AVA Gallery 4 exhibitions on offer through to 9 June 2022. The Association for Visual Arts has an interesting line up from a solo exhibition by Katherine Bull, a curated group show, work selected from graduate shows at Michaelis School of Fine Art and Ruth Prowse School of Art, and a film! There’s also a satellite exhibition at the Vault at the Silo Hotel.
- The Pieces That Find Us’ Katherine Bull – Main Gallery
This exhibition by Katherine Bull is assembled from works by the artist spanning twenty years of practice in printmaking, performance, painting, drawing and collage. Sourced from the artist’s personal collection.
Katherine Bull, detail of ‘data capture_a muse (Willem Boshoff)’ and ‘data_CAPTIVE AUDIENCE (Bologna)’
Approached in the spirit of collage – a strategy that has the potential to bring both fresh potentials and uncomfortable juxtapositions – Katherine Bull reflects on the different ways that she returns to a fascination with the unresolved nature and shifting technologies of perception. This tension between the need for resolution that predominates the artist’s sense of sight and a desire for dissolution experienced through embodied awareness – speaks to her interest in the quantum entanglement of being as becoming.
“This tension leads me to continually return to performative actions and convoluted systems of obstructing my senses while making. By drawing attention to the process of an image slipping into and out of being, I can inhabit the centre and periphery. I can be separate yet interconnected, a witness and participant, teacher and student – within an evolving spiral of learning and unlearning.”
- ‘Location’ Curated by Lesole Tautswala and Shakes Mbolekwana – Long Gallery
Bulumko Mbete, Tsomo to Elsies River, 2021, digital print on cotton. Dimensions variable
The guiding premise of the exhibition is memory as a site of study. How do we come to remember ourselves, and in that process of remembering, how do we make ourselves? This notion of’ making of ourselves’ is privileged in this exhibition. Collage, understood here as,’ a collection or combination of various things is our mode of an investigation into Identity-making and Place-making in the works of the artists in the exhibition. This ‘making of ourselves’ takes the physical and the metaphorical makings into consideration. Modes of remembering and re-memory are also investigated in how the materials, and media are engaged with and used in the artists’ processes of making. This exhibition aims to serve as a prompt, or a gesture, into the processes of ‘making of ourselves· and the study of memory.
Artists: Bulumko Mbete (photo above), Bruce Bowale, Sherwyn Jantjies, Lucie Adjoa Pavy, Bongiwe Phakai, Anna Sango, Vanessa Tembane
- ‘Greatest Hits’ An annual AVA production – Mezzanine Gallery
Sophie Cope, installation view of ‘Sky of Myself’ (endorsing ink on paper) and ‘Mapping the Sky’ (digital lithograph grid stacks). Mia Thom photography, 2021
Since the first time in 2008, the Association for Visual Arts has been curating and hosting a fixed-anchor exhibition called ‘Greatest Hits’ – the only exhibition on the calendar curated by the AVA gallery director. AVA’s Greatest Hits alumni include Igshaan Adams, Gerald Machona, Sethembile Msezane, Claire May van Blerck, Haroon Gunn-Salie, Mohau Modisakeng, Rowan Smith and Johno Mellish.
This year, work was selected from graduate shows at Michaelis School of Fine Art and Ruth Prowse School of Art. Part of the exhibition will be on view at the Vault at the Silo Hotel. Greatest Hits have emerged as a means of closing the chasm that exists for art students between tertiary education and professional exhibition exposure, and it serves as a launchpad for new talent for AVA audiences, too.
It is the curator’s eye on art instead of the academic’s, selecting works on grounds of individual value and their rapport with other selected works. The end result is an exhibition that offers an overview of the local and broader discourses that run through art schools in the Western Cape at the moment.
The 2020/21 graduates participating in Greatest Hits 2022 are Caitlin Hendricks, Nkhuwemi Kumwenda, Sophie Cope (photo Above), Kirstie Pietersen, Katlego Phetlhe, Erin Sweeney, Karen Elkington, Sinead Mason, Megan Fritz and, the only male participant, Anton Birkenmayer.
- ‘Live DIY Demos’ Matthew Cannon – New Media Room
As landofmilk, Cape Town-based musician and writer Matthew Cannon bridges roots and loops by singing and playing original mbira-based material, with an occasional ancient tune refreshed and thrown into the pot. Self-taught, the sound is diverse and perhaps non-traditional, yet the classical African instrument’s resonance shines through.
LIVE DIY DEMOS comprises 11 lo-fi video clips made by the artist during 2018 to 2021, and specially compiled into a 23-minute film screened on a vintage monitor in the AVA Gallery. Through the course of the exhibition, landofmilk will perform live, both in the New Media Room and elsewhere around the gallery! (see lead photo at top of page)
WHAT: AVA Gallery 4 exhibitions
WHERE: AVA Gallery, 35 Church Street, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: until 9 June 2022. Gallery Hours: Mon to Fri 10am- 5pm Sat 10am – 1pm. Sun and Public Holidays closed
INFO: T +27 21 424 7436 | E AVA TEAM sam@ava.co.za |  VISIT
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