Ranging from post-avant-garde video installations to the figurative oils of an Eastern Cape Old Master, the exhibitions for Festival 2003 use different visual languages to articulate similar preoccupations with identity and belonging.
Standard Bank Young Artist award-winner Berni Searle is fêted internationally for the vivid way she uses her own body to create resonant and technically immaculate still photographs, and video and film pieces.
The works installed for the festival will include the lyrical Home and Away commissioned this year for a Spanish exhibition. It shows the artist’s body floating in the sea between Morocco and Spain — a sea where numbers of African refugees drown each year. Her red skirt and white petticoats are steadily blackened by an ominous ink tide.
Tracey Rose’sCiao Bella is the centrepiece of a multimedia exhibition of her film and photography presented by the Goodman Gallery. A triple-screen DVD projection, commissioned for the Venice Biennale in 2001, Ciao Bella presents a supper table with 13 characters — all female and all from different times and worlds.
Homing-in, curated by Virginia MacKenny, Paul Edmonds and Willem Boshoff focuses on the work of emerging young artists who explore and deconstruct what constitutes ‘home’ in South Africa today.
Maureen Quin’sbronze sculpture has featured regularly at the festival. For many festinos, this year’s retrospective of her work will present a chance to re-trace her long journey as an artist committed to a heroic medium and often engaged with social issues.
George Pemba (1912-2001), that loyal and well-loved father figure of Eastern Cape art, is commemorated in an exhibition of large colour posters containing a biographical text richly illustrated with paintings, drawings, photos and memorabilia. Pemba’s figurative paintings made him the visual poet laureate of the humble life.
Joanne Bloch fills her small glass-fronted showcases with tiny nicknacks in a way that releases the poetic in the trivial.
Langa Magwa’s giant Zulu bracelets were seen at the 2002 Festival in Male Order. He’s back this year using hide, grass and wood, and playing again with scale.
Information supplied by National Arts Festival