“.za: Young Art from South Africa”

SMS CONTEMPORANEA (FORMER PALAZZO DELLE PAPESSE)
Piazza Duomo, 1-2,
February 2–May 4

View of ".za: Young Art from South Africa." From left: Zander Blom, Untitled, 2007; Untitled, 2007; Untitled, 2007.

Assailed by a series of saints, demons, and fairies who penetrate, kiss, and consume her, Elizabeth, protagonist of Bessie Head’s 1974 novel A Question of Power, is an allegory of South Africa’s own fractured self: activist and apathetic, pious and agnostic, black and white. It is this same commotion of the self in shambles, this “orchestral mess . . . or harmony,” as artist Dineo Bopape describes her work, that plays the overarching theme to “.za: Young Art from South Africa.”

Withdrawing to an old town house in Brixton, Johannesburg-based artist Zander Blom makes and photographs installations reminiscent of Merzbau, Kurt Schwitters’s destroyed “cathedral of erotic misery.” Complex collages of jutting foamcore triangles and cartoon clouds, as in Untitled or the Boulevard, Bedroom 1, Corner 2, 5:11 PM, Friday, 1 June 2007, climb the walls and extend across the tin ceilings of Blom’s home. Nicholas Hlobo challenges gender conventions in a playful recombination of signs: Umthubi, 2006, takes the form of a kraal, a traditional ring of wooden stakes, which for the Xhosa serves as both a cattle yard and the ceremonial grounds for exclusive male rituals. A web of pink ribbon, recalling the feminine, is stretched across the stakes of Hlobo’s kraal; a tail trailing the web is tied to a rubber form that brings to mind both an enormous testicle tied to a string and a fetus on an umbilical cord. Evoking associations that are comparably ambiguous, the female curves cast in cowhide of Nandipha Mntambo’s Sondzela, 2008, both seduce and disgust. In The Black Passage, 2006, a dark corridor throbbing with the continuous flush of bass that blasts from four speakers at its end, James Webb questions the common sense of belonging. A faint light creeps out around the speakers’ edges, helping visitors find their way back to the beginning of the disorienting tunnel. Sean Slemon’s topographical sculpture of carpet cutouts, Uplift: The Mountain, Palazzo delle Papesse, 2008, explores the ideological appropriation of land while taking aim at museum and gallery display for its manipulation of the viewer.

In selecting the show’s twenty participants, curator Lorenzo Fusi worked with five established South African artists: Marlene Dumas, Kendell Geers, Berni Searle, Minnette Vari, and Sue Williamson. Williamson addresses what she calls "the dilemma of the artists of 'island' Africa": Whether to stay and work in Africa, often perceived as isolating, or move abroad to Western Europe and the United States where one's work will perhaps be less conditioned by political geography. Head’s novel ends with Elizabeth placing “one soft hand over her land,” a gesture that signifies her coming to terms with maddening cultural complexity through a renewed relationship to nature: not only that of the gardens she tends but the inherently fragmentary nature of the human character.

—Emily Verla Bovino

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