Jo'burg art picks: October 21 2011

Emergent curator Portia Malatji(with the assistance of Same Mdluli and Pearl Mamathuba) has used the probing fiction of Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa as a starting point for her exhibition Random Access.

■ Emergent curator Portia Malatji(with the assistance of Same Mdluli and Pearl Mamathuba) has used the probing fiction of Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa as a starting point for her exhibition Random Access. The show contains the work of three artists: Robert Machiri, Lehlohonolo Mashaba and Molefe Thwala. Agualusa’s novel The Book of Chameleons “explores the contestation of memory, history and truth”.

It’s about an individual who deals in the “unusually scandalous business of selling history, memory and constructed identity to a new bourgeois clientele that is obsessed with acquiring the right lineage”, according to the curator’s statement. Memories of deceased relatives and forced migration are explored as well as letters and text messages.

Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, 10 Mahlathini Street, Fordsburg, from October 26 to November 9.

■ People on the Edge is an exhibition of paintings and gourd heads by Johannesburg-based artist Lettie Gardiner.

A passionate painter of people, Gardiner’s work is celebrated for its evocation of “quiet disquiet”. Her figures are poised between innocence and sexuality, connection and detachment. They are individuals and twins, siblings and solitaries. In a departure from her previous work, Gardiner has used dried gourds from Limpopo and the Free State to create a series of decapitated, quirky heads that hover on the frontline between male and female, this world and another. The exhibition is a luminous celebration of the value of human life, as well as its vulnerability.

Thompson Gallery, 78 Third Avenue, Melville, until October 29.