses Phi – the divine proportion – to look at science’s interpretation of aesthetics. Her media, including a live fish, fishing line and perspex, are intended to provoke a physiological response to this proposed relationship.

Hannes Olivier
Born in Utrecht, Netherlands in 1980, Hannes Olivier received his BA (FA) from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2002. His work formed part of various group shows, which include the MTN New Contemporaries in 2003 and the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival in 2005.

Olivier’s interests are in biotic relationships, the resultant dynamic of meetings between organic and synthetic materials. He uses light to define the inner or outer boundaries of his sculpture, and as evidence of both a physical and, more importantly, intangible energy presence.

His piece for SAarts, re-union (soet slaap sonder sonde), alludes to the double burial sites (often marked by coupled memorial structures) found in many cemeteries across South Africa. It explores the dual, physical and psychological co-habitation between ‘significant others,’ in life and death.

Hannes is also intrigued by unmarked memorial stones, void of any inscription. He sees these as melancholic, denying the physical representation of a ‘dialogue’ between the living and the dead. He’s fascinated by the language used on these gravesites, which is influenced, and strongly shaped, by religious symbolism and cultural ideology.

re-union (soet slaap sonder sonde) draws on the formal language used in unclaimed, indefinite, commissioned for the KKNK in 2005, and represents Olivier’s believe in the inaptness of rigid physical structures to mediate human experience.

Vaughn Sadie
Vaughn Sadie is a Durban-based artist, who is completing his Masters in Fine Arts at The Durban University of Technology. He has participated in several public art events such as Red Eye at Durban Art Gallery and Negotiate at JAG. More recently he was a participant in the KO Video Festival and Young Artists Project, 2005. He is a lecturer at Vega, The Brand Communications School.

Sadie is interested in light, “with all its metaphorical qualities and practical applications; light besieges our everyday existence, and illuminates the spaces we occupy, effecting our social reality. The nature of light is such that it can be manipulated and altered to illuminate objects and spaces, revealing only the aspects that are deemed suitable or necessary.”

Forbearer of light, his piece for the SAarts exhibition, investigates the layering of unknown histories embedded in everyday objects. Sadie is interested in how we disregard the “memory” of previous owners and narratives, whilst we give our “property” new life. His constructed object- stories are often sentimental reflections on the past.

Nathaniel Stern
Nathaniel Stern is a writer, artist and teacher, who divides his time between fawning over his daughter, writing and blogging, reading, producing art, and more generally making a collaborative ruckus. His media range between multimedia performance, interactive installation, digital and traditional printmaking, and academic texts, but he’s been known to jump, head-long, into new processes without looking first. From November 2006, he’ll be working on a research- and production-based PhD at Trinity College, Dublin, around art, technology and embodiment.

Nathaniel’s contributions to SAarts are as a founding member, web designer, writer and editor, and he serves on its board. Although he is not officially exhibiting on the Emerging Arts show, he will speak at its opening, take part in two panel discussions (one on collecting new media art in South Africa, the other on Social Networks), and will also give an informal presentation on Interactive Video as an emergent medium.

Some of Nathaniel’s URLs:

www.nathanielstern.com
www.atjoburg.net
www.compressionism.net

Rat Western
Rat Western received her Masters in Interactive Media in 2004 from Wits University. She has worked as a freelance designer and lecturer and currently works at the Bag Factory Artist Studios in Fordsburg. She is responsible for the design and maintenance of the organisation’s online material as well as for the writing of a monthly e-newsletter. Western is the latest edition to the SAarts team and is responsible for the catalogue design for the SAarts exhibition 2006.

As an artist, Western’s work examines such themes as memory, urban living and the poignant passage of time and its effects of people and places, but the common focus of her work has always been the art of storytelling. Video and animation dominate her portfolio; this is because of the aspect of time which is fundamental to storytelling. However, in a still image, the suggestion of a narrative outside of the picture interests her greatly too, specifically when the work is photographic and hints at a thread of truth in a way that a painting or drawing can not.

Western’s work Pipe Dream combines an interest in urban decay and the unseen systematic workings of urban living with the voyeuristic photographic observations that stimulate her speculations of an imagined narrative for the lives she observes. The use of pipes represents the inner workings of the beast that is the city and the interrelated networks both physical and ethereal. Manipulated digital photographs of exterior glimpses into the lives of Western’s supposed characters are integrated with these pipes to form a maze of light boxes.

Storm Janse van Rensburg
The Young Artist’s Project (YAP), initiated by Storm Janse van Rensburg in 2002, provides support for emerging artists’ first solo projects, and has featured sixteen artists thus far. It fills an important South African gap by offering support in the form of funding and space, as well as critical engagement, for young creators with a solo exhibition vision.

Housed at the KwaZulu Natal Society of Arts Gallery’s multimedia room, YAP has produced an institutional platform for the presentation of experimental visual arts practice. It allows for artistic freedom without the concerns of having to re-coup money spent.

Over the last four years, YAP’s exhibition programme developed national, as well as local artists, and in 2005 - with a three year funding injection from the Royal Netherlands Embassy - the project had its first seminar and critical writing workshop. After each annual cycle of four artists, a catalogue is produced in which young critics are commissioned to engage with the work.

Artists on the SAartsEmerging exhibition who were also former YAP participants include Colleen Alborough,Doung Anwar Janhangeer, Dean Henning, Rike Sitas, Bronwyn Lace and Vaughn Sadie

Asha Zero
The “Imposter“ portraits of the “WHO AM IS“ series are an attempt by Zero’s imaginary roadkillvisiontoiletries corporation to counter the influence of the Imposter and the “mobilediscoetcetera“ organisation, which formed after the defection of roadkillvisiontoiletries agents Palinki and Broop Nook, who joined the Imposter in a campaign to discredit roadkillvisiontoiletries and the “sunset vending machine“ project (a roadkillvisiontoiletries initiative to distribute poetic merchandise to the general public ). By inserting sets of “original reproductions“ into circulation by means of portrait painting, roadkillvisiontoiletries intends to neutralize the “EPIC DISCOUNT“ merchandise of mobilediscoetcetera.

Attempted translation by SAarts team: Asha is including several “painted collage” pieces from his “imposter” series on the SAarts exhibition. This body of work appropriates found images related to consumer culture, and explores concepts of multiplicity and illusion in contemporary society.