At Night We Dream During the Day We See explores what curator Kirsty Cockerill calls ‘political surrealism” in contemporary South African painting.
The group exhibition gives voice to a new generation of artists who plough the fertile material initiated by the creative dynamos — Fikile Magadlela, Lefifi Tladi and Thami Mnyele — of the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s. The eight selected artists for this exhibition — Zolani Siphungela, Anathi Tyawa, Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi, Mncedi Bodlo, Adolf Tega, Cinga Samson, Richard Mudariki and Bangikaya Maqoqa — combine political and social realities that offer the viewer a hyper-real experience.
Their artistic-historical DNA is fragmented and dispersed and constantly recovered or assembled from a web of memories, associations, histories and blurred symbols. Somewhere, this network of passions links to form a new place, an imaginary country yet to come.
Association for Visual Arts, 35 Church Street, Cape Town. Until September 2.
The gallery inaugurates its new exhibition space with two shows that run concurrently. Renee Holleman’s A Novel in Parts draws on ‘choose your own adventure stories” to explore a collection of interweaving themes that draw on history, locale, narratives of progress, abstract fable, visual conundrum and text. She exhibits alongside Andrzej Nowicki, whose Little Ruin explores the tension between new and old, centre and periphery, East and West, beauty and the grotesque. Nowicki’s whimsical watercolour narratives treads a fine line between seduction and deception.
Whatiftheworld, 1 Argyle Street, Woodstock. Until September 14.