STILL LIFE AND LIFE DRAWINGS
A MOMENT CAPTURED OR PRESERVED
Workshop and Group Exhibition
Iziko South African National Gallery Annexe
23 November – 7 December 2018/ Cape Town, South Africa
THE EXHIBITION
The exhibition, curated by Lonwabo Kilani, is the visual manifestation of a 4-day workshop that runs before the opening. Five artists working within the contemporary South African art scene, will collaborate and create the artworks on display.
Lonwabo Kilani states, “the workshop will focus on the idea of movement and stillness, of life and death, the traditional idea of ‘life drawing’ that presupposes an image generated from life or something living. It will also reflect on ‘still lifes’, which is making work generated from a single or a group of objects gathered.”
Discussing the criteria for selection of the participants, Kilani reiterates that each of these artists has significantly affected the art world as they bring unique qualities into a collaborative process. “It is also that they have sought excellence in what they have created and because they have created works that broaden our understanding of the personal and collective journey within the human condition, and these are essential qualities for understanding and relating to still life, life and movement and the intricacy of this duality.”
In support of art education and the meaningful work museum educators conduct, the artists and curators of “Still Life and Life Drawings: A Moment Captured or Preserved?” will donate textbooks to further enrich the lessons being taught by museum educators at Iziko Museums.
Still Life and Life Drawings: A Moment Captured or Preserved? will be on show on Mondays to Fridays from 09:00 until 16:30, at the Iziko South African National Gallery Annexe, St Johns Road, Cape Town.
VERNISSAGE – SNEAK PREVIEW
THE WORKSHOP
“The workshop will focus on the idea of movement and stillness, of life and death, the traditional idea of ‘life drawing’ that presupposes an image generated from life or something living. It will also reflect on ‘still lifes’, which is making work generated from a single or a group of objects gathered.”
Iziko South African National Gallery Annexe – Precious moments from the first workshop days.
IMPRESSIONS FROM THE BACKSTAGE
Iziko South African National Gallery Annexe
FEATURED ARTISTS
Using their artistic background and skills to create a body of work that coalesces into an exposition on stillness and movement.
Dathini Mzayiya
Painting / Drawing
Born in 1979, Dathini Mzayiya is currently an artist in residency at The Factory of the Arts, a Centre for Humanities Research project at University of Western Cape (UWC), Woodstock in Cape Town. Mzayiya is a founding member of several arts initiative including Factory of the Arts (FOA), Africa South Arts Initiative (ASAI), Visual Arts Network South Africa (VANSA) and Gugulective artists collective.
After graduating at Community Arts Project (CAP) in Advance course for Visual Arts in 2001. Mzayiya participated in international artists Residencies and projects, including Greatmore Artists Studios, The Bag Factory Artist Studios, and Glenfiddich Distillery Artists in Residency Programme in Scotland, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands and Ethiopia. He’s work is both in private and in public collection, notably at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Maria Worth Town Hall in Austria and exhibited his work in several galleries including Erdmann Contemporary. Dathini has worked on projects for the South African Human Rights Media Centre with survivors of torture and violence in South Africa, Liberia, Kenya and South Sudanese refuges in Uganda.
Using oil paint, charcoal, sculpture, video and sound installation, Mzayiya’s critical and expressive art depicts the socio-political landscape of the post apartheid and a day-to-day life in contemporary South Africa.
Tazneem Wentzel
Mixed media / Archival
With an academic background in International Relations, Social Anthropology, I am presently a fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC, completing my MA in Food History. I am also a member of the arts collective Burning Museum and the education officer at the Simon’s Town Museum. My research and areas of interest has tended to gravitate towards people as producers of knowledge opposed to institutions as centres of knowledge manufacturers. It is for this reason the ‘archive’, has been a recurring preoccupation in the work that I do and the spaces that I find myself in.
Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi
Mixed media / Painting
Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi studied arts at Community Arts Project in year 2000 and 2001.
He attended and facilitated several art workshops both at Greatmore studios in Cape Town and abroad.
In 2010 he was awarded in The Dak’art Biennale in Dakar, Senegal Foundation Blachere Residency Award.
In 2011 he won an Award for Lava Thomas and Peter Danzig fellowship Awards for a Residency at Djerassi Artist’s Residency, in California.
In same year he was invited for a Thami Mnyele Artists residency in Amsterdam.
In the same year, he was awarded a fellowship residency at Sacater, Brazil.
In 2013 he was awarded a fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.
In 2017 he was invited for a residency at IAPSIS in Sweden.
He has also done cross media collaboration with dancers performing artists and musicians, exploring the genesis of his paintings, through movement and sound.
Ndikhumbule is currently represented by Barnard Gallery in Newlands Cape Town.
“I am a painter, Born and living in Cape Town, South Africa, Currently represented by Barnard gallery. Besides painting, I collaborate with musicians’ dancers and lighting technicians, who mostly use my paintings as inspiration for their creations. My work investigates human struggles through use of figurative painting. These narratives are investigated and then presented in a symbolic and figurative form, where I deal mostly with national and international political and social landscapes. It is about problems, mostly political faced by people in South Africa and abroad. These ideas are expressed through use of figures. This is also where I explore aesthetic approaches or illustrate my story telling by the use of the material, which is paint. It’s about how politics and social constraints shapes the way we move think.
Of course my approach is symbolic and in a surreal form. The origin of my imagery comes from the genesis of sound and movement, from sound and movement comes rhythm.
Rhythm and movement equals to a “central image” in the mind. I guess it’s what they call inspiration. Central image is a core part of narrative imagery, which has been generated by the elements of the imagined sound. So my painting comes from a hard to explain phenomenon taking place when I imagine, hear or listening to the sound, that also explains the relationship between sound and mark making. But it a very important genesis, hence I explore musical performances with jazz artists, dancers and visual artists. This process of working often ends up being a musical theatre, if I get to collaborate with performers, and live the artworks being stills for the performance piece.”
Thabo Pitso
Mixed media
Thabo Pitso was born in 1982 in the small township of Itsoseng near Litchtenburg,North West Province. He discovered his love of
art from an early age. In 2007, he decided to study Fine & Applied Art at Tshwane University of Technology. He obtained his B-Tech in 2010.
His work is very personal and abstract and is mostly about social
conditions in everyday life. Through metaphors, he tries to deconstruct the social and personal meaning of objects.
He is also exploring the role of different forms of propaganda in society, how social conditioning affects the way we are living.
He does this by juxtaposing images and objects that have functional and dysfunctional relations with each other.
He has a Minimalism approach to art and it’s not about one’s nationality, culture or social group, but about one’s individuality.
Thabo lives and works in Pretoria.
“Essentially I intend to visually document and present a study of how people interact and react to mass produced objects. (household products ,clothes, cars, houses,etc). I am also interested in the use of mass media tools (TV, radio, film, fashion, newspapers) and how they create visual images that are systematically designed to influence, alter, control social and personal habits of a person. I seek to explore the effects of mass media on the average person and how this social conditioning dictates the way people establish sentimental relationships with mass produced objects. I am interested in using and producing sculpture to deconstruct the relationship between human beings and mass produced objects.
The sculpture also explores rules and expectations by which consumerism guides the behaviour of humans and mass produced objects, particularly meanings and symbols that mass produced objects carry and which are recognized by people.”
Lonwabo Kilani
Artist – writer – facilitator – curator
Cape Town, South Africa
Trustee: Greatmore Studios, Woodstock
“I began my visual arts studies at the Community Arts Project (CAP) in Cape Town. The Community Art Project’s significant history with protest art drew my interest and became my entry to the art world. Thereafter I furthered my studies in Motion Pictures at AFDA.
Currently I am doing a curatorial course at UCT’S CENTRE for Curating the Archive. I have exhibited both locally an internationally and work in various mediums – painting, drawing, video and interactive media. Some of my collaborativearts residency initiatives are Gallery.exe and Studio147. These initiatives allowed for both dialogue and spaces for the participation of other artists.
In addition to these initiatives I facilitate independent experimental workshops (animation and visual arts) as well as curate independent exhibitions.”
ABOUT THE VENUE
IZIKO SOUTH AFRICAN NATIONAL GALLERY ANNEXE
South Africa’s premier art museum houses outstanding collections of South African, African and European art. Selections from the Permanent Collection change regularly to enable the Museum to have a full programme of temporary exhibitions, paintings, works on paper, photography, sculpture, beadwork, textiles and architecture. They provide insight into the extraordinary range of aesthetic production in this country, the African continent and further afield.
Iziko operates 11 national museums, the Planetarium and Digital Dome, the Social History Centre and three collection-specific libraries in Cape Town. The museums that make up Iziko have their own history and character, presenting extensive art, social and natural history collections that reflect our diverse African heritage. Iziko is a public entity and public benefit organisation that brings together these museums under a single governance and leadership structure.