In support of local heritage and artisan enterprises, Goodman Gallery is proud to present the Artist Blanket – the result of a collaboration between our artists in support of Witkoppen Health and Welfare Clinic, a non-profit organisation which services 1.3 million people across the most deprived communities in Johannesburg.
A portion of the sales of each blanket goes to Witkoppen Clinic, to enable them to engineer new programmes to cope in this moment of great need. Limited edition of 50 editions featuring Cassi Namoda, Ghada and Reza, Samson Kambalu, Nolan Oswald Dennis of locally produced woven blankets.
Nolan Oswald Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. His practice explores what he calls ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.
His work questions the politics of space and time through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach. He is concerned with the hidden structures that pre-determine the limits of our social and political imagination.
Through a language of diagrams, drawings and models he explores a hidden landscape of systematic and structural conditions that organise our political sub-terrain. This sub-space is framed by systems which transverse multiple realms (technical, spiritual economic, psychological, etc) and therefore Dennis’ work is an attempt to stitch these, sometime opposed, sometimes complimentary, systems together. To read technological systems alongside spiritual systems, to combine political fictions with science fiction.
Cassi Namoda (b. 1988) is a painter whose work transfigures the cultural mythologies and historical narratives of life in post-colonial Africa, particularly those of the artist’s native Mozambique. Namoda’s paintings are highly elusive, drawing upon literary, cinematic and architectural influences that capture the expansiveness of her specifically Luso-African vantage point. The idiosyncratic subjects who appear and reappear in Namoda’s paintings also convey this hybridity: they emerge from African indigenous religions just as much as they springe. While they appear straightforward, her ima from Western mythologies.
The blanket is based on a work by Namoda, titled, “Untitled, lovers” from her 2020 solo exhibition Dog meat, cat meat, God-knows-what meat which took place in Miami. The work reflects Shetani folklore and symbolism that is ubiquitous in Swahili and Makonde craft, including wood carving. Namoda has rendered the elements of wood carvings into the painting to re-imagine folkloric traditions of her native Mozambique.
