Cape Town art picks: November 5 2010

A seminal South African artist is given his place in SA history.

• Louis K. Maqhubela is probably best known in art circles as one of the firebrand art activists associated with the apartheid-era Polly Street Art Centre. Less well known is his European legacy. Having travelled to Europe in the late 1960s, Maqhubela encountered visionary abstract works that offered him a means of decisively breaking out of the conventions of a genre that had been labeled “Township Art”.
  Working out of London, he forged a new style that combined European influences with a profound humanism and metaphysical spiritualism to challenge art historical conventions. A Vigil of Departure is a major retrospective exhibition that traces the development of his distinctive and enigmatic oeuvre. An attempt to re-inscribe Maqhubela into South African history, it also highlights how historical representation is first and foremost always a construct.
  Until February 13, 2011. Iziko SA National Gallery, Government Avenue, Company’s Garden, Cape Town.
  
• South African photographer David Goldblatt’s work is routinely described as ‘poetic”. That is, when it is not being described as ‘political”. His exhibition Kith, Kin & Khaya demonstrates how flawlessly he navigates between two. Assembled by The Jewish Museum in New York City, where it received widespread attention, the exhibition features Goldblatt’s black-and-white work, mainly from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties—the heyday of apartheid. His theme may be ‘the struggle” but it’s the struggle of ordinary people and the minutiae of everyday life. People of all classes and races: from exhausted migrant workers to a seemingly vulnerable Harry Oppenheimer; from careworn whites from the wrong side of the tracks to the well-groomed women of the Boksburg’s Women’s Zionist League; and from simple, devout families posing stiffly to a humble cleaner. Goldblatt’s medium is documentary, but he discovers there a deep vein of the poetry of contingency. ‘I needed,” says Goldblatt, ‘to grasp and probe.” By doing exactly that he transcends grand narratives to present an alternative, as yet unwritten history of South Africa. South African Jewish Museum, 88 Hatfield Street Gardens, Cape Town. Until February 11.