Goodman Gallery and blank projects are delighted to introduce a collaborative exhibition over Johannesburg’s art season titled alluvium. With both galleries dedicated to a crosspollination of artistic voices and building a resilient ecosystem, this show enacts the idea of collaboration as a practice.
‘Goodman Gallery X blank projects: alluvium’ takes its cue from the loose clay, sand and earth that is deposited by running water or a stream. Considering ideas around debris as the composition itself, the exhibition incorporates artists across both gallery programmes to explore how artists can gather discarded materials or ephemeral notions into a composition.
The works of David Koloane, donna Kukama, Misheck Masamvu, Lerato Shadi, Jeremy Wafer, Clive van den Berg and James Webb consider sociopolitical and material debris, pointing to their entanglement with emotional wellbeing, historical narratives and the imaginaries that develop around land and landscape.
Through the photographs, found objects, layered paint and the inclusion of unconventional art materials such as oil and coffee present across their works, they bring to the surface messy contradictions in how value systems are formed, their persistence and how these are projected into the world.
Following the thread of conceptual materiality, Ghada Amer and Kresiah Mukwazhi apply it to their engagement with the female body and how under patriarchal systems it is leveraged as a site of contestation, power dynamics and resistance. Mukwazhi’s bra straps stitched on canvas and Amer’s textile work speak to a defiance and reclamation of agency.
Naama Tsabar, too, transforms textiles, modifying the natural characteristics of material to shift our worldviews and expose the hidden systems that guide them.
This produces for each artist a distinct visual vocabulary built on exploratory, experimental and contextually engaged work. Similarly, Sam Nhlengethwa’s non-figurative paintings embrace an intuitive sense of the formal elements, including colour and composition.
Drawing together these artists’ practices from across multiple sociopolitical and geographical contexts, the exhibition seeks to locate their common, shifting grounds.
Artworks
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