JOHANNESBURG
Art
In 2008 the New Museum in New York held an exhibition called After Nature, which at once diagnosed that the zeitgeist amongst artists was geared towards concerns about nature and made sure that thereafter it in fact was. Since this influential exhibition, young artists working with environmental themes seem to be more visible than they were before. Even in South Africa, the pendulum seems finally to be swinging away from inward-gazing identity critiques in art, and towards concerns with how humans negotiate the external world. Two exhibitions recently opened in Johannesburg – Lerato Shadi’s Mosako Wa Sepione (A Circle of Mirrors) and Sean Slemon’s In the Red/In The Black – consider the relationship between the natural and the man-made or unnatural.
Shadi’s Mosako Wa Sepione at Goethe On Main is a screening of two video performances complemented by a sculpture which is the residue of a performance executed at the opening on January 14. The sculpture, titled Se Sa Feleng (which means ‘that which does not end” in SeTswana), is a metal grid woven through with red wool tracing the movement Shadi’s body as on the afternoon of the opening she crawled in and out of the blocks in the shape of an infinity symbol. The work alludes to a SeTswana idiom which holds that all natural things must come to an end, and that anything that doesn’t end is an abomination of nature.
The two video pieces document two separate performances, both of which require great physical and mental stamina of Shadi. In Mmitlwa, Shadi, seated on a white plinth, wraps herself entirely in masking tape and then painstakingly unbinds herself. In Selogile, she knits a long red thread while seated in the Lotus position for seven hours. Both of these works suggest her alignment with organic processes through meditation.
Sean Slemon’s In the Red/In the Black takes a more lucid approach to environmental critique, examining the ways in which a capitalist economy exploits of nature. This exhibition of installation, drawings and digital prints runs under the auspices of the Project Room at Brodie/Stevenson until February 13. – Anthea Buys
Music
If you’re a fan of experimental industrial (a rare breed in this town), and haven’t given NuL a chance yet, make sure you get down to the Bohemian on Friday.
NuL are a band founded on technological experimentation, and this innovation means that they now carry the torch of Afrikaans industrial, picking it up where Battery 9 left off and carrying it even further into the extreme. These are no Rammstein clones, despite their use of authoritarian costume and imagery. Their sound is tinged with glitch and EBM, bringing to mind bands such as Autechre and Einsturzende Neubauten. It’s not for the faint hearted, or the close minded.
Bands who combine a commitment to sonic innovation and a strong visual philosophy are hard to come by, which is all the more reason to get to one of NuL’s gigs. The gig kicks off at 9pm and entry is R40. – Lisa van Wyk
CAPE TOWN
Art
Is death dead? Jean Baudrillard thought so. ‘The perfect crime,” Baudrillard writes ‘is the extermination of the real by its double.” There is no more otherness, because everything has been reduced to sameness. There is no more mystery, and no more uncertainty, only a blinding, universal transparency. Art is dead. ‘Even death itself is under threat of death.”
In his first solo exhibition in South Africa in more than 10 years, showing at the Michael Stevenson gallery until March 6 Cohen engages in a similar critique. Framed as an attempt to refocus attention on the artist as an image maker, the exhibition is, in many ways, a retrospective showcasing Cohen’s two decade long career. On the surface this sort of static summation seems contradictory to his life-long struggle to transcend the deathly fetishism of the object and the production of merchandise.
But Cohen is not so easily co-opted.
Seen in retrospect, his early ‘anti-apartheid” mash-ups shown alongside more recent artist’s books incorporating family ‘mementos” of the Nazi era highlight how simulation can become as dangerous as the actual crime. Also on view are videos of some of Cohen’s early public interventions, as well as the costumes from these performances. Cut free from their original context these sculptural assemblages take on a frightening afterlife as surviving fragments from ritualistic crimes against culture; performance relics that mirror the very process of objectification and fetishising they challenge.
Against this backdrop the video of Cohen’s latest performance piece, Golgotha, takes on a new resonance. According to Cohen, the work aims to explore ‘the disappearance of death from public life.” In order to do so, Cohen straps on a pair of a pair of exquisitely macabre ‘skulletoes” and visits some of our most famous late capitalist ‘crime scenes”: Wall Street, Times Square and Ground Zero. It’s a fatal strategy that’s pure Baudrillard. A return, as it were, to the scene of the perfect crime, and look at what life is like after the murder of the real.
But while Baudrillard gave up hope in art, Cohen continues to believe; pitting memory again memorialising, and tenderness, pain and humanity against the spectacle of death in a life affirming attempt to transcend objectification; to brutally and beautifully expose our power and fragility. The artist takes patrons on a walkabout of the exhibition at 11am on January 22 in aid of Friends of the South African National Gallery. Admission is R20. – Miles Keylock
Music
There are artists whose role in culture is nothing less than unique, which makes it difficult to categorise them. Neo Muyanga belongs among such people. He is simultaneously a first-class composer, musician, poet, stylist, innovator, curator and ideologue. He’s a Soweto boy whose relentless thirst for knowledge lead him to Italy where he studied the Italian Madrigal tradition before returning home to he fine tuned his ear with an audio engineering at Downtown Studios. As the co-founded the acoustic duo, Blk Sonshine (with Masauko Chipembere) he’s toured the world, sharing their rapturous, rootsy diasporic soul-pop music with the poetry, hip-hop and acoustic folk circuits from Cape Town to New York.
As a composer, Neo has created music for contemporary African dance, film and stage (most recently Shakespeare’s The Tempest directed by Janice Honeyman and starring John Kani and Sir Anthony Sher). In addition, he’s the co-curator of the annual cross-cultural and cyber-spatial Cape Town music intervention Pan African Space Station.
In short, his unique role in South Africa has been that of the ‘creator of ideas.” In many ways it’s an old school position, a stance embodied by musical giants like Abdullah Ibrahim and Vusi Mahlasela: a desire to investigate the conditions of culture and knowledge, to explore the relationship between myth and history, and to demonstrate the potential of music to revolutionise our ways of seeing the world. Like Ibrahim, Neo is especially fascinated with all sorts of interdisciplinary and revolutionary ways of thinking. His blog quotes Lenin, Burmese activist and freedom seeker, Aung San Suu Kyi and Zimbabwean literary provocateur Dambudzo Marechera.
Yet, despite his obvious intellectualism, Muyanga’s music is never distant or oblique. Like the best pop stars, he possesses an uncanny knack for recognising what’s up, where the world culture as a whole is heading, what undercurrents and protuberances are at work there: his breath is in our ear; his urban reality is essentially our urban reality.
Nowhere is this more apparent than when Neo performs solo live. Combining the super-kinetic bird cries of the mesinko (a traditional Ethiopian bowed instrument), with is string-bending insect-funk acoustic guitar and mesmerising afro-chic piano lines with black consciousness poetics and an edgy improvisatory flare, Muyanga creates music that’s smart enough for intellectuals to dig and catchy enough to lodge itself in the ears of even the most casual listeners.
Neo Muyanga performs at the Backsberg Picnic Concert on January 24. Gates open at 3pm. Admission is R85 (pre-sale) or R100 (gate). Book at Computicket. – Miles Keylock
Theatre
Cricket, that arcane English grammar school game that has taken root in the ex-colonies, makes fertile ground for a comedy of new South African manners. Combining his two previous successful shows, Slips and Second Slips, Nicholas Ellenbogen achieves a handsome hat-trick with the current Slips.
The title puns the fielding position behind the batsman on the offside and faux pas, the main comic vehicle for Ellenbogen’s gentle satire on ‘untransformed” southern suburb whites, who seldom socialise outside their circle and whose ideas about African culture are at best modest. Meet Anthony ‘Lasher’ Dawkins (Ellenbogen), a retired mathematics master at Bishops, who has two debenture seats in the members’ stand at Newlands. When Dotty, his wife of 40 years, passes away, Dawkins has his boundaries pushed and is almost stumped when her seat is occupied by an ebullient Zulu polygamist, Eric ‘Wisdom’ Tshabalala (Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi).
Ellenbogen is as dependable as ever. The comedy is thoughtful and humane, and the cast deliver the lines with infectious enthusiasm.Slips shows at the Golden Arrow Studio Baxter until January 30 – Brent Meersman
DURBAN
Art
With her work combining the abstract intensity of Mark Rothko and the figurative eccentricity of Ego Schiele, Durban artist Anet Norval has been been smouldering discreetly in the shadows of the underground art milieu of Durban for several years and threatens to kick down the door of widespread fame and fortune with every exhibition she holds. The hour might well be nigh with the opening of Norval’s new solo exhibition epilogue/naskrif which at artSPACE durban on Monday January 25 at 6.30pm that runs until February 13.
The cult painter of enigmatic images that evoke both childhood innocence and the realm of nightmares in her new work reflects an intriguing emotional journey where the cryptic, compelling images guide viewers through series of personal experiences, circumstances and situations. The exhibition consists of a series of paintings and multi-media works which all engage with narratives of change, loss, acceptance, attachment, indifference, departure, love and relationships.
Much like an epilogue in film or fiction is a device used to tie up a tangled web of loose ends, epilogue/naskrif can be seen as a visual meditation upon the notions of transformation, growth and closure. point of departure or end of a series of events and emphasises transformation and growth. (An epilogue can be used to allow the main character a chance to ‘speak freely’ and to conclude a story.)
Opening at the same time is Women, the new solo exhibition by iconoclastic painter Makiwa Mutomba whose signature style of heavy brushtrokes evokes a kinetic sense of vigour, vibrancy and vitality.
Mutomba was born Colin Makiwa Mufaro Mutomba in 1976 in Chivhu, Zimbabwe and is currently based in Pretoria, South Africa. Makiwa is the recent winner of a prestigious international art award from the Societe Nationale des Beux-Arts in Paris, France and Women – a collection exclusively comprised of oil paintings of African women – is his second solo exhibition at aSd. artSPACE durban is open from 10am to 4pm Monday to Friday and from 10am to 1pm on Saturdays and public holidays. – Alex Sudheim
Music
Injecting an industrial-strength dose of contemporary cosmopolitan cool into Durban’s moribund nightclub scene is Origin, the sleek, sophisticated temple of pleasure that blends international trends and local inspiration to create a cutting-edge concept club in a class of its own. This comes as little surprise since the team behind Origin is the exact same one that catapulted Durban’s 330 into the global top 10 of dedicated dance clubs at the height of the rave wave.
Origin keeps the flag of top international groovesmanship flying high with its impressive event on Saturday February 6 teaming antipodean superstar DJ/producer/composer Emerson Todd with Cape Town’s cult Killer Robot crew of unhinged electronic musicians.
After achieving worldwide success as a DJ, Todd has recently stepped from behind the decks and into the studio where he is one of the latest signings on Claude VonStroke’s Dirtybird label and Sven Väth’s Cocoon Label where he has been creating major hype with his remixes of top electronic acts Layo and Bushwaka!
Killer Robot was recently described by Mixmag as ‘South Africa’s premier showcase of underground minimal and techno mixing dubbed-out deepness with the hi-tech sounds of Detroit, Berlin and beyond.” Each Killer Robot event is unique so expect something suitably sensational on this unprecedented. Other DJs on the night are homegrown selectors Coco Loco, One Track Mike, Dakin Auret and Green Jr. Origin can be found on the corner of Clark and Umbilo Roads and doors open at 10pm with entrance R80 and R40 for ladies before 11pm. Advance booking is strongly advised. Tel: 082 292 0744. – Alex Sudheim
Theatre
It’s September, 1939, and the storm clouds of war are gathering over Europe. However, in a private school in the Natal Midlands, trouble of an entirely different kind is brewing— A housemaster’s wife has met with an unfortunate accident; the much-loved school librarian has disappeared; the widowed headmaster has taken a vivacious new wife and, in the dead of night, a ghostly phantom glides across the school grounds. Could it be the wraith of the headmaster’s first wife whose death remains shrouded in mystery?
Join Michael Buchan, the unlikely detective, on his quest to unravel the mystery behind a singularly enigmatic murder and help him to figure out whodunit and why in the ‘dinner thriller” interactive theatre production The Strange Case of the Midnight Phantom which enjoys two shows only at The Hexagon Dive in Pietermaritzburg on Friday January 29 and Saturday December 30. Both shows take place at 7pm for 7.30pm with Friday’s performance including a 3-course dinner and tickets R150 while Saturday’s outing is a picnic evening so pack a basket of tasty treats and only cough up R75 for a ticket.
The exciting and innovative format of theatre has proved highly popular in the past as the enjoyment of the production is a highly active rather than passive one where the audience is required to put their collective sleuthing prowess to the test as they try to unravel the mysterious whodunit. Booking is advised. Tel: 033 260 5537. – Alex Sudheim