Brenda Atkinson on an exhibition of South African art in Switzerland
Internationally curated exhibitions of “South African art” are an odd phenomenon: split between a loaded and layered history of colonial misappropriation, and a present anxious for the conciliatory dialogues of “cultural exchange”, they somehow fall into the space of that split, touching sides with a resounding ambivalence.
The catalogue for towards-transit: New Visual Languages in South Africa, which is one such exhibition currently on show in Zurich, begins with two strangely juxtaposed quotations. One is from Durban-based graphic design meister Garth Walker (of iJusi fame), which proffers a “new social and visual order” in language approximate to white middle-class praise poetry. The other, from cultural studies guru Homi Bhabha, is a delicate, hyper- sophisticated theoretical exposition about beginnings and endings, identity and difference, inclusion and exclusion.
Perhaps anticipating the criticisms that would come from South Africans concerned with the aesthetic, political and cultural ghetto-isation of South African artistic production, the Swiss organisers of towards-transit set the show up as just such a mixture of bluntness and considered intellectualisation.
The main exhibition is installed (but apparently not curated) in the Blue Room, a large space located in a building that administers the futures of exiles and global transients attempting to gain legal residence in notoriously xenophobic Zurich. The space itself is on the fourth floor of the building, which stands in a pristine, semi-industrial part of urban Zurich, alongside another building which houses several of the city’s most prominent contemporary art galleries.
In the Blue Room, work by South African artists, graphic artists and designers is uneasily crammed along the boundary of the blunt and the urbane: portraits from Bobby Bobsons’ studios hang in a fully reconstructed shebeen by Steven Maqashela.
The shebeen intercepts the encounter with Berni Searle’s by comparison sublimely ribboned prints, again parenthesised by Bongi Dhlomo Mautloa’s large installation rooms. A series of ruder works by Bitterkomix boy Anton Kannemeyer hangs on the external back wall of Mautloa’s work, looking on to Walker’s iJusi posters, which face archival material from Drum magazine pasted against the venue’s rear wall.
Opposite the rough Blue Room, the Serge Ziegler Gallery is home to a video installation by Minnette Vari and large- scale colour photographic prints by Zwelethu Mthethwa.
The diverse “visual languages”of towards-transit are thus spatially and discursively packaged as a self- consciously eclectic collection, one in which “South Africa” is the hold-all term for a transitional clash of styles, intentions, perspectives and markets. “Transit” is geographically contexualised by a venue that is neighbour to a bureau for global minorities who are literally in transit in Zurich. The situation of Vari and Mthethwa’s work across the road requires a literal transition of viewers between the two spaces.
But as clever as these links might be, their execution through the exhibitions – as well as the associated informal talks, a conference and a web site – seems motivated more by gung-ho diplomatic agendas and practical considerations than considered curatorial and intellectual work. The conference itself mimed the bizarre disjunctures of the exhibition: those who attended reeled between Bhabha’s hard-hitting eloquence and Walker’s fixation with random and transitional (D)urban typographies.
This is not to suggest that the intentions of Pro Helvetia – the Swiss Arts Council in Cape Town which organised the event – were insincere, nor that this particular exchange was unproductive. But the agendas which are served in the process by definition involve a degree of political expediency, and South African artists will not benefit for much longer from their “flavour of the month” global cultural currency.
Those artists who declined to be on the exhibition were, unsurprisingly, artists who have already had a considerable degree of international exposure. They did so precisely because, by allowing ourselves to be categorised in terms of a national attribute, we risk being trapped in a discourse that recapitulates colonial voyeurism.
“Africa”, in this discourse, again becomes the object of an appropriating gaze which, although perhaps not as violently exploitative, still sees “us” as “them” – something of a global curiosity.
What these shows also set up – and this could be positive if managed productively – is a kind of counterfeit unity which comes when South Africans are thrown together in a strange country. The level of debate that the artists engaged in away from home, in the hotel, in the shebeen, in the informal talks, is one that is rarely, if ever, achieved here. And this by artists and writers who will probably see each other accidentally, if at all, once they get home.
That these debates inevitably take place on foreign soil is, as Kendell Geers has pointed out, a problem for the process of South African art. While the towards- transit website exists to facilitate local access to those debates, a web forum is nowhere near as fluid or honest a thing as verbal interaction.
What remains is a queasy sense that we long too urgently to have ourselves heard, everywhere but on our home ground, by everyone but those who, it seems to me, need to hear us, themselves, most.