The exhibition Don’t/Panic is a homecoming of sorts for Durban-born curator Gabi Ngcobo. It is opening next week to coincide with COP17, the United Nations’ conference on climate change.
The show, running at the Durban Art Gallery, features more than 30 works by South African artists, including David Koloane, Mlu Zondi, Clive van den Berg and Moshekwa Langa, Nigerian-born artist Otobong Nkanga, Eritrean artist Dawit L Petros, Nigerian George Osodi and Moroccan-born artist Batoul S’Himi.
Ngcobo has returned from Bard College in New York, where did a master’s degree in curatorial studies last year.
Since then, she founded the Centre for Historical Re-enactments, an alternative exhibition space at August House, at the corner of End and Pritchard streets in Johannesburg.
The work in the Don’t/Panic exhibition was not commissioned. Ngcobo sought out ready-made artworks touched with a “poetic not evangelical disobedience”, works that had “subversive ways of looking at” the climate issue. So, using her contacts, she gave the exhibition a continental outlook.
On one level, the title of the exhibition could be read as an injunction not to worry when panic has broken out everywhere. This is not to sidestep the grave crisis that faces humanity — like the man in an Igbo proverb who, instead of putting out the fire engulfing his house, runs after a rat escaping the inferno.
Involuntary paranoia
But she was also keen to avoid wading into the “television discourse”; for instance, how the birth of the seven billionth person last month seemed to induce involuntary paranoia and widespread excitement.
Some of the work shows the danger we face in an upfront manner. For instance, the photograph Ogoni Boy, by Osodi, shows a boy, arms folded, staring at a point in the sky as huge pall of billowing smoke rises up in the background.
The pollution of Ogoniland has become part of environmental folklore. In fact, the first time I became aware of the environment was in the mid-1990s when Shell’s pollution of Ogoniland made global news. The cause’s martyr, writer Ken Saro Wiwa, and other Ogoni activists were executed by the Sani Abacha administration for their work in opposing Shell’s destruction of their homeland.
Don’t/Panic also references the extremes — icy conditions are represented in the work by Petros, which is of a hand holding a triangular ice-block against the background of a frosty landscape.
One of the chief features of the impending crisis will be migration, both within states and across national borders. This is alluded to in Reunion artist Thierry Fontaine’s photograph of shoes with thorn-like features.
“Durban is always moaning that people don’t stay in the city,” Ngcobo said on the phone from Durban, before reeling off a list of artists who were born or have lived in the city, including curator and critic Khwezi Ghule, artists Dineo Bopape, Penny Siopis, Thando Mama and others.
All of them had moved on to Cape Town or Johannesburg.
Hostile climate
Ngcobo said the brain drain invited the question: How do we make people stay? This in turn evoked a further question about what exactly it was about the Durban climate that drove people away.
She spoke about the vociferous opposition to name changes witnessed in Durban. “Street names have been vandalised,” she said.
Although she was born in the city, “I had to re-understand the city’s politics, how so much hasn’t changed.”
Ngcobo has an abiding interest in history and archival material. In this exhibition, she goes back to an old tree that was cut down when a road was widened. The tree, whose trunk is now housed at the Durban Art Gallery, was known as the “Dead Man’s Tree”. It served as a death-notice board.
Ngcobo, working with Zamani Makhanya, an arts educator and artist, and students from the BAT Centre, identified a tree in the same vicinity as the original on which they have stuck notices, not just sombre ones announcing death but about things “they wished would die”. Archival footage of the work, known as Messages of the Living, will be shown at the exhibition.
In an interview with Ngcobo in December last year, she spoke about her approach to curatorship: “I used to be a practising artist and that’s important in my curatorship. If I was an art historian, I would do it differently.” She spoke about how she found exhibitions “unsatisfying”
so her curatorial practice was informed by the need to make them “interventions”.
For her, an exhibition should be “a research process” going via detours towards a finished product.
In this case, the “product” is the context in which the exhibition takes place — COP17 must take radical decisions about the Earth, or else.
Don’t/Panic runs at the Durban Art Gallery from November 23 to February 19 2012
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