Cape art pick: April 15 2011

‘Confession,” French feminist Helen Cixous tells us, ‘puts into play something which seems to me impossible and terrible: erasure.

• Are we supposed to be amnestied? Confession treats ritually what is absolutely untreatable.” Nicola Deane arrives at a similar conclusion in her contribution to the Michaelis masters students group exhibition Heimlich Manoeuvres. Deane is perhaps best known for her 2002 performance where she made three casts of her vagina in chocolate. In her new work she offers a quieter critique of phallogocentric capitalist culture. Comprising a series of poems, litanies, slogans and secret messages, she hold a mirror up to a contemporary culture of ‘shamelessness” as epitomised by reality television or in tell-all tabloid confessionals. The language of her investigation includes Morse codes, scrolled secrets, montage, fabricated relics and Dictaphone diaries. In her work, Deane exploits the way theses mediums betray every inaccuracy, and combines her aphorisms with a technique where craft meets reproduction. The resulting images reflect the emptiness of the codes by which our lives and art are defined while at the same time offering an antidote in the form of poetry.
  Michaelis Gallery, Orange Road, Gardens, Cape Town, Until April 21.

  Caption: Nicola Deane, I have started to feel alone with you, Typewriter text on cotton paper, 2011

• Judgement 2011 Case No. 001/05/2008 is a collaborative group show developed out of, and in some ways as the conclusion of recent graduate Elgin Rusts MFA exhibition, redress[1]-un-dressed, Adv. Alice presents J v JR 2010. As its incriminating title suggests, the project investigates processes of judicial and aesthetic redress to offer fresh perspectives on the victim within the criminal justice system. For the exhibition, fifteen different responses are juxtaposed in relationship to aspects of Rust’s redress[1]-un-dressed. Artists participating in the trial include Bridget Baker, Paul Birchall, Kitty Dörje, Isabelle Grobler, Ian Grose, Claire Jorgenson, Mwenya Kabwe, Nina Liebenberg, Natasha Normam, Sonja Rademeyer, Dave Robertson, Gretchen Van der Byl, Dale Washkansky, Cara van der Westhuizen and Max Wolpe.

  Association For Visual Arts, 35 Church Street, Cape Town, April 18 until May 13.