Durban art picks: June 24 2011

Two of Durban’s more interesting cultural spaces have new shows on this week.

■ Artist Naretha Pretorius engages in a deconstruction of her identity in her solo exhibition Onthaal Onthul.

Interrogating the various forces that have shaped her, the artist is primarily concerned with history, ­geography, language, culture and, most importantly, memory. Having grown up and lived in Pretoria for more than 20 years, a large chunk of the forces that formed Pretorius’s sensibilities took place in the context of an archetypal white Afrikaans family environment. Onthaal means ‘formal reception” and onthul means ‘to reveal”, so we are invited to see Pretorius reveal herself—figuratively speaking, of course. Her life is on a slide under a microscope and we see a subtle ­dialectic at play: the role of model parents is as much circumspect as it is sentimental and, enamoured as she is with a seemingly idyllic youth, Pretorius’s work is lined with a darkness that brushes ominously at the soft-focused fringes.

artSPACE durban, 3 Millar Road, off Umgeni Road. Opens Monday June 27 at 6.30pm. Tel: 031 312 0793. Visit www.artspace-durban.com.

■ Our Lives of Deckadence is an exciting exhibition of photography, art and film that showcases skateboard culture in South Africa. An initiative of Working Class, Verb and Revolution, the show is a collection of work celebrating a love for skateboarding by some of South Africa’s biggest underground talents, including Gavin Scott, Craig Scott, Darren Jacoby, Tyrone Bradley, Sam Clark, Brett Shaw, Richard Hart, Skullboy, Tokyo-Go-Go, Christian Mugnai, Bruce Mackay, Warwick Kay, Bryce Louw, Dos, Paul Senyol, Jean de Wet and other Verb ­artists.

Gallery 415, 415 Umgeni Road. Visit www.gallery415.co.za.