Activist, feminist and the 2022 Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art, Lady Skollie brings her exhibition Groot Gat home to Cape Town at the Norval Foundation after it has travelled around South Africa over the past years since winning the award.
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Lady Skollie explains the title Groot Gat as her way of represent the brown and black way of being in South Africa, where she feels you are defined by a hole or a gap. The show asks questions about our collective histories and how to enlighten ourselves – where do we all fit in. As a ‘Coloured’ person in Cape Town, these are the questions that always bothered her. Groot Gat tries to fill that void.
She is looking at her roots and what it means to have been put into a box labeled ‘Cape Coloured’.
The exhibition has been travelling throughout South Africa. Coming to Cape Town is a sort of homecoming allowing her to see the response of people from similar backgrounds. How do we identify ourselves?
The development of her work has been to reposition herself as a modern day ‘pop’ painter, working in modern media to express her identity and see how it was shaped by colonialism, trauma and family patterns. What she unleashes she hopes will fill the void of many people’s collective histories. Groot Gat creates a parallel universe which you can plunge into and come out not weighed down by pain when you are defining yourself.
Identity, belonging and rethinking our history is what Lady Skollie, with her “groot bek” does strikingly and effectively in this exhibition sending out her message of finding one’s identity and place in history,
A must see exhibition! Of interest is the exhibition at the Iziko SA National Gallery, Esther Mahlangu Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting A Retrospective similarly reflects on Mahlangulu’s cultural journey through challenging times in South Africa. The issue of identity is also the focus in Joe Turpin‘s exhibition Set in Stone at the SA Jewish Museum.
If you define yourself as a ‘culture vulture’ there’s LOTS to do in Cape Town – ENJOY!
WHAT: Lady Skollie – GROOT GAT
WHERE: Norval Foundation, Gallery 9, 4 Steenberg Road, Tokai, Cape Town 7966
WHEN: 22 May 2024 – 15 September 2024
INFO: T 087 654 5900 | E info@norvalfoundation.org  | VISIT | Instagram @norvalfoundation | Facebook NorvalFoundation | LinkedIn NorvalFoundation | see also Lady Skollie: GROOT GAT exhibition opens at Norval FoundationÂ
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