Cape Town art picks: October 15 2010

Provocative work and witty commentary is on show this week.

• Earlier this year emerging artist Ayanda Mabulu was thrust into the centre of a controversy when his paintings, which satirized apartheid figures and icons, were deemed too controversial to be included in an exhibition sponsored by Truworths. Combing pointed humour and intelligent political satire with the bitterness of personal experience, his new exhibition, Un-mute my tongue is partially a response to this censorship. Through a series of marvelously sardonic visions he presents a chaotic world overrun by perversity and gross over-consumption. In these works, the artist treats political reality and art history with the same ahistorical off-handedness, using them as an inexhaustible reservoir of raucously provocative images and motifs that respond to contemporary socio-political sore points. Opens October 18 until November 8 at Worldart Gallery, 54 Church Street, Cape Town.

• For SketchAssembly: Merry Company artist and educator Andrew Putter has brought together 30 artists and designers to re-imagine the Khoikhoin and Dutch at the Cape in the 1600s. Inspired by the Dutch ‘merry company” paintings that were popular in the early 1600s for their feisty depiction of young people having fun, this new body of images looks at the history of Khoikhoin / Dutch contact through the eyes of the youth. Taking the form of a visually-based educational project, it features photographs styled, acted and produced by a diversity of young photographers, graphic designers, painters, clothing designers, set designers and an architect, that imitate historical ‘merry company” paintings but with Dutch and Khoikhon characters. The exhibition opens October 19 at 6pm and is on view on October 20 and 21. Putter will present a free lunch-time lecture on the project on October 20 at 1pm. Michaelis Galleries, on UCT’s Hiddingh campus, Orange Street, Cape Town.