[Working
Title]
2012

Cape

Town

24 May - 30 Jun 2012

[Working Title] 2012 featured a group exhibition of young artists working in South Africa, brought together in a way that allows multiple and perhaps surprising dialogues to emerge, and foregrounding questions of authorship, authority and notions of the relational.

Reshma Chhiba's Kundalini Shakti and Linga-yoni – a slashed canvas and an unsettlingly organic sculpture, both informed by the artist's ongoing interest in the Hindu goddess Kali as an embodiment of unbridled feminine creativity – act as a complement and counterpoint to the cool, Apollonian rationalism of Kyle Morland's Double-Ended Saddle Cut, a suspended sculpture of welded steel. Both are also concerned, in different ways, with the act and effects of making. Murray Kruger, too, plays with concepts of creativity and authorship in his recreation of, and extrapolation from, Walter Battiss’ 1973 performance piece Open tent for contemplating the cosmic origins of art, while at the same time raising questions about the nature of the artwork, its evolution over time, and the ways in which its audiences are implicated in its inscription into history.

A solemn photographic installation by Gabrielle Goliath titled Berenice 10-28 speaks poignantly of personal issues of loss and grief, while uncompromisingly confronting questions of violence and abuse in South African society.

Gerald Machona’s origami-based installation Bling Bling: Blood diamonds are a girl's best friend, a cynical comment on the abuses of power in postcolonial African politics, resonates with Monique Pelser’s Conversations with my Father, a searingly intimate attempt, in an installation and set of photographs, to understand her father’s death and life in the larger context of the dark and complex history of the South African police.

Thabiso Sekgala's photographs of the workers and inhabitants of a housing estate in Ghent are a refreshing and original take on the questions of identity that inform so much contemporary South African practice, and a provocative inversion of the usual dynamics of 'othering', while his stark images of domestic objects, at once intimate and abject, are a compelling reflection on contemporary urban life.