STEVENSON CAPE TOWN presents Kings County, a group exhibition featuring Njideka Akunyili, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu and Paul Mpagi Sepuya.
Today Brooklyn, as Kings County is more commonly known, counts 2.5 million inhabitants, measures 474 square kilometres, and by itself would be the fourth largest city in the United States if it were not part of New York.
Brooklyn is a place of immigrants, its demographics ever shifting.
Complex layers of class are superimposed on both historical and newly established ethnic enclaves. Because everybody who lives there is, in some way, from somewhere else, it has been a theatre of imagination and invention, and Brooklyn as an idea, or a metaphor, has been as important in this process as its physical characteristics. Perhaps as a result, it has attracted an urban creative community of a nature and scale not seen elsewhere in New York – a community that, in turn, has affected the idea of Brooklyn in real and imaginary ways. Brooklyn is often associated with gang violence and artisanal food, but its lived experience is infinitely more complex, and resists such narratives as much as it invites them.
For Wangechi Mutu Brooklyn was a place to live while getting an education in Manhattan, and now it has become her second home. Meleko Mokgosi was specifically drawn to Sunset Park and its history of manufacturing, as well as its large South American population. Curiously, the other two artists have left the neighbourhood since the exhibition was conceived, or are in the process of leaving. Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Njideka Akunyili are both moving to Los Angeles this year, but often reflect the timbre of Brooklyn social life in their work.
On one level, Kings County is about four immigrants (from Botswana, Kenya, Nigeria and California) in a place of many immigrants. More fundamentally, however, Kings County is about the symbolic potential of geographic locations – about how imaginary places can affect the real world, and vice versa.
WHEN & WHERE: Kings County opens on Thursday 9 October 2014, from 6 to 8pm at Stevenson Cape Town.
The gallery is open from Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, and Saturday from 10am to 1pm
PHOTO: WANGECHI MUTU
