DEMO TAPE. A Group Show. At Gallery Momo until Saturday. DANNY SHORKEND reviews
VIDEO art is becoming a significant medium in South Africa and Africa generally. Paradoxically, being within the fine arts, it conveys its message as an alluring surface (beyond time) and as conforming to a kind of narrative (in time), though operating as an alternative, even philosophical vehicle for meaning, in contradistinction to mainstream film. This exhibition highlights “stories” in a South African context in the main, as well as exhibiting sensitivity to the medium itself.
Maurice Mbikayi’s web jacket, a documentation of performance wherein, clad in weird technological equipment – wires, telephonic accessories and what seems to be plugs – dances and appears to cry out. His dance is certainly not joyous and ends in a death-like comatose position. His performance and documentation as video is a protest against the mining of minerals, specifically in Africa, that is marred by exploitation of the land (and people). The background African music adds to the dramatic tension.
Perhaps the strongest work, by well known photographer Roger Ballen – Asylum of the birds– reveals a sinister, psychologically instinctual, one might say chilling encounter with birds and the human inhabitants of a suburban house in Johannesburg. The walls of the house seems to be littered with “primitive” drawings/pictographs, the filthy infestation of birds – nesting, flying, hankering after the debasements of its occupants – a Hitchcock-like horror.
The black and white space is sickly and it is unclear whether the artist’s statement is a psychological entrance into the dark crevices of the mind in general, a more specific comment about Johannesburg and South Africa in terms of political and economic bleakness, or simply, quite ironically, simply one man’s journey that actually tells of his love of birds on a rather lighter level – after all birds do fly! In this sense, there is also an aesthetically pleasing side to its theatrical “play”, a merely staged savagery.
Christine Cronje’s “weeping” forms an interesting use of high speed videography and large-scale projection, wherein two bowls sit side by side on separate screens exhibiting change, process, creation and destruction as water and dust pour, diffuse and then almost recreate the bowls. Materiality as such is closely observed as it disintegrates under external pressure/influences.
There is the promise of growth, albeit predicated on painful transformations and the capacity to slow time in order to really see, in order to be. The whole “narrative” suggests a play/struggle of identity, that is the paradoxical attempt to insulate self and also to be open and give way to outside causality. It is unclear whether, in that maelstrom, the “bowl” can remain autonomous (whole), a free self as it were as processes impinge on self in the continuous construction and reconstruction of identity within a South African and African context. Therefore, a coherent “African identity” amidst diversity and rigidity or conformity, may not be forthcoming.
This dichotomy is further explored in the video walls of Leila by Amirah Tajdin, which relate the love story between a Cape Malay girl and an American boy set in Cape Town. Their love is “tainted” by external pressures, given the girls’ Muslim background and the identity she “ought” to embody. Thus Tajdin explores the possible rigidity of one culture offset by the beautiful “counter culture” that is their love. Interestingly, this venture connects the gallery’s position in Bo Kaap with an evocative “local story”.
Lastly, the trailer not in my neighbourhood by Kurt Ordeson, highlights the forced urban removals in both Cape Town and New York in order for there supposively to be urban “development” and upliftment.
In truth, perhaps, such “development” reveals cultural, social and what is called “spatial violence”, a kind of architectural apartheid. The video is informative and controversial, a clear indication of art as social text, precluding or negating a purely aesthetic preoccupation.
All in all, a broad spectrum of styles and use of video brought together by narrative that reflects philosophical, social and psychological dimensions in a South African and African context, reaching outward (or inward) towards global-human considerations.
l 021 424 5150.