#153. Watch Times photographer Marianne Schwankhart’s farewell to one of Johannesburg’s best known landmarks – The Top Star Drive-In. While the Top Star hasn’t operated for the past four years it will be the end of an era when you drive around the city centre from the east and don’t see that enormous movie screen rising above you on one of the city’s mine dumps.
#152. Wonder whether walls make us safer? This after 24 hours in which I attended a community meeting with a security company in my area and then spent yesterday at a seminar called cracking walls at the Goethe Institute in Parkwood, Johannesburg. The Goethe is thinking a lot about cracking walls, what with the 20th anniversary of the “fall” of the Berlin Wall approaching, and now so am I. Continue reading
# 151. Follow the Spring Art Tour now at a gallery near you. Four days of contemporary art and design, walkabouts with artists, talks and white wine (usually cheap but purposeful) kick off tomorrow night. Continue reading
#143. Get some answers. On Saturday I was at Origins Museum at Wits (not a striking student to be seen) to listen to a discussion on Johannesburg/Kolkata, as part of a series of events that are linked to Words on Water, a South Africa-India Literary Festival. The discussion on Johannesburg prompted the question: Who is Johannes?
Continue reading
#140. Follow that car. No sooner had I read the post about “Google sends out cars for Street View SA” on Matthew Buckland’s blog then I looked ahead of me as a car pulled away from the robot and saw it was a Toyota Prius with a camera mounted on top of it. Either its Google or the CIA is being very conspicuous about their monitoring of Joburg’s leafier suburbs. Continue reading
#139. Head downtown to Arts on Main. It’s not often that you have an opportunity to witness a random conversation between two generations of South Africa’s most talented artists whose work is collected by the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and other major global art institutions. There I was walking through the courtyard at Arts on Main watching William Kentridge lean out of his studio window to talk to photographer Mikhael Subotzky.
My first instinct was to think someone had called casting central and requisitioned two famous artists: “We’re sending Kentridge and that Magnum guy Subotzky. They can handle this gig.” Continue reading
#137. Read Andy Davis’ review of District 9 “Prawn Again” on Mahala, my current most favourite local website. Mahala means for free and that’s just what the content is, for nothing and on anything. The brainchild of Davis, a former magazine editor (SL) the site is smart and sharp, fresh and visual and carries some of the best and most current thinking and writing on South African art, music, photography and movies. Oh, and it also covers sport and surfing.
#135. Go see Roger Ballen’s photographic exhibition at the University of Johannesburg. It’s all black and white, darkness and light, at times playful, always intriguing and sometimes disturbing.
Cat and Mouse, 2006 by Roger Ballen
The American-born photographer has been resident in Johannesburg since 1982. A geologist by training, you could say Ballen’s primary profession underlines his photographic work as he is intent on mining the subconscious.
Tall and soft-spoken, his gaze shifts while he talks as if he is looking past the direct subject for other objects that might frame the conversation. In his photographs objects are made to speak, of other lives and other experiences. They create new meaning in being photographed, and in their interaction with a cast of animals – rats, cats, snakes … who are the co-stars of Ballen’s work. Continue reading
#130. See Lolo Veleko’s photographs at the Standard Bank Gallery. Only one day to go until the exhibition moves off taking Veleko’s portraits of urban fashionistas and graffiti with it. “Gatecrash your own fantasy” reads a piece of graffiti scrawled on a wall. Veleko’s subjects are mostly young, black and hip. They stare back at you with a brash confidence, dressed in clothing that makes you start. It’s full of colour, its often unconventional in its arrangement, it is “individual” and a powerful form of expressing that. “The Japanese love them,” a Joburg gallery curator once told me.
There is an element of fantasy to the subjects being dressed up so as they stand out from their urban settings. The exhibition is aptly named “Wonderland” and at its centre is an installation — a green carpet dotted with plastic flowers, swings suspended above it from the ceiling. It looks inviting and fantastical — all that is missing is a ‘Don’t walk on the grass sign’.
In the background of some of the photos is the city of Durban with its tropical palm trees and strange mix of cutting-edge urban fashion and design with that frozen-in-time 1970′s seaside town look (reminding me of the movie Funny Bones starring Oliver Plat and set in Blackpool where he auditions lots of carnie-folk). It is perfectly captured in a photograph of a statue of a rickshaw-puller, behind him two strange-looking white children, all of their frozen gazes fixed on what’s ahead; another has a fairytale castle set amidst a city landscape, a couple at its doorway as if they are about to enter and escape to another dimension.
Standard Bank Young Artist Veleko is in an exploratory phase, playing with words and meaning. Another piece of graffiti says: “Adventure without risk is Disneyland”.
Her photographs range from portraiture to capturing fragments of urban life.
William Kentridge (also a Standard Bank Young Artist once) was there before us and signed the comment book with “White people are negotiable ?” – a comment on one of the grafitti photos. William if you are listening I chose to interpret that as saying you can bargain them down. Let’s discuss. I don’t have to tell you its art – open to as much interpretation as you can throw at it.
* Standard Bank Gallery is on the corner Simmonds and Frederick Streets, downtown Johannesburg. For more on the gallery click here.
#123. Lament the passing of Ricardo Rangel. The man considered to be Mozambique’s greatest contemporary photographer died on June 11. Eleven years ago this month I first saw Rangel’s work when a friend gave me a book of African photography as a wedding present, In/Sight African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (Guggenheim). Through the book I was introduced to the work of Rangel as well as Mali’s Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe, Cameroonian Samuel Fosso and Drum magazine’s Bob Gosani, among others.
© Ricardo Rangel, In the embrace of the night, 1970.