Video art at Twiice International and Paul Smith
The rationale behind placing art videos in clothing and furniture shops is to break barriers between contemporary art, fashion and design. Artlogic wants to demonstrate to our audience that contemporary culture stretches across disciplines and good video art is equally at home in a boutique store as it is in a gallery.
Highlights of this special project include a video by Avant Car Guard titled gif.
Avant Car Guard are a Johannesburg-based three member visual art collective, exhibiting and authoring as a singular artist. They are comprised of Zander Blom, Jan-Henri Booyens and Michael MacGarry, all individual artists in their own right. They have exhibited at a national and international level for several years, with their production being based on a conceptual, self-reflexive and satirical approach to the art world — its markets and practitioners as well as the process of creating art.
Their work is manifest across multidisciplinary means; through photography, sculpture, performance, multiples, installation and painting.
This piece uses the Avant Car Guard’s Artthrob diary as its starting point.
Vulnerability and strength
Lerato Shadi is a young performance and video artist based in Johannesburg. In Aboleleng we see a figure against a green background wearing an odd costume in a tone close to the her skin tone, suggesting full nudity. Shadi starts to pull a knitted string, hidden in the costume, from between her legs. An image of vulnerability and strength, Aboleleng considers the moment where our innermost ideas are set up for public scrutiny, like an artist first exhibiting new work. The woollen string itself is displayed on a plinth across from the video projection. The bright green background of the video soaks the room in an eerie glow; for those familiar with television production it is recognisable as the green screen used for adding images in postproduction. It suggests a space for projection of ideas on to the work, moving it from a deeply personal realm into a more public place.
Every breath you take
Hema (or Six hours of out-breath captured in 792 balloons) takes a public space as its starting point. The work is based on footage of a performance staged by Shadi at the offices of the Ogilvy advertising agency in Cape Town. She relates the choice of context to the nature of the modern working environment where our primary needs of proper breathing and physical posture are too easily forgotten. For the performance, the artist spent exactly six hours seated on the staircase in the centre of the building, exhaling every single breath into balloons.
This feat was possible because of her experience with meditation and breathing techniques, but it left her physically and mentally exhausted. Her fingers developed bloody blisters from tying the balloons. By the end of the performance, a colourful collection of nearly 800 balloons had formed on and around the staircase, physically encapsulating six hours of Shadi’s breath. For the video, Shadi has played with the editing process to capture the essence of the performance, rather than document it in its entirety. Like the green screen in Aboleleng, Hema’s method of production indicates an awareness of and concern with the medium of video.
Lonely dance
Another exciting artist featured is Nandipha Mntambo. Her first foray into performance is to be seen in her video, Ukungenisa, in which she rehearses the steps of a bullfighter in the abandoned Praça de Touros in Maputo, the arena where black Mozambicans once fought for the entertainment of the colonial Portuguese. The bullfight staged by Mntambo is an atypical one, as she confronts a bull that doesn’t appear. The physical contact with the animal is sublimated by her wearing a cowhide matador outfit. The arena is empty and the public spectacle becomes a private act, a lonely dance, an intimate display of her fear, or her fearlessness. The absence of the visible threat makes it more difficult to set the fighting and the protecting apart: as confrontation and refuge, masculine and feminine, aggression and defence, they are by nature at opposite ends of the same spectrum. We are confronted with this middle space of uncertain borders, framed in the arena.
Rendering the body
Athi-Patra Ruga is young artist whose work comfortably straddles the divides between fashion, performance and photography. Ruga’s interest in fashion stems from a complex understanding of the body and the politics its dressing reveals. He speaks about body proportions and gender-based preconceptions informing clothing, which in turn renders the body rather than simply covering it. His shift into performance has seen him importing this concept of clothing into energised situations, informed by a razor-sharp sense of time and place.
By choosing these venues, this project plans to introduce the medium of video art to a new audience.