The festival will host four guests who are major gay or lesbian filmmakers:
* John Greyson is a Toronto-based videomaker who is widely regarded as being in the forefront of politically motivated, risk-taking gay film in North America. The director of the brilliant Zero Patience, which caused such a stir at last year’s festival, Greyson will be conducting the Festival Workshop with Catherine Saalfield. * Lauran Hoffman (right) wrote and produced Bar Girls, based on her highly successful stage play of the same name. The film was the opening or closing night selection at the London, Sydney, Melbourne, Oslo, and Turin Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals. As a performance artist and lecturer she developed an ethnically diverse women’s performance group in Los Angeles called Wild Women of Words.
* Pratibha Parmar is an Indian-born feminist and activist now based in London. She has been making stirring documentaries on social and political issues since 1986. Much of her work has concerned itself with issues relating to lesbians, the disabled, Aids, racism and the plight of Asian and African-American women. Parmar is the winner of the 1993 Frameline Award.
* Catherine Saalfield is a renowned activist from the USA who produces, makes, and assists in recruiting funding for films about Aids, lesbians and gay issues and multi-culturalism. Saalfield has also been responsible for empowering gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth through the establishment of Bent-TV, a project providing opportunities to learn how the media works and how it can be used to combat prejudice. Saalfield will be conducting the Festival Workshop with John
All the radios of the rainbow
The exhibition of radios disguised as artworks that made a splash two years ago has a new life — it’s going overseas. HAZEL FRIEDMAN reports
You could hardly describe it as a merger made in the boardrooms of heaven — the urbane son of an illustrious family with the Etonian accent and the earth man who is more at home in remote rural villages than in the rarified atmosphere of the art gallery. But ever since their first tentative steps into the realm of co-curatorship — united only by a passion for divergent art causes — the partnership between Trent Read and Brett Sher has proven to be a serendipitous success.
For the uninitiated, Sher is the nomadic art dealer who made more than airwaves with his 702 radio artworks show in 1993. Read is the art dealer who launched a young generation of art stars through the Everad Read Contemporary gallery and the man with the balls to support an exhibition that many believed would fizzle out faster than a damp cracker.
Three years later, people still recall the time the ERC was transformed from citadel of the avant garde into a 702 theme park. The show was such a sell-out success that a year later both Read and Sher embarked on another craftart extravaganza, this time sponsored by Unitrans, called — appropriately enough — A Moving Experience.
Like their first venture, this show could easily have skidded into the debris of its laudable
Cynics anticipated hoards of wire bicycles stashed handlebar-to-handlebar in a gallery-cum-shed.
Instead, they found hoards of ingeniously designed vehicles produced from waste material by formally uneducated artists throughout Southern Africa, as well as some refreshingly humorous contributions by a spatter of university-trained artists who put their “if it’s art it must be serious” egos on
This year, Sher and Read have been invited to curate another radio show, to be held at De Kunstahl in Rotterdam on November 18.
As with the first two, it is predicated less on aesthetic pretensions than on fun and the desire to showcase the talents of Southern African artists normally marginalised by poverty and geographical remoteness alongside their more established urban
If it goes down well with the Dutch public, plans are afoot to send the show to the Pompidou Centre in Paris as well as to other parts of Europe where the show will link up with various galleries.
Sher is understandably both terrified and elated about this new venture into untamed turf. “It’s like graduating from primary school into high school,” he says. “So much is resting on the response to the show.” He adds: “The most rewarding aspect of these projects is the challenges they present. They keep me sane, offering me a sense of purpose and passion, even when the process is about to drive me insane.”
“I don’t have Brett’s patience for going back time and time again to artists in Katlehong and KwaZulu, making sure they come up with the goods” admits Read. “My contribution probably lies in keeping a fine-art curatorial eye on things.” He adds: “In many respects radios in a rural context are a continuationof the age-old oral tradition. Unlike televisions they play a more intimate role as companions to communities who do not have access to the latest techno-tools.”
With assistance from Read and intrepid sidekick Brian Berkowitz, Sher commissioned about 50 radio artworks by artists who are fast becoming familair fixtures on the Sher-Read roadshow, such as Steve Makashela, Emlee Masenabo from KwaNdebele and the Mangena brothers from Zimbabwe, as well as the pick of the mainstream gallery crop, such as Norman Catherine, CJ Morkel, Guy du Toit and David Roussow. There’s also work by rural radio supremo Alsom Zuma whose Alszum “station in stereo” — a local-content line-up scripted by Zuma himself — comprises titbits on the fashions and foibles of rural life , broadcast from a magnificently carved wooden chest; a spaza radio produced by Lambert Moroloki and Brigitte Hunter.
Sounds like a truly multi-culti melody composed of rural and urban harmonies. But it is one thing to temporarily unite art under a rainbow radio station; it is entirely another to address the socio-cultural dissonances that continue to affect art in post-apartheid South Africa and to establish an infrastructure that will support and promote local art on an ongoing sustainable basis.
But Read disagrees: “The first radio show spawned the transport show, which led to another show on the same theme being taken to Holland”, he points out. “As a result of these exhibitions, 15 to 20 rural artists are employed by us on a full-time basis, and they make a living from their art”.