With summer here, and South Africa a favoured destination, a stop at the Zeitz Mocca is highly recommended. As Africa’s largest contemporary art museum and a ‘platform for Africans to tell their own story’, these exhibitions should be a must see in your travel itinerary. As they say these days, do it for the culture!
Addio Del Passato, Dusthouse
Yinka Shonibare’s, MBE (RA), occupation of the Dusthouse, the third building that forms part of the Zeitz MOCAA campus, is an extraordinary acknowledgement of how the past and present engage to create meaning. Historically, the Dusthouse filtered the air of the adjoining industrial structures to protect the lungs of the workers and stop the building from exploding.
Shonibare’s, MBE (RA), Addio del Passato tells the story of Lord Nelson’s rejected love and plays out as an endurance performance. The sound of the opera resonates throughout the Dusthouse 24 hours a day. Four floors of stained glass windows are illuminated from the interior. The extraordinary projection draws in the audience across the bridge from the interior of the museum or from the stairways from the museum parking below.
Ends 26 August 2018
Now and Then: El Loko/Kyle Morland
Now and Then: El Loko/Kyle Morland introduces an intergenerational dialogue between a historical artist and a young artist, resulting in a greater understanding of the often derided, linear progression of artistic practice. The inaugural exhibition in the museum’s sculpture garden unveils a major commission by El Loko (Togo) and works by the local sculptor Kyle Morland (South Africa).
El Loko’s nine laminated glass discs are both the ceiling of the museum and the floor of the rooftop sculpture garden, now standing as a memorial to the artist and his contribution to the universality of artistic expression. Kyle Morland’s presentation is an ongoing acknowledgement of the technical and conceptual inheritances from 20th-century abstract sculpture.
Ends 27 August 2018
Luanda, Encyclopaedic City
Luanda, Encyclopaedic City consists of twenty-three stacks of five thousand mass-produced images from the artist’s photographic series Found Not Taken (2009-2013). This site-specific intervention in the museum will mark the first time that this installation has been exhibited since winning the Golden Lion Award at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013).
The installation unravels the latent complexity inherent to the theme of the 55th Biennale: Encyclopaedic Palace. When a palace is encyclopedic, it becomes a city: in fact, the city incorporates an encyclopaedic multiplicity of spatial conditions and situations within a single complex entity.
Edson Chagas’ artworks are exhibited in a random order. Each visitor is invited to walk through the space and to collect the artworks and thus assemble their own encyclopaedia.
Human Nature
Human Nature is a debut solo exhibition that presents an extensive body of ethereal paintings created by Ruby Swinney following her graduate show at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2015.
Human Nature takes the viewer on an existential journey, prompting self-reflection as one navigates through the various curated terrains such as ‘The Province,’ ‘The Cityscape,’ ‘Water,’ ‘Nature,’ and ‘The Garden.’ It becomes clear that humans actively seek to establish a place in nature, a space that is often vastly unknown and uncontrollable. Nature’s mastery over us is evident in how its looking presence influences emotional states. In this sense, the meanings of Swinney’s paintings transcend rational thought. The silence evoked by the indescribable resonates with the quotes that grace the walls of the exhibition. Each quote arches back and forth rhythmically to strike a deep chord within and initiates sometimes overwhelming moments of introspection— a near on near Stendhal effect, conjuring up questions that pervade our everyday thoughts.
Ends 31 October 2018
Source: Zeitz Mocca