Johannesburg-based artist Kay Hassan has created installations using video, found objects and photography for years, but local media coverage of his career has focused on his large-scale paper constructions made from decimated billboards. Urbanation, Hassan’s mid-career exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), should dispel the myth that his oeuvre is mostly two-dimensional: there are only three billboard reconstructions included in the show, one old and two new, which hang sparsely in JAG’s yawning Phillips Gallery.
The rest of the works in the exhibition are large-scale installations which, if nothing else, are evidence of years of perusing city locations, collecting and reinstating their throw-away paraphernalia. Hassan trawled streets, beaches and second-hand stores for the range of urban flotsam represented in Urbanation, which includes old clocks, rare LPs, clothes, shower curtains and military bags. These are organised into atmospheric environments, which occupy entire rooms in the gallery, much like his paper constructions in earlier exhibitions dictated the ambience of the spaces in which they hung.
Hassan is one of the first few nominees in JAG’s series of mid-career exhibitions, initiated in 2006, but his relationship with the South African art scene has for many years been a long-distance romance. His career had the uncommon fortune of being established in overseas museums rather than local commercial galleries. His absence is partly an indictment of a frail institutional presence in the South African art industry. He says: ”I work mostly outside the borders of this country and I find that my community, the people of this country, kind of miss out. But this is partly a problem of institutional funding … Here we tend to work for the market, because serious issues don’t sell.”
In Urbanation Hassan hauls out a full arsenal of ”serious issues”. The exhibition’s title alludes to his continuing interest in urban subjects — particularly the marginalised inhabitants of the city — but also to the current global phenomenon of explosive urbanisation. The world’s population is concentrated increasingly in urban areas and one of this exhibition’s most interesting discursive aims is to consider the ecological, spiritual and social consequences of this in South Africa and neighbouring states.
In an untitled series of installations, which together occupy three large rooms of the gallery, photographs of shreds of clothing washed up on a Mozambique beach are offset by four walls entirely covered in whole items of second-hand clothing. Hassan transforms the same room that Kendell Geers once infamously emptied out, by ”painting” its walls with brightly coloured garments. ”We are all painters, whether people are doing it consciously or unconsciously,” Hassan says. At once this installation hints at the action painting of the Abstract Expressionists and recalls the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in which everyday, often unwanted, objects were used as art media.
Like Shebeen (1997), a work that enveloped visitors in the effluvia of spilled beer, the clothing installation encroaches on senses other than sight. The musty smell of old clothes lingers in the room and the sounds of voices and footsteps are muted, making the space feel smaller than it actually is.
Hassan says this installation creates a link between the ubiquity of stuffed second-hand clothing shops in the Johannesburg inner city and a Mozambican religious tradition in which the clothes of a deceased family member are tossed into the ocean to represent the journey of the soul after it leaves the body. The circle is closed with a video projection in a third room showing people gleaning reusable scraps from an urban municipal dumping ground.
Hassan’s framing of this parochial spiritual custom with urban phenomena is not without an agenda. He fingers the practice of discarding clothes in the ocean as a serious ecological threat to the coastlines of Mozambique and the adjacent shores of Malawi, suggesting that ”the masses” need to be ”educated” about the environmental consequences of their actions. His reference to urban second-hand markets and the poor’s re-use of what is deemed garbage by the affluent seems to condone these as less poetic systems for administering society’s junk.
In another installation titled The Boxers photographs taken in one of Hillbrow’s popular boxing gyms are juxtaposed with hanging boxing bags made from old military sacking. Sound clips of military drums and the thud of well-thrown punches emanate unnervingly from the bags, associating the growing interest in this sport, particularly among Hillbrow’s youth, with a history of institutionalised violence in South Africa.
The three lonely paper constructions included in the exhibition tie Hassan to his studio, a space adjacent to his house in Troyeville and, revealingly, to South African audiences. However, they seem thrown into the mix as a token, the fulfilment of a criterion that will allow him to use the gallery more adventurously without incurring accusations that his career has been inconsistent. The diverse environments created in Urbanation, apart from their common investment in cultural vernaculars, seem to have different agendas. While this is not in itself a bad thing, how the installations communicate with one another — and lend cohesion to the entire exhibition — does not appear entirely resolved.