The NIROXprojects year-end exhibition
2013.
VENUE: NIROXprojects | ARTS ON MAIN |
MABONENG PRECINCT | JOHANNESBURG | 264 Fox Street, corner Main Rd.
DATES: Opening Thursday 5 December 2013
@ 18:00.
Closing 15
January 2014.
Please note
that the exhibition will be closed over the Christmas and New Year period.
EXHIBITION CURATORS: Ann-Marie Tully and Neil Nieuwoudt
EXHIBITION CONCEPT/BRIEF: This group exhibition gathers together a group of
established and emerging artists whose artwork relates in theme/manner/medium
to Lauren Beukes’ Arthur C Clarke award-winning novel, Zoo City (2011). This text frames Johannesburg as the seedy science
fiction setting for a long tale (tail) where a criminal underclass and their
animal companions live in a magical and hellish reality. In Zoo City Beukes has mobilised to great
effect the entwined literal and metaphoric understanding of the English word
“Zoo”:
zoo [zuː]
n pl zoos
A park-like area where live animals are kept in cages
and enclosures, studied, bred, and exhibited to the public. Formal term zoological
garden
[shortened from zoological gardens
(originally applied to those in London)].
A place, activity, or group marked by chaos, strange,
or unrestrained behaviour.
Beukes’ text
also draws on the “touristy” association of Johannesburg with wild animals (as
a gateway to game farms etc.); and one of the largest vibrant and complex
cities in Africa and the Southern Hemisphere.
This group
exhibition extends on the dualism of the word “zoo”, drawing together artworks
that respond to urban and wild animals; the “human zoo” of identity, activity
and discourse; human interactions with nature and animals; spaces and sites of
control, coercion and contravention; urbanity and nature binaries; human and
animal dialectics and amalgams; technology/reason and instinct juxtapositions;
the historical context of the zoo as a colonial invention and “benign” theme
park that instrumentalises the imperial project of control, and display is also
of interest:
‘Their [zoo animals] dependence and
isolation have conditioned their responses so that they treat any event that
takes place around them – usually it is in front of them, where the public is –
as marginal. Hence their assumption of an otherwise exclusively human attitude
– indifference.’
‘Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos
they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance. And in doing
so, they provoke their last metaphor. The
Naked Ape, The Human Zoo, are
titles of world bestsellers. In these books the zoologist, Desmond Morris,
proposes that the unnatural behavior of animals in captivity can help us to
understand, accept, and overcome the stresses involved in living in consumer
societies”.
‘All sites of enforced marginalisiation
– ghettos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, concentration camps – have
something in common with zoos’
-John Berger, ‘Why Look at animals’, in About Looking (1980).
FEATURED ARTISTS:
Wayne Barker
Hannelie
Coetzee
Carole
Desbois
Bevan de Wet
Germaine de
Larch
Gordon Froud
Georgina
Gratrix
Sikhumbuzo
Makandula
Senzeni
Maresela
Rosemarie
Marriott
Michele
Mathison
Jurgen Meekel
Neil
Nieuwoudt
Phumulani
Ntuli
Andrea Rolfes
Lauren
Schlachter
Hannalie
Taute
Ann-Marie
Tully
Jessica
Webster
Ed Young
Isaac Zevale
http://jozirediscovered.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/the-human-zoo-and-the-concrete-jungle/
 |
| Ann-Marie Tully |
 |
| Isaac Zevale |
ABOUT THE CURATORS:
Neil Nieuwoudt is a curator and artist. Working as professional curator in the industry since 2008 in Cape Town (UCA Gallery). In June 2012 he started as curator/ project manager at NIROXprojects, Arts on Main, Johannesburg CBD.
Neil has also exhibited in various spaces around the world, among these being the Joburg Fringe 2011 (JHB), Joburg Fringe Video Berlin (Berlin), AVA Gallery (Cape Town), Centenery Complex Art Gallery, UFS (Bloemfontein) and the SomArts Cultural Centre in San Francisco (USA).
Neil’s work has also been selected for two independently curated books of international
poets and visual artists: http://www.blurb.com/b/3683608-estuary-a-confluence-of-art-poetry (Winner of the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Mixed Anthology; with the second book being released later in the year (2013). His work primarily deals with notions of subjectivism, symbolism and he employs the accident or the random in his creations.
Ann-Marie Tully is an artist, curator, and writer who obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2003. She has exhibited widely and is represented in collections. Her art practice is as a painter, also working with mediums such as textiles and ceramics. Ann-Marie’s most recent solo exhibition Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing debuted at NIROXprojects in 2013. Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing travels to the North West University Galleries in 2014, and to the Oliewenhuis Museum in 2015.
As a curator her most recent undertakings are the Facing the Climate exhibitions in association with the Swedish Institute and the Swedish Embassy of South Africa (Michaelis, NIROXprojects and the Oliewenhuis Museum); the Pointure exhibition at the University of Johannesburg Gallery in August 2012; and Bracha Ettinger’s solo exhibition at NIROXprojects also in August 2012. Prior to this Ann-Marie curated the Urban Animal exhibition at the ABSA Gallery in 2009.
Ann-Marie’s research and art-making is concerned with the rhetorical and reductive representation of non-human creatures, ancient and contemporary narratives of human 'culture' and the 'natural world'. Themes of mortality and the trace character of photographic media are also themes revisited in her work.
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