Colleen Alborough

by Nathaniel Stern

This piece was originally commissioned by Storm Janse van Rensburg for the Young Artist Project catalogue, May 2006. It is re-printed on SAarts with the permission of KZNSA.

Performed through text, video, installation and sound, Colleen Alborough’s work is an invitation into the perilous depths of emotional thought. It asks us to play out the tensions between fear and loss, being and space. Night Journey, her YAP installation, is a tearing at the seams of a labyrinthine mind, and an interrogation of the complexities of our fragility. The work begs us to stumble through walking and waking and wanting and winding, finally, wielding a fleshly comfort in that dark, but beautiful, place we call home: ourselves.

Night Journey, installation at KZNSA

Crossing the threshold into Night Journey can be likened to entering a maze of foreign-but-familiar flesh. As I step through the door, it opens into an 8-meter long corridor of painstakingly hand-made felt, grey in color, and highlighted with feathers, dirt and fractured light. The walls’ softness make them ever so touch-able, but their seemingly dampened soot is utterly repellent. I’m in a meticulously produced womb that is anything but a fetal resting place.

At the end of this woolen birthing canal, I turn almost 180-degrees into another stretch of felt darkness, and the wind pushes me back, restricting my attempts to carry on. Blasts of cool air – no, it’s the sound of a hurricane – are triggered by my stepping through to the next part of the maze.

I recall Alborough as one my students in the Digital Arts Masters Programme at Wits School of the Arts; she was someone who continually strove to use her technological prowess sparingly and keep it hidden from view. Here, she’s co-opted 4 small, passive infrared rangers – the kind we use for our motion detector lights and house alarm systems – which are perched atop her long corridors. These, and a hidden video camera, all communicate with custom-built computer software that drives 2 video projections and 3 soundtracks throughout her installation, triggered on and off when participants are in the ‘hot spots’ of Alborough’s tangled space.

It’s not only the materiality and interactivity of the work that make Night Journey such an embodied experience, but also its obvious, labour-intensive nature. I can’t help but to imagine the ritual of its production, the meditative and, paradoxically, obsessive-compulsive personality behind such a detailed installation. Allborough’s noisy mess of an artwork sounds a cadence of organization – grid-like but misshapen, her carefully constructed pathways are strewn with detritus.

Night Journey, detail of installation at KZNSA

As I continue down the deserted halls, Night Journey persists in blasting me with the sonic wind of an oncoming downpour, and I see trickles of light, candles burning, behind its walls. It feels like I’m trapped in an Edgar Allan Poe story: the glowing sticks lead me down a dark corridor; the felt becomes an unbearably thick wall of brick; my heart is pounding.

Vision becomes haptic, and I’m engulfed by affection. I don’t mean affection as in love for the space, but that, like Deleuze’s time-image[i] , Night Journey gives “discourse to the body … the body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself … it is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought … obstinate and stubborn, [the body] forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought.”[ii] Body-sensations become body-thoughts and versa vice; I am, because I am “in an immediate, unfolding relation.”[iii] Night Journey “unfolds in and as [my] bodily intuition of the sheer alienness of these forms.”[iv]

I turn another corner, and I’m hit with an eerie soundtrack – Alborough has used found sound from horror films, safari field recordings, and sound effect CDs, bombarding me with connotatively rich and potent audio that invokes a remembrance of myself at 5-years-old, hiding under the bedcovers. There’s a disfigured and mummified human form asleep in a bed across the way, and a small video projection above her head reveals her nightmares to me. She’s dreaming of crossroads and forlorn paths and fire and children running. She’s driving along a dust road at night, barely illuminated by dim orbs of light; she sees barren trees, long blades of dry grass, hears the squeaking of a tired land-rover and the distant hum of its engine; speed bumps are slowing her already over-loaded journey, and the ill-focused headlights have a dizzying effect on her retinas. As I get closer to our sleeping traveller, I hear her breath, assiduously labouring in and out of exhausted lungs.

Night Journey, details of installation at KZNSA

I re-member bits and pieces of Alborough’s artist statement:

Each day we retreat to our bed … so private, so familiar, so intimate. It lures us with its promise of comfort, protection, and restoration … we can escape the endless traffic, incessant noise and smothering fog, into the oblivion of sleep, transported to other worlds beyond the borders of ordinary perception … the night shuts out our visible reality and gives free rein to our hopes, fantasies, dreams, fears and nightmares.[v]

Is that us asleep in that bed, and why such unrestful sleep? To which world do we belong, I wonder, as I stare and stare.

I eventually walk from behind the bed and towards the final turn, triggering a few too many sounds to take in at once. Is that a young girl I hear praying somewhere off in the distance? I can make out someone tap-tap-typing this story, this story I never meant to tell.

Instead of another long corridor of misshapen walls beyond the bend, the cave in front of me has collapsed into a bed of foam pillows, strips of bandages and gauze piled high and blocking our path; and in the middle, I’m watching a small film of animated text that right now reads, “the fog drifts in / you fade to the distance / headlights flash and shine / down the road”. I swear I see my self of minutes ago, the me looking at the girl in the bed; I swear I see a faded video of myself behind this text, still looking. But that was so long ago, and where was it?

I breathe slowly now, myself, hyperaware of Alborough’s continual reference to that very action. Night Journey asks us, she says, “to breathe through the moment.”[vi] There’s a droning quality to my own lungs’ rhythm; there’s something ‘felt’ in the ‘felt-ness’ of her space that, perhaps inadvertently, both frames and dampens the sounds my body-thoughts make.

My experience of the work is not one of ‘looking’ as a "continual translation into visual language of the kinaesthetic,”[vii] it is one of ‘perception’ as a "total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world.”[viii] This is a “dynamic coupling of body and space”[ix] reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s body-schema. Touch promotes proprioception, and I am touched.

I close my eyes and listen to the most-recently triggered soundtrack. I hear the slow typing, a voice praying for loved ones. Like Colleen (we are all, by now, on a first name basis), I oscillate between feelings; at one moment, I feel the “dreadful sense of being alone and being hunted by those spiritual hounds in the night.”[x] At another, I sense an unresolved attempt to “reconcile an ambivalent … physical and psychical”[xi] relationship with the world.

A calm is perhaps approaching, but not the calm before or after the storm; it’s that calm in the middle, the one where you’re wet and the thunder is loud and your muscles ache, and it’s not that you don’t care about being soaked through to the skin, but that you are part of the rain, and that the rain is part of you.

I can hear other visitors entering and interacting with the space; their shadows intensify my experience of light and dark, as they cast shapes across the walls. Their movements trigger more sound, more video, making me curious as to their experiences, and how similar they are to my own. Do they also wonder what this place is and what it makes them? Are their insides tingling with a fear of loss, worrying about a loss of fears?

What terrible things would happen if we forgot to be afraid?

I wonder: perhaps Night Journey’s mummy is not a pickling corpse; perhaps she’s just healing. Bandaged, but warm, she’s on her way to recovery, and when she wakes, it is not the scary space that has transformed, but rather, it is her. By equally perceiving and producing the world around her, she ‘is’.

Night Journey, detail of installation at KZNSA

Night Journey resonates with mystic odysseys as times of despair mirrored by times of opportunity. At its core, Colleen’s story could be considered an embodiment of Walter Benjamin’s Storyteller: it is not a present force, but only a proposal. Our ‘hero’ has had no adventures as a righteous man, preaching morals and maxims. Rather, Night Journey shares its discoveries in order to give counsel, and provides a space in which listeners encounter themselves.[xii]

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[i] And Hansen’s affection-image – see reference for full quotation in footnote 4, below. Note that Night Journey would not be considered a Deleuze time- or Hansen affection-image, per se, but accomplishes affection in a similar way, nonetheless.

[ii] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 173.

[iii] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke.
University Press, 2002), 204.

[iv] Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 204.

[v] Colleen Alborough, email interviews by Nathaniel Stern (Johannesburg, South Africa: private digital collection, 2006).

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 99, quoted in Mark Hansen, “Embodying Virtual Reality: Touch and Self-Movement in the Work of Char Davies,” Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender and Culture Vol. 12: Making Sense (2001): 1-2. Found online @ (13 May, 2006).

[viii] Ibid, 100.

[ix] Hansen, “Embodying Virtual Reality”.

[x] Alborough in Stern.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Paraphrased from Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Trans. Harry Zohn and Ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 82-109.

Doung Anwar Jahangeer

by SAarts Emerging Team (Bronwyn Lace, Nathaniel Stern, Simon Gush)

A kind of cultural chameleon of difficult-to-place origins, Doung’s ‘art-work’ is more like a long-term social project that asks us to look again at our preconceptions, stereo-types, and interpersonal relations. Obviously idealistic, a walk through Doung’s efforts is an invitation to believe; it may sound overly-sentimental, seem futile, or even appear condescending at points, but his optimism and faith in humanity are utterly infectious, and his project is more than a gesture towards empowerment: it works.

Doung’s international background and architectural training led him to explore structures and hierarchies, and how we “break” them every single day. His well-known “city-walks” begin by pointing out buildings and walkways that are built for use in one way, but wind up being transfigured by the world and community around them. From small amounts of grass that magically crack their way through manmade cement streets, to unused walkways surrounded by dirt paths beaten into what was intended as lawn space, Doung inevitably leads us to a “vision of questioning.”

Finally, he puts us in front of our own eyes by enabling us to see how we interact with those different from us. After a long day of seeing the world in a different light, we simply walk into people’s homes, and talk. This is not just a lesson in difference; it is one part of a larger project that empowers through art, reveals unseen realities, and makes tangible change on day-to-day lives, on all levels of class and race.

Doung’s work tends to be participatory and socially-charged performances / experiences, whose by-products are secondary to process. He contends that architecture routinely focuses on brick and mortar, forgetting the spaces they are meant to provide, and the negative spaces between. He calls this the ‘spaces of in-between,’ and says that they are much like the oft-forgotten people that inhabit them.

A prime example of Doung’s multi-faceted approach would be his work for Negotiate (Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2004). As a co-curator and an exhibiting artist on this exhibition, we oversaw Doung as he worked with a group of street children from the end of Paul Nell Street in Hillbrow. Dubbing them ‘Streetlights’ – ‘street kids’ has too many negative connotations – they mapped out a city-walk route, together, between the JAG and Constitutional Court. The route was not direct or efficient, but it more than served its purpose of performing and documenting the spaces between the two cultural centres.

Streetlights during a workshop at the Constitutional Court

For Negotiate, The Streetlights went on to collaborate with Doung in the creation of installations at the JAG and Constitutional Court. Asked to visually describe their relationship to the architectures of their surrounding spaces, they produced a provocative showing of objects from street-life, framed in the gallery space. They were involved in ongoing social programs and activities, culminating in a permanent-relationship-building workshop that took place at Constitutional Hill. Post-Negotiate, the ongoing Streetlight Initiative, facilitated by the Constitutional Hill, means we can expect to see more Doung/Streetlights workshops and programs in the future.

Doung and Streetlights installing at the Constitutional Court

Doung’s obvious intention is to give agency and empowerment through expression and belonging, simultaneously shedding light on life just outside The Gallery, The Hill, etc. We cannot express enough how amazing Doung is with both sides of this potentially volatile relationship. The lack of pretensions and condescension, the care-full interactions, only lead to the most honest and beneficial of relationships.

Streetlights during workshop at the Constitutional Court

Up & coming: Doung is in the process of working on another extension to the Streetlights Initiative, called Coming Home, that will likely take place later this year. He’s recently started a company (Doung²) to focus and refine his unique practice of bringing together art, architecture and activism.

Current: Doung is co-curating (with Guy-Andre Lagesse) the Mari-Mira: Playing with Life exhibition, which opens at the Johannesburg Art Gallery this Sunday, 19 March at 6:30pm. The show features a video documenting Doung’s City Walk and will feature a seminar, in conjunction with the Art in Public Spaces exhibition, on Monday 20 March, 6:30pm (also at JAG).

Next feature is 21 April: Our first guest writer, Lester Adams, does a piece on Hannes Olivier - a young, Johannesburg-based sculptor.

Bronwyn Lace

by Nathaniel Stern

I met Bronwyn Lace when we were working on concurrent exhibitions at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and subsequently opened her beautiful Honors show at Spark Gallery - the text from that opening can be read here. She and I had a li’l discussion about her work over some wine earlier this month (edited by Simon Gush and myself)…

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Nathaniel Stern: First I think we should start talking about your work, generally. I know that you are very interested in the relationships between science and art.
Bronwyn Lace: As an artist, I have always felt inadequate in the face of mathematics and science. Intimidated by ‘grand narratives,’ I try to take them on in my role as teacher as well as artist. I’m after a way that presents, furthers and reveals my cognitive and emotional understanding of the physical world. Scientific theories have a huge impact on how we understand things, and I want be able to open up spaces in which viewers can form relationships with those core concepts; my pieces are based on my personal relationship with art and learning.

NS: My experience of your work is as a kind of analogical or physical dialogue with scientific theories and theorists.

BL: I can describe it best by quoting Priya Hemenway in her book Divine Proportion, “In a world that for twenty five hundred years has developed an extraordinary compendium of knowledge based on principles of logic and rational thought, we find ourselves faced by the realization of physicists that experience, not knowledge, is the real key to discovering universal principles.”

I find that I can only describe such concepts by recreating them, by creating my own experiences.

NS: For me, your installations instill a sense of awe. Science is meant to explain, but trying to describe a sunset, the ocean, life - something gets lost in translation.

BL: I get lost in translation - that’s why I empathize so much as a teacher. When people don’t understand something it is not necessarily their own failing, but could be the way the subject matter has been presented. I try to find new ways to help a student’s process, and interpret difficult information. In order to understand and form a relationship with concepts, I need and want students to be able to see them as more than formulae. My teaching and creation processes are the same in this way - I force myself to form a relationship with the subject matter, and everything other than my “brain-based” intellect has up to now played a role in my understanding; the physical is a necessary and often neglected part of understanding.

Repetition, process and intensity are vital to my creation. These tools come from my teaching, but in my work they speak to more than the process of learning. I enjoy the tedium; it‘s like therapy.
NS: Your work is like a physical manifestation of your internalizing of the concepts you have been disallowed. And it feels good to “get it.”

So, what are you working on now?

BL: I’m currently working with concepts revolving around the natural ratio of Phi 1.618…, it’s an irrational number which means it never ends or repeats. It’s famous because of its remarkable properties and has recently become extremely popular, mainly due to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. What appeals to me about Phi is that it’s supposed to be the most aesthetically appealing proportion to the human being. It is a proportion that is found within us - our bodies use it for length of our limbs, seashells and webs and flowers use it - it’s a very powerful thing, a very appealing concept. I want the installations to be very beautiful and moving, but more importantly to raise questions about our relations - physical or otherwise. The installation should envelop them and create a space where they can form their own meanings. As much as my installations are beautiful, their intensities, and the work so obviously involved in their creation, are alienating. I think this is very much part of how we understand science.

NS: It is almost as if you are playing out the clashes between philosophy and science.

BL: I think the plays between chaos and order that are a constant feature of my work are, on one level, a metaphor for this.

NS: Tell me about how this work came about.

BL: In 2003, I made a work called ‘Yellow Pages’ - I began by tearing pages out of the telephone book and folding them into origami. I didn’t know what to do with them; I began sewing them into a canvas; I wasn’t sure why I was doing it but I began to see that I was looking for information that seemed innocent but was actually impregnated with a forced structuring. I wanted to deny direct access to the text by folding the pages into origami pieces. I was presenting the information, but in an inaccessible way - all there, but unreadable. Although I was not working with science at that point, this was the beginning of my interest in the plays between larger narratives full of power, and my own personal sense of diminished agency in relation to them. It was the start of a trajectory of my work that, in a sense, reclaims something for myself.Yellow Pages, Detail, 2004

NS: In light of this, how much did you consider what material was kept and what was thrown away? A lot must have been hidden from the viewer, or even discarded.

BL: I only really became aware of that question by doing, particularly in the next work, which used an entire encyclopedic dictionary. I started to want to allow certain words, and deny others. As I folded, certain parts were always visible and I started to anticipate and coerce.

Encyclopedic Dictionary, Detail, 2004

NS: It feels like a political gesture away from language. It relates back to the work about science and power?

BL: Yes.

NS: You then moved away from text and paper, and started to use fishing line.

BS: I’m still working with origami, but after that piece I also started producing works with fishing line because I felt that I needed to move on, explore other ideas and media. Fishing line is incredibly seductive. In fact it is a problem, in that I have to continuously prevent myself from being completely seduced by it. It’s amazing in that a single thread can be snapped in your hands, but en mass it gains strength - I started creating strong, potent and beautiful webs. Fishing line helped me express energy in a way far less loaded than text.

200000 and 2, Installation view and detail, 2004

I made my first gut work in 2004, during the world summit in Johannesburg. It was for the Negotiate: Intercession show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and the work was called 20000 and 2. My cousin is an environmental scientist and was talking to me about the summit. His company had produced twenty thousand lapel pins for the delegates, where delegates would sponsor a pin and wear it as a recognition of their personal pollution that resulted from the summit - gases omitted due to their air travel, personal waste produced, etc.

But the pins weren’t sold; not a single one. This dumbfounded me, and I managed to get hold of all twenty-thousand pins through my cousin for my piece.

We tend to assume that the ‘powers that be’ will look after the environment. I wanted to represent the fragility of these structures that we rely on. I made six pillars out of fishing line and the backings of the pins: a kind of architecture of supported strength, but one that still maintained the unique fragility of its parts. In fact, the piece was knocked down on the opening night, a (very annoying) completion of the work.

NS: What is interesting to me is the way in which you engage with power relations in all your work. You are continuously reclaiming your own voice in relation to power, creating a space for others to have a voice on some level.

Can you talk about your work that you are producing for Outlet this March?

BL: For the past few months, I’ve been slowly writing down the individual, never-ending, never-repeating decimal points of Phi onto individual squares of blank paper, and then folding these squares into origami cranes. My intension is to completely cover the gallery walls, ceiling to floor, with tightly packed cranes. I’ve titled the work ‘The Irrational’.

The Irrational , detail, 2005

NS: I know you’ve also got a solo show coming up at the KZNSA Gallery in Durban, as part of the Young Artists Project (Y.A.P.). Tell me about that work.

BL: I wanted to take standard 2D representations of Phi -

NS: Like, graphs?

BL: Ja, we could call them diagrams, illustrations, graphs — and make them experiential. I’ve cut bicycle spokes down in increments corresponding to the ratio of a Phi spiral, and am currently attaching fishing line to the end of each spoke. These fishing line trajectories will extend towards the walls, ceiling and floor of the gallery space, in seemingly random patterns.

Phi spiral

I wanted to take Phi off the page and turn it into a 3D environment that one can walk through, take the order that is Phi and overlay it with the chaos of our experience.

I want to engage with concepts of beauty, want people to feel enveloped by, and acutely aware of, the piece’s [editor: science’s, our own?] fragility - there’s a possibility that it may unwind at any point.

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Bronwyn Lace has two solo exhibitions in the coming months:
Outlet Gallery, Pretoria: opens 1st April, closes April 15th
KZNSA, Durban: Opens March 7th, closes March 28th

Next feature is 17 March: Doung Anwar Jahangeer, a Durban-based architect and artist.

Donna Kukama

by Nathaniel Stern

Don’t miss our launch party on 9 February @ the Berlin Bar, Johannesburg!

Donna Kukama has been on a trajectory of exploring and performing the boundaries between inside / outside, flesh / self, and the relations and investments we have in objects and social status. She is currently studying for her Master of Arts in Sierre, Switzerland; we had a discussion about her work mid-last year.

At that time, Kukama was struggling against being defined by her peers - she was “an emerging, black, female, South African artist,” full stop. Feisty and considerate, she was attempting to rebel against what she called a mis/use of identity politics in order to circumvent the politics of the art world. Ironically, in her quest to break out of a boxed in and imputed singularity, Kukama was putting herself smack in the middle of this very dialogue - sometimes with very successful and beautiful interrogations of body and character, and sometimes with works that are very different from what she intended. Rather than trying to “unfold the spaces of her gendered and raced body, to find the stigmas of social inscription,”1 Kukama explored and shared an intimacy of personal experience, simultaneously daring her onlookers to find the lack and the excess, of confinement and of humanness.

Blind Lullaby and Blind Sleep, video diptych @ Franchise gallery in Joburg, 2005

Blind Lullaby and Blind Sleep, for example, were framed as a-sexual landscapes of Kukama’s well-lit dark skin, which could just as easily have been shadows on whiteness. At first formalistic, I got a growing sense of discomfort around questioning whether her intensions were political, personal, aesthetic, or all three. In discussions, Donna had a bit of a dark wit, and a short temper for reductionism - she preferred people to look, listen and reflect. She liked to talk about her work, but mostly the questions that inspired her, the responses from her audience.

Curio, performance, 2004, Gerhard Sekoto Gallery, Johannesburg

Curio set out to “send up” the organizers of Young Vision 2004: 11 Promising Artists:

I tightly wrapped myself from head to toe in a white fabric, which only revealed my hair… Whilst blinded and suffocating, the body continued to move, often attempting to break free from its own cocoon… slowly retreat to the ground, breathe again… using minimal and repetitive gestures…. [It was] a reaction to the space… [to] a “classified” emergence.

I think Donna’s own artist statement about this work was very telling. Once “she” wrapped herself in her anti-identity, “the body” became its own actor - an ironic Cartesian split provoked by socially constructed specifications.

Behind Kukama at this performance, were clippings of hair and nails on canvas, spray-painted white. Unfortunately, I don’t think the black/white and body/identity binaries framed in this piece could be considered a successful deconstruction of themselves - they were a bit too easy, too readily compartmentalized (and not ironically) to argue against categorization. But the piece is far from devoid of merit. Tripping over her, watching her crawling desperate pleas to break - with the occasional “oops” of trying to remain hidden - created several accidental moments of clarity in the hypocrisies all of our political agendas take. Perhaps, in a future work, Kukama could accent and enhance such errors in more of an inter-course between the exceptions and acceptions we must make.

breath, video, 2004

Kukama’s “involuntary performance” series documented seemingly mundane actions like blinking, breathing and swallowing, but the video mosaics she created were haunted by a desire to halt her own involuntary performance as a known entity. Her tainted collections of dead hair and nails were commonly used for mixed media wall-hangings that are reminiscent of, and poke fun at, South African land- and skyscapes.

all nails go to heaven, mixed media, 2004

Kukama’s role as an artist, which was mostly as a youthful interrogator until very recently, has taken a sharp turn since her temporary move to Europe. Where her performances before were mostly a response to the post-Apartheid / “Rainbow Nation” environment around her, she now finds inspiration in anthropological texts and ritual performance.

In a recent email exchange with me, for example, Donna wondered if the hair and nails she uses could not be seen “as borderline parts of the body,” if they’re state and color said something “as a sign of status.” With almost new wonder, she says her performances are a chance to engage, in a trance-like state, between memory, loss and the everyday, but without the necessity of politic or the spectacular.

Of Laughing & Crying, her latest work, Kukama says it is “improvised and based on playing and discovering… to find meaning in the moment of the accident.” In the same mail, her excited, written statement for the piece ironically lacked any physical description, and consisted only of adjectives - perhaps a texted version of itself. It sounded like disparate moments of “concentrated… consciousness,” harsh emotions sandwiched between nothing; she admits this to be a narcissistic phase in her development.

Armed with her performance experience and newly-found stimuli, Donna Kukama will continue asking us to examine ourselves, and our humanness, with the utmost scrutiny.

¹ paraphrased from Rebecca Schneider’s The Explicit Body in Performance

Next feature is 16 February: Bronwyn Lace, a Johannesburg-based, installation artist, just before her YAP/first solo show at the KZNSA in Durban.