Brenda Atkinson: Johannesburg Biennale update
Okwui Enwezor, artistic director of this year’s Johannesburg Biennale, has spoken out against media coverage of the arts in South Africa, as well as corporate “stinginess” regarding local arts funding. Despite the fact that resistance to apartheid produced a flourishing creative community, and some extraordinary work across the artistic field, post-apartheid South Africa seems to have relegated its artists to the cultural and political periphery.
As Enwezor himself comments, this phenomenon is hardly unique to South Africa – arts budgets are usually the first to go when governments are cash-strapped. But where corporate sponsorship of the arts in some countries tends to make up for the short-fall, in South Africa support for the arts is often low on corporate marketing and social investment agendas.
According to Enwezor, South African media is to an extent complicit in the stifling of new arts projects, tending as it does to focus on the failures of contemporary artistic and cultural engagement. The fate of this year’s Johannesburg Biennale is no exception. With just over six weeks to go before launch-time, it has, according to the Biennale offices, received negligible coverage that has been more concerned with the political fallout of its predecessor than with any fresh insights the new exhibition might offer. “It’s a terrible neglect to ignore arts and culture,” says Enwezor. “Culture in South Africa is a necessary ingredient of democratic transformation – it must have full participation as a site of exchange of ideas between people. Debate is a sign of life.”
For Enwezor, the Biennale itself is an opportunity to convene “contact zones”, where serious dialogue, disagreement, and exchange can take place.
He explains that this year’s Biennale is being held, “not to resolve differences or to assert polemic, although those aspects might occur in the shows themselves – and why not? We must see art not as a pure phenomenon, but as a language that challenges and complicates our relationship to the world.”
As such, Enwezor and the Biennale’s five international curators have invited artists who are not necessarily “champions of aesthetic formalism”, but whose work poses durable social questions. Confirmed local artists include Santu Mofokeng, Jeremy Wafer, Moshekwa Langa, Marlaine Tosoni, Willem Boshoff and Jo Ractliffe, among others, and the international contingent includes such luminaries as America’s Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nigeria’s Oladele Bamgboye and Mexico’s Gabriel Orozco.
Despite financial struggles, and even rumours that the show might not go on due to lack of sufficient funding, it seems that Enwezor will have the capacity to deliver a tightly conceived and impressive show.
“A lot of countries are funding their own artists,” says Enwezor, “and we also have funding from the French and the British Councils, as well as the Rockefeller and Norton Foundations.”
Although the Department of Arts and Culture is contributing financially, Enwezor sees the real task for himself, his successors and the South African arts community, as bringing in partners from the private sector.
He points out that the Biennale is just one instance of this need, which, as in Havana and Istanbul, is a moment in an ongoing process – one that should ultimately lead to a focus on the art works themselves, and not, as Enwezor puts it, “on the trials and problems of the people trying to organise these events”.