Xenophobia to feature at Venice Biennale
Not-so-contemporary curators have promised to take big issues to art fair,
AFTER months of speculation in the art world, the curators of the South African pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale were finally announced last week.
Jeremy Rose of Mashabane and Rose architects and Christopher Till, the founder of the Johannesburg Biennale and director of the Apartheid Museum, will represent the country’s artists and art at one of the world’s most high-profile art events.
With little time left before the May 9 opening of the Venice Biennale, Rose and Till have announced a list of artists who they feel “give a commentary on where we are and where we are going”. The list includes Willem Boshoff, Haroon Gunn-Salie, Nandipha Mntambo, Robin Rhode, Jo Ratcliffe, Jeremy Wafer, Diane Victor and Brett Murray. Burundian artist Serge Alain Nitegeka and Zimbabwean Gerald Machona are also part of the pavilion. Filmmaker Angus Gibson will present work that forms part of the planned Truth and Reconciliation Commission exhibit at the Apartheid Museum, and musician and producer Warrick Sony’s sound and video installation on Marikana, exhibited last year at the Wits Art Museum, will also travel to Venice.
At a press conference in Johannesburg this week, Till said he and Rose hoped that their selection would communicate “what we as South Africans are feeling, where we consider ourselves to be, to respond to these issues and make a statement from an artistic view”.
Organised under the title What Remains is Tomorrow, Rose and Till’s South African pavilion hopes to “seek to present the past as an alluvial undertow in South Africa’s fractured and multivocal present, a stream of dreams, desires, and memories that frequently boil to the surface in ways both useful and destructive”.
Art commentators have taken issue with the selection of Rose and Till as curators and the selection of artists, but Till said that although there had been suggestions that he and Rose were “two middle-aged white men who don’t dance, we hope that we can dance. There’s an energy in South Africa, an anger, a concern, a fear, and why not take that challenge into the world?”
Rose said bureaucratic holdups in the Department of Arts and Culture meant that they had been left with a short time to pull together the pavilion, but he was adamant that “the time constraint has not affected the quality and array of artists that we have. We even had time to hone the messages that we wanted to bring across. This sudden outbreak of xenophobia and the defacement of sculptures happened very quickly and we have been able to respond to those issues.”
Critic Sean O’Toole said although “Christopher Till has serious chops as an art curator and Jeremy Rose has a fine sense of architectural space, neither has in any meaningful way been part of the post-2000, market-driven contemporary art scene”. This did not disqualify the curators from con- sideration, he said, but he felt that their “selection was a bit odd: a mix of ’80s lefties and the branded Day-Glo set. It’s like eVoid touring with The Brother Moves On. I am curious to see what they come up with.”
This year’s biennale also features Okwui Enwezor, who recently curated the blockbuster photographic exhibition The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, serving as the first African curator of the overall event. Till, who invited Enwezor to be the curator of the Johannesburg Biennale in 1995, feels this is ad- vantageous to South Africa — Enwezor is well acquainted with the country’s artists and has included several as part of the main exhibition.
A group of younger performance-based artists will show work as part of the Johannesburg Pavilion, a separate exhibition that will run during the first two weeks of the Biennale, outside the main programme and funded by Roelof van Wyk’s nonprofit 133 Arts Foundation and the FNB Joburg Art Fair.
Rose said there were enough South African artists at the event for visitors to get a sense of how “the whole package of South African art is presented on the world stage. I look forward to seeing how the international community reads it.”
The biennale is from May 9 to November 22. Visit www.the southafricanpavilion.co.za
They say we’re middle-aged white men who don’t dance, but we hope we can dance