AVA Gallery March and they are are thrilled to announce four new exhibitions that will fill their space for the next six weeks. With a mix of dynamic group shows and a solo video exhibition, AVA looks forward to welcoming you to the opening(s) on Thursday 10 March at 5.30 pm.
Main Gallery
V E R S E: curated by Megan Mc NamaraLONG GALLERY
Exploring conversations around language and text in contemporary art practice, this exhibition seeks to deconstruct the ways in which we convey personal and geographical histories throughout the African continent. The title V E R S E speaks to two literary terms, one the poetic, a space for language to speak in a metaphorical and nuanced manner, and the other speaks of a biblical sense.
Throughout the African continent, much of the language we have been provided with has come from the colonizing West. This exhibition speaks of the more critical sense, and explores works that deny the Western narrative and instead examine alternate methods of employing our own definitions of what the telling of culture and history on the continent can look like. No longer imagined, but carving a new identity, these could look like love letters, performances, video art, installations.
Participating artists: Megan Mc Namara, Mitchell Messina, Thuli Gamedze, Brett Charles Seiler and Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose, Lucus Ngoma, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa
PHOTO above: Megan Mc Namara, Selling the Sun, 2021
Long Gallery
Dark: Sinead Mason, Megan Fritz and Anton Birkenmayer
The works in this exhibition articulate themselves within the gaps of documentation and challenge the hegemonic archive. The apparent linearity of knowledge is reinforced by the ways in which we ingest knowledge, with the most obvious example being that of the codex. But this assumption is interrogated in Anton Birkenmayer’s work. He calls into question our very perception of time and the individual’s reality in relation to these grand concepts, too. Relating personal experience to a metanarrative is mainly convoluted through visual representation and its inherent performativity.
Sinead Mason’s work simultaneously refers to and overturns traditional portraiture and the exacting eye of the camera through blurring out borders and creating facades. In an attempt to access the porous nature of the unconscious, her work investigates ways of being that are inescapably tied to the rigidity of our society while always being just marginal of it.
Megan Fritz challenges what we know as ‘the norm’ by taking everyday objects and subverting their functionality, allowing them to exist in a state of flux and perpetuating their reconstruction by creating traces of their existence
PHOTO: Sinead Mason, A Person Wearing a Hat, 2020, lithographic print on Munken paper
Mezzanine
Time is a Broken Umbrella: Abri de Swardt, Adrian Fortuin, Hedwig Barry, Jarrett Erasmus, Khotso Motsoeneng, Matty Monethi, Nyakallo Maleke, Robyn Penn and Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee
Facilitated by Forms Gallery
Time is a Broken Umbrella is an experiment that sets out to see if it is possible to disperse and decentralise curatorial logic and to substitute the contained convolutions of a single brain for a thinking network, or a networked thinking.
The exhibition proposes a kind of score or playbook for an exercise: nine artists embarked on this project with the same brief, to curate themselves, collectively, into an exhibition. They were invited to listen to and look at each other’s practices, to mediate their own and each other’s work, and to anticipate each other’s final outputs with their own, all in the hope that what emerges in the final public display has some sort of legibility or significance, if not coherence. This exercise is about questioning what counts as an exhibition and who counts as a curator. Who mediates art and why and how, and what roles do institutions, artists and galleries have and contest in this economy?
Participating artists: Abri de Swardt, Adrian Fortuin, Hedwig Barry, Jarrett Erasmus, Khotso Motsoeneng, Matty Monethi, Nyakallo Maleke, Robyn Penn, Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee
New Media Room
Mother’s Milk | A BrownLETTER Experience
Mother’s Milk is one page of a moving survivors journal of Truth. Spoken word is combined with documentary footage in a Spilling of the T and a salute to the cultural alchemy of Xhosa women.
PHOTO: Film still from Mother’s Milk, BrownLETTER, HD video
WHAT: Four New Exhibitions
WHERE: AVA Gallery, 35 Church Street, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: Opening Thursday, 10 March 2022 at 5.30 pm. Until 21 April 2022. Gallery Hours: Mon to Fri: 10am- 5pm.| Sat: 10am – 1pm.
INFO: T +27 21 424 7436 | E AVA TEAM sam@ava.co.za |Â VISIT
AVA Gallery [10]
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