DIALOGUE

Global Dialogue on Art

This Global Dialogue on Art features fellow artists (professional and amateur) and writers, their experiences and takes on art. Artists featured in the Global Dialogue on Art since 2010 are: Candice Breitz, Beezy Bailey II, Wayne Barker, Strijdom van der Merwe, Nicholas Hlobo, John Eppel, Beezy Bailey, Aidan Bennetts, Catherine Christie, Cyril Rolando II, Stephen Lasker & Aidan Bennetts, Cyril Rolando, Craig Hilton-Barber, Michael Wyeth, Gavin Rain, Victoria S Botha, Joan Peeters, Michael Poliza, and Lynda Soutar. To apply to be featured in this section and for more information please email info@sketchbooktrails.com.

Candice Breitz, Artist

Extra #13 Artist: Candice Breitz
Candice Breitz is an internationally renowned artist who has exhibited her photographs and video installations worldwide. She was born in Johanessburg in 1972 and now lives and works in Germany where she is a tenured Professor of Fine Art at the Braunschweig University of Art. From the mid-1990s, Candice Breitz produced a body of work reflecting on various aspects of the structure of identity and psychological identification. In her early photographic work, made shortly after she left South Africa, Breitz used montage and found imagery to thematise the ways in which racial and sexual identity had come to be pictured in apartheid South Africa, within visual contexts ranging from tourist postcards to pornography. Since 1999, Breitz has predominantly created multi-channel video installations, in which she often explores the relationship between individuals and social bodies. Central to her work is the question of how an individual becomes him or herself in relation to a larger community, be that community the immediate community that one encounters in family, or the real and imagined communities that are shaped not only by questions of national belonging, race, gender and class but also by the increasingly undeniable influence of mainstream media such as television, cinema and popular music.
Extra #8 Artist: Candice Breitz
*Candice Breitz: Extra!* - the first comprehensive survey exhibition of the artist's work to be presented in South Africa - is presented by Standard Bank in partnership with the Goethe-Institut and Goodman Gallery, and runs at the Standard Bank Gallery from 8 February until 5 April, 2012. Breitz's exhibition derives its title from her new work Extra (2011), a single-channel video as well as a series of photographs created on the set of the soap opera, Generations. Broadcast on SABC 1 since 1994, Generations, South Africa's most loved soap and the most watched television programme on the African continent, seeks to paint a picture of the country's emerging black middle class against the backdrop of the media industry. Generations does not include any major white characters in its cast: because much of the scriptis delivered in Nguni languages, white South Africans - who at this historical juncture rarely speak indigenous African languages - simply don't fit into this aspirational landscape. In Extra!, Breitz inserts herself into a number of actual scenes from Generations, sometimes subtly, sometimes awkwardly and absurdly, but always without judgement or easy explanation. Here she resonates as a conspicuously white presence amongst an otherwise black cast. The resulting images are simultaneously thought provoking and uncomfortably amusing - implicitly raising questions about what it might mean to be white in the context of the new South Africa, without offering easy answers. Extra! was specially commissioned by the Standard Bank of South Africa and is being shown for the first time in this exhibition.
Stills from Factum Kang Artist: Candice Breitz
The second video installation in the exhibition is similarly concerned with questions around identity and self-formation. Factum (2010) is a series of dual-channel installations, each of which juxtaposes the testimonies of a pair of identical twins, whom Breitz interviewed individually at length.
Stills from Mother Artist: Candice Breitz
The third work on this exhibition, Mother + Father (2005), is a pair of video installations that features a selection of fictional parental characters drawn from popular cinema. Mother includes Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton, Shirley MacLaine, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep, while Father features Tony Danza, Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Keitel, Steve Martin, Donald Sutherland and Jon Voight. In each case, Breitz's edit weaves carefully selected snippets of footage drawn from a variety of films into a new dialogue that probes parental stereotypes, and at the same time explores the formative power of mainstream entertainment. For more on Candice Breitz: Extra!, please go to www.standardbankarts.com. [Acknowledgements and thanks to Gilly Hemphill, Standard Bank Arts]

Beezy Bailey II, Artist & Social Commentator

Rain in Africa Artist: Beezy Bailey 2010. Oil, silk screen, enamel on canvas. 170 x 250 cm
"Beezy Bailey captures the iconic figure of Nelson Mandela with wit and the irreverence of a genuine iconoclast. This collection is a vivid, touching and illuminating journey around Madiba that teases, tantalises and transfixes the viewer in an effervescent celebration. The symbolic tapestry of South Africa's haunting landscape, secretive mists, visceral imagery of birds and broken shacks weave and float around the elusive, multi-dimensional charisma of a man who has always reminded us that love is central to liberation, and the masses, not great men, are the true creators of history...Through Bailey's prism the icon is captured in all his grace, simplicity and dignity. Bailey the iconoclast does what Mandela would wish. The saint is a human being..." - Ronnie Kasrils, Former Minister of Intelligence and comrade of Nelson Mandela
Prophets Old and New Artist: Beezy Bailey 2011. Oil, silk screen, enamel on canvas. 120 x 110 cm
"Icon: A name, face, picture, edifice or person readily recognized as having a well-known significance or embodying certain qualities: An image or depiction that represents something significant through literal or figurative meaning, usually associated with religion, cultural, political or economic standing. Iconoclast: A person who attacks cherished beliefs: one who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular beliefs. The 'Icon' in question is our own Nelson Rohlihlahla Mandela, an international figure revered around the world, acclaimed and claimed by all. A hero who is a prisoner of the mass media! With his birthday decreed and celebrated internationally as Mandela Day, 'Madiba Magic' is real. What then of the man? The 'Character, Comrade, Leader, Prisoner, Negotiator, Statesman' (the title of an exhibition on his life at the Apartheid Museum). What lies beneath the printed iconic smile and familiar face? Who owns the Icon and the reproduction and exploitation of it as a commodity in a consumer society? Who decrees who or what can be shown where and how? Bailey the artist/iconoclast poses these questions by holding the iconic image up, placing it centrally in his new work. The echo of Warhol's words proclaiming himself to be a 'Business Artist' could be the icon busters Bailey's challenge in de-commercialising the commodity and rebranding it 'Art', where ownership is in the imaginative possibilities and layered meaning attributed to it by the artist..." - Christopher Till
Rainbow Nation Artist: Beezy Bailey 2010. Oil, silk screen, enamel on canvas. 170 x 250 cm
"I feel somewhat like a conduit... people ask where I get my inspiration, and I say, from above. I don't really feel personally responsible for the work I produce - it is rather something that flows through me. I am something of a walking paintbrush. I believe in all forms of creativity and indulge in painting, drawing, sculpture, performance and video as a means of my expression. I live for beauty." – Beezy Bailey
International Friends Artist: Beezy Bailey 2010. Silk screen, gouache on archers paper. 125 x 102 cm
Follow Beezy Bailey’s Blog here. For more on Beezy Bailey, please go to www.beezybailey.co.za. Don’t forget to vote for Beezy Bailey on the Sketchbooktrails page on Facebook if you like his work! [Acknowledgements and thanks to Mark Read, Everard Read Gallery]

Wayne Barker, Artist

Blue Colonies Artist: Wayne Barker 1995. Mixed media on canvas. 169 x 160 cm
"Wayne Barker - the antithesis of "Super Boring"." - Taf [Tafadzwa Mukwashi] Biography Wayne Barker was born in Pretoria in 1963, and completed a post-graduate degree in Fine Art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Marseilles. Barker is an extremely vocal social satirist, the founder of FIG (The Famous Art Gallery), a curator and educator. The innovative multi-media artist uses deconstruction and subversion in works carrying his signature conceptual expressionism.
His and Her Mozambique Artist: Wayne Barker 1995. Mixed media and neon tubing on wood. 200 x 246 cm
Past exhibitions include "Kunst is Kinder Speef" at Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria; and "All Washed Up in Africa" at the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Barker's work can be found in numerous museums and private collections all over the world. His latest exhibition, Super Boring, opens at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg on 2 February 2011 and runs until 2 April 2011.
Colour Country Artist: Wayne Barker 2010. Mixed media and neon tubing on canvas
'Barker is a colourful, provocative and rebellious persona and artist who lives a life of seemingly endless outrageous incidents. He and his work are anything but boring, lending an ironic twist to the exhibition's title. He firmly rejects the idea that art should be "idle navel-gazing", and presents instead work that is arresting, incisive and a challenge to political perceptions and understandings, morality, authority and values. Barker is renowned for his re-interpretations of paintings by the Afrikaner nationalist artist, JH Pierneef. For the exhibition, 'Super Boring', he has produced a new body of work that confronts and questions the new South African culture in all its diverse manifestations, while celebrating the underlying force and spirit of optimism that binds and drives our unique country.
Golden Girl Artist: Wayne Barker 2009. Strung glass beads. 170 x 170 cm
'Super Boring' was initially a curatorial collaboration between SMAC Art Gallery, Andrew Lamprecht and Barker. It will now travel in an evolved form to the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg as a retrospective exhibition curated by SMAC Art Gallery.' As Standard Bank Gallery is committed to bringing quality exhibitions to us, wherever we are in the world, those of us not in Johannesburg will be able to take a virtual tour of the gallery instead at www.standardbankarts.com. For more on Wayne Barker please go to www.standardbankarts.com. Don’t forget to vote for Wayne Barker on the Sketchbooktrails page on Facebook if you like his work! [Acknowledgements and thanks to Jo-Anne Duggan, The Heritage Agency on behalf of Standard Bank Gallery]

Strijdom van der Merwe, Land Artist

Lifting stones out of the water and balancing on sticks. Meyerton. Gauteng, South Africa Land Artist: Strijdom van der Merwe
Biography Strijdom Van der Merwe was born in 1961 and currently resides in Stellenbosch, South Africa. As a land artist, he uses the materials provided by the chosen site. His sculptural forms take shape in relation to the landscape. It is a process of working with the natural world, using sand, water, wood, rocks etc… He shapes these elements into geometrical forms that participate with their environment, continually changing until their final probable destruction. He observes the fragility of beauty, while not lamenting its passing, what remains is a photographic image, a fragment of the imagination. While a visual record is materially all that is left, he also leaves us a reminder of the capacity, however feeble, of an individual to alter the universe by embracing the ceaseless changing of nature, actively contributing to it and, in so doing, modulating and beautifying the outcome. Strijdom obtained a BA Degree in Fine Arts in 1983 and a BA Hons Degree in Fine Arts in 1984 from the University of Stellenbosch. He was awarded with the John van Reenen bursary as the best Graphic Design Student. From 1984 onwards he worked as a graphic designer and in 1990 received a bursary from Dutch Government to study print-making at the Hooge School voor de Kunste, Utrecht, Holland. In 1992 he became head graphic designer at the Graphic Design Studio of the University of Stellenbosch and from 1993 - 1995 he also lectured computer graphics in the Art Department. He then studied sculpture for six months at the Academy of Art, Architecture & Design in Praha, the Czech Republic and went on to become artist in residence at the Kent Institute of Art and Design, Canterbury, England in 1995/1996. Strijdom has been working as a full time artist since 1996.
Arranging 9 beach pebbles in dug out squares, Eerste River Beach, Eastern Cape, South Africa Land Artist: Strijdom van der Merwe
Strijdom has had a plethora of exhibitions over the past two decades, including an Installation Art Work for the ‚Woordfees' 2009 Stellenbosch, South Africa; Sasol Art Gallery Stellenbosch, Mercedes Benz Awards Exhibition, 2008; Invited Land Art Installation, Pordenone, Italy, 2008; Experimenal Film Festival Carbunanari Florean Museum Baia Mare, Romania,2007; Experimenal Film Festival Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, 2007; Invisioning Change, Nobel Peace Centre Oslo Norway, 2007; BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium, 2007; 14 Sculptures for the Simonsberg Ward Wine Route, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 2007; the Medal of Honor Award from the South African Academy of Art and Science, 2007; and Recipient of the Jackson Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2006. Strijdom continues to take 'the provenance of art outside of the museum and into the outside world'.
Using a broom to clear the circles underneath the jacaranda tree, Stellenbosch, South Africa Land Artist: Strijdom van der Merwe
For more on Strijdom van der Merwe, please go to www.strijdom.co.za. Don’t forget to vote for Strijdom van der Merwe on the Sketchbooktrails page on Facebook if you like his work!

Nicholas Hlobo, Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2009

Izithunzi and Kubomvu (detail of works in progress), 2009
Artist: Nicholas Hlobo
Photograph: John Hodgkiss

Biography

In 2009 the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art was bestowed on Nicholas Hlobo. Since 1981, the award has been made annually to those who have demonstrated exceptional ability in their field, and Hlobo was the 28th visual artist to be acclaimed through the award. On winning the award, he said, "I am truly honoured to have been chosen and hope to give audiences something new and innovative."

Drawing on his Xhosa culture and heritage, and his life as a black person in post-apartheid South Africa, Hlobo is concerned with gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and, according to him, "anything that people find embarrassing in society". He is particularly concerned with prejudice against homosexuality in black society, as well as sex education, AIDS and blurring the division between the masculine and feminine. Renowned for his sculptures made of found objects and disparate materials, such as the inner tubes of car tyres, ribbon, leather and wire, Hlobo also makes drawings and is a performance artist of note. His works are usually entitled in his native tongue, Xhosa, and he is interested in the language, with its proverbs and idioms. His work is symbolic: rubber tubes refer to condoms and some of his forms allude to phalluses, sperm, orifices and umbilical cords.

Nicholas Hlobo was born in Cape Town in 1975. He moved to Johannesburg in 1995, where he worked in the television industry. Initially he explored art-making on his own, but enrolled at the Artist Proof Studio, Johannesburg, in 1998 and also studied at the Technikon Witwatersrand (now the University of Johannesburg), obtaining a B Tech in Fine Art in 2002. Hlobo was an artist-in-residence at the Thami Mnyele Foundation in 2005, following which he won the Tollman Award for Visual Art in 2006. Another residency followed in 2007, when he spent two months at the Ampersand Foundation in New York. During this year, Hlobo was also invited to show at the Aardklop National Arts Festival in Potchefstroom, for which he produced the exhibition, 'Umdudo'.

It has taken just a few years for Hlobo to rise to fame and he has shown around the world to much acclaim. He launched his career as a solo artist in 2006 with 'Izele', an exhibition at Michael Stevenson in Cape Town, to which he is also affiliated as a stable artist. Other solo exhibitions followed, including 'Umakadenethwa engenadyasi' at Galeria Extraspazio in Rome (2007); 'Momentum 11: Nicholas Hlobo' at the ICA in Boston, Massachusetts (2008); and 'Nicholas Hlobo: Uhambo' at the prestigious Tate Modern, London (2008).

Hlobo has also shown on many group shows worldwide. The more recent of these include 'Flow' at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2008); 'Home Lands – Land Marks' at Haunch of Venison, London (2008); 'Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art' at The Stenersen Museum, Oslo (2008); 'Skin-to-Skin: Challenging Textile Art' at the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg (2008); and 'Dada South?' at the South African National Gallery (2009-2009).

Hlobo is represented in the art collections of Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, and the University of South Africa, Pretoria.

While Hlobo's previous shows have explored ideas surrounding birth and sex, the theme in 'Umtshotsho' is the rituals that accompany the transition from youth to adulthood. As Hlobo explains, the term umtshotsho refers to a traditional party for young people. "The focus is on that time when children are beginning to think and act like adults; the desire to explore life, dating, going out at night and all the consequences of wanting to do things older people do. Umtshotsho rarely takes place in its old form anymore and young people have found alternatives, such as going to bars and clubs. The works are not trying to tell a story about an old way of partying for teenagers but look at the new conventions and draw similarities between different times."

In a darkened room, the central installation, Izithunzi (meaning 'shadows'), comprises a gathering of eight figures resembling jellyfish, pumpkins or ghosts. Some are freestanding, others suspended or seated on a sofa. Constructed primarily from rubber inner tubing, the figures are individuated with details of lace, organza and ribbons – Hlobo's signature materials. Casting a red glow on the group – and perhaps a playful warning – a reupholstered lamp stands on a table covered with rubber to resemble a sack or a scrotum.

'Umtshotsho' is accompanied by Hlobo's first monograph, which traces his life and work from 2005 to 2009. It includes essays by Mark Gevisser, Kopano Ratele and Jen Mergel, all of whom look at aspects of his life and work in depth.

Acknowledgements: Jo-Anne Duggan, The Heritage Agency; Litnet. 2009. "Standard Bank celebrates 25 years of supporting South Africa’s young artists".

Uzimbamb'emsileni, 2008
Artist: Nicholas Hlobo
Rubber and ribbon on paper
Standard Bank Corporate Collection

For more on Nicholas Hlobo, please go to www.standardbankarts.com/Gallery/Previous-2010.aspx.

Don’t forget to vote for Nicholas Hlobo on the Sketchbooktrails page on Facebook if you like his work!

John Eppel, Author / Poet

John Eppel Author / Poet
Biography "My Mission Statement That I should treat people the way I should like to be treated; that I should not turn a blind eye to the wickedness of those who have too much power; that I should value the future on a timescale longer than my own." - John Eppel John Eppel was born in South Africa and raised in Zimbabwe. He lives in Bulawayo, near the Matobo Hills and teaches at Christian Brothers College. He has three children. His first novel, DGG Berry’s The Great North Road, won the M-Net prize in South Africa, and was listed in the Weekly Mail & Guardian as one of the best 20 South African books in English published between 1948 and 1994. His second novel, Hatchings, was short-listed for the M-Net Prize and was chosen for the series in the Times Literary Supplement of the most significant books to have come out of Africa. Other John Eppel novels include The Giraffe Man, The Curse of the Ripe Tomato, The Holy Innocents, Absent: The English Teacher, and (yet to be published) The Boy Who Loved Camping. His book of poems, Spoils of War, won the Ingrid Jonker Prize. Other poetry books by John include Sonata for Matabeleland, Selected Poems 1965-1995, and Songs My Country Taught Me. In addition, he has written two books which combine poems and short stories: The Caruso of Colleen Bawn, and White Man Crawling. Soon to be published is a book of poems and short stories in collaboration with Julius Chingono, entitled Together.
Loveliest of Girls Of all the girls I’ve seen, these, dying, are loveliest; lovelier by far than leaves outside a bedroom window turning, petals from a vase of bronze, some drifting to this very page, even now as I rend my garments for these dying girls. Slender they are but not like anorexics, nor stalks. They walk on the cycle path along Cecil Avenue or down Flint Road, cutting corners, joining queues that stretch like birth; queues for Paracetamol, for pretty cloth, for paraffin; not like models with detached pelvises, nor storks with bloated midriffs, but like spectres, half-revealed, presentiments haunting the smug suburb of Hillside, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, the World, the fucking Universe. Loveliest of girls are these, dying; loveliest of leaves turning; petals on a page. John Eppel Copyright © John Eppel
Winter in Matabeleland, 1987 The airlock in our hosepipe won't be heard for another season; the spider in our spout, he won't be stirred for another season. The ZANU/ZAPU dialogue is dead until what rains? The Somabula Flats are tinctured red until what rains? On caps of wind the migrant swallows soar: will they return? Our soldiers guard the Beira Corridor: will they return? I found a rusty bayonet in the yard: lest we forget; some two-by-four and half a playing card: lest we forget. We watch our garden dying flower by flower... perhaps the spring? the water table falling hour by hour... perhaps the spring? There's part of a heart on the card I found: does it portend? The Rhodies rev their Hondas, southward bound: does it portend? Our new born baby squints her eyes to see (love, light the fire) her two-dimensional security. Love, light the fire. John Eppel Copyright © John Eppel	Poinsettias on Africa Day Woke to a consciousness of bright petals opening and closing against my cheek. Red rags of a child’s back yard, window-sills cool as flagpoles, cement floors, and the creak of sap going down. But these whisperings of milk and poison, these claims of cousins who crowned Christ, healed Mauritanian kings, caught wildfowl and fish for unknown dozens, if not millions, of Africa’s children... against my cheek. Woke to bracts recalling Apollo’s lust for Daphne. Lips open, lips close, and the half-turned palmates falling. Pulcherrima. Daphne Laureola – provoker of homeless poets. Consoler. John Eppel Copyright © John Eppel
	The Midnight Blooming Although that night, beyond the pitch of ululating strings, was dim enough to veil the twinkle of a riot squad; although the atmospheric pressure on a square inch of my brain was more than fourteen comma seven pounds, my stanzas, oh my stanzas, were as light as plastic bucket blue. Although the band that played before had twanged amandla to a drift of flowers sweetly clenched; and then awethu wafted thousand thousand perfumes in reply; although the rain came down in dog- bites, and the midnight blossoms dripped a crimson song, my stanzas, oh my stanzas, were as pale as plastic bucket blue. John Eppel Copyright © John Eppel
For more information on John Eppel, please email info@sketchbooktrails.com Don’t forget to vote for John Eppel on the Sketchbooktrails page on Facebook if you like his work!

NB errors and omissions excepted