Five South African artists are exhibiting at Havana’s sexy Biennale this year
Sue Williamson Each of the world’s great art biennials have their own character. The oldest and best known, the Venice Biennale, is highly commercialised, characterised by infighting between the local city officials and visiting art people, and only the curators and the most important artists are invited to the opening bash of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Peggy Guggenheim’s gift to the city.
Most of the artists are not invited to anything much and spend their time fighting for one more spotlight for their piece. Last time, there were only two artists from the entire African continent.
Sydney is great: the host Gallery of New South Wales plans a whole series of events for visiting artists and all the embassies throw parties. The Johannesburg Biennale: alas, it is no more, but for all its faults, it buzzed with energy. Of them all, perhaps the Havana Biennale is the sexiest.
Set against the lush Caribbean landscape and decaying grandeur, the opening ceremonies of the Seventh Havana Biennale took place on November 17 on the Plaza Vieja, the heart of old Havana, accompanied by performance, dance and music Cuban style. Three days before there was a party that started at midnight to celebrate the city’s 481st anniversary.
The theme of the Biennale this year is “Communication and Dialogue”. The intention of the curators is “to reflect communication and dialogue among human beings in the midst of global and economic turmoil and the re-emergence of ethnic, religious and cultural particularisms which seem to increasingly accentuate the differences among the various communities and nations of the world”. The curator for Africa was Magda Gonzlez Mora, long associated with the Wifredo Lam Art Centre, situated just off the Plaza Vieja, and the site of the Biennale office. Her choices from South Africa were Jane Alexander, Willem Boshoff, Kevin Brand, Lisa Brice and William Kentridge a very white line-up, though wnderkind Moshekwa Langa was one of the participants last time around. Alexander is showing a series of 15 photographic collages in which the artist places her sculptures in landscapes, set in five rows of three under the title African Adventure: Cape of Good Hope.
The series represents a journey undertaken by Alexander’s characters, the slightly stunted, masked figures based on the streetchildren of Cape Town. The names of the characters, gang names (the bom boys, lonely boys, fancy boys and sexy boys), portray simultaneously the bravado and loneliness of the children. They progress from the Karoo to the centre of the Mother City, ending up at the Adventure Centre and the old Mountain View hotel in Long Street.
Somewhat linked in theme is Kentridge’s Shadow Procession, (1999) a 35-mm film transferred to video and DVD. It was shot using animated paper cut-out figures, three dimensional objects, shadows, plus edited film from Ubu Tells the Truth. In the seven-minute film, shadow figures made out of dark cut-out shapes trail in ragged form from the left to the right side of the screen. The melancholy sounds of an accordian, played by Johannesburg street-musician Alfred Makgalemele, are heard in the background.
In a review of Shadow Processions, film critic Ari Sitas writes: “The film as a total experience, feels unresolved: has Kentridge abandoned any empathy with his subject matter? Has he flattened everything into an undifferentiated world of raw materials, there to be played with without referential consequence?”
The work of Boshoff and Brand engages more directly with the Biennale’s theme of communication and dialogue.
Boshoff’s piece Writing in the Sand pays respect to South Africa’s official languages of Sesotho sa Leboa, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, isiNdebele, isiXhosa and isiZulu. Says Boshoff: “Today, in post-apartheid South Africa, we mistakenly believe that languages are no longer under siege that their place in our new Constitution is a guarantee for their survival.”
In this work, Boshoff stencils text on to the floor in sand, making an area 4m x 10m. Sand, of course, is a highly unstable medium, blurred by wind, washed away by water. Writing in Sand deals primarily with this loss. It points at an abject extinction of a people’s collective myth when they no longer share it by word of mouth. It also hints at the figurative nature of information in cyberspace and the loss of smaller languages, such as San, Khoisan, Khoekhoen, Nama and Griqua, due to the dominance and pervasiveness of super languages in the world’s media.
Brand’s piece, Babble, also deals with language. Brand is known for work in which he reconstructs well-known images in pixels in white, shades of grey and black most famously, Sam Nzima’s photograph of Hector Peterson, the first casualty of police fire in Soweto in 1976, which Brand titled Pieta and adhered to the walls of the Cape Town Castle for Faultlines in 1996.
For the Havana Biennale, Brand has worked from the famous Breugel painting of the Tower of Babel. Cutting woodblocks into squares with raised details of scraps of letters and communications symbols, Brand vacuum-formed sheets of clear plastic on to these, then painted on the colours from the back. A final touch, once the work is in position in Havana, will be the addition of gold leaf highlights in certain areas. A second set of the sheets will be given to Dutch artist Rob Moonen who will meet Brand in Havana, and decide how to use his set according to his response to the city.
Lisa Brice has responded to the theme by taking along a series of her Exit boxes. Each of these illuminated signs tells a short story in four images bases on internationally recognised signage icons. As part of her installation, Brice will also work directly on the walls of one of the vaulted spaces in the historic Morro Castle, to make a large scale drawing using paint with a special velvet finish.
Originally conceived for Latin American and Caribbean artists, the Havana Biennale has cast its net wider to include artists from Asia, Africa and the Middle East with an emphasis on work from developing countries.
Other attractions for visitors this year will be an exhibition of Jean Michel Basquiat (a Basquiat show is scheduled for Durban soon). A whole slew of other events, including an architectural conference, are part of the proceedings.
For information see http://universes-in -universe.de/car/habana/bien7/english.htm. The Biennale runs until January 5 2001