Category Archives: art

björk – isobel (1995)

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In a forest pitch dark
Glowed the tiniest spark
It burst into flame
Like me
Like me

My name Isobel
Married to myself
My love Isobel
Living by herself

In a heart full of dust
Lives a creature called lust
It surprises and scares
Like me
Like me

My name Isobel
Married to myself
My love Isobel
Living by herself

When she does it she means to
Moth delivers her message
Unexplained on your collar
Crawling in silence
A simple excuse

Nana na na na, Nana na na na
Nana na na na, Nana na na na

In a tower of steel
Nature forges a deal
To raise wonderful hell
Like me
Like me

My name Isobel
Married to myself
My love…

fernando pessoa – 27, from the book of disquiet

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Literature – which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality – seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness.

Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life. What moves lives. What is said endures. There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having been well described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it’s a nice day. But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.

Everything is what we are, and everything will be, for those who come after us in the diversity of time, what we will have intensely imagined – what we, that is, by embodying our imagination, will have actually been. The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.

Right now I have so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say that I suddenly feel tired, and I’ve decided to write no more, think no more. I’ll let the fever of saying put me to sleep instead, and with closed eyes I’ll stroke, as if petting a cat, all that I might have said.

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From The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa), a work by the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). Published posthumously, The Book of Disquiet is a fragmentary lifetime project, left unedited by the author, who introduced it as a “factless autobiography.”

eric rondepierre – couple, passant (1996-1998)

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Eric Rondepierre, “Couple, Passant” (1996-98)

‘Cinema was born in 1895. In 2015, the original device has disappeared – such is the world, techniques vanish and others emerge: “There is no doubt that death is the youth of the world” [said Georges Bataille, in L’Histoire de l’érotisme]. I initiated my cinematic research at a transitional moment, in 1990, and started to present it in 1992. In 1993 in Washington (USA), I started a series of photographs figuring photograms of films corroded by the passing of time and storage condition, which was exhibited in New York two years later at MoMA. Since then, I have been watching films in Western film libraries and private collections, harvesting “decomposed” images affected by the passing of time. Without retouching them, I select the improbable and rare ones, those on which the marks of time enter in dialogue with the image to the point where it becomes difficult to distinguish between the actual image and its destruction process. Jean Cocteau claimed that cinema filmed “death at work”. It seemed interesting to identify death at work at the core of the medium, within the material and invisible layer allowing us access to the film: the reel. So I ventured through cinema, with great patience – it takes fifteen days, eight hours a day, to watch a feature film frame-by-frame –, reflecting upon the instability of film archives, their support, the conditions of their appearance and disappearance (I was far from imagining that the proper reel could vanish!). I fancy the idea that figures and locations filmed a century ago resurface differently at other times and that I was able to capture this hazardous encounter with the ills affecting the medium. Furthemore, the fact that these images exhale beauty, strangeness and intensity is a nice complement: grace befalls anywhere.’

– Eric Rondepierre, The Mark of Time.

That impossible photogram, as Roland Barthes said. An object which is not (even) an object, but at the same time is actually two objects. It doesn’t (really) belong to the cinema or (simply) to photography ; it is more than a photograph yet less than a film. It is, therefore, a sort of axis or fold, the precise crossing point (punctum) between cinema and photography. Eminently paradoxical, the photogram is the touchstone of Eric Rondepierre’s work which is acutely conscious of the delicate balance on the razor’s edge where cinema meets photography in their most intimate specificity.

Eric Rondepierre’s work always starts with a film, or more precisely with the image-matter of a film. Rondepierre is not interested in cinema as the reflection-projection of a film on a screen, in a consumer relation to what is watchable, with its imposed length and speed, uninterrupted flow, impression of movement, perceptive fiction, transitory illusion – in other words the magic of the large cinema-body on the screen. What interests him is the film as actual film strip, a material sequence of fixed images intimately and appropriatively related to its object. Film images that you can not only see but also touch, hold, manipulate and collect.

In other words, Rondepierre aims at what is most authentically photographic at the very heart of cinema. This is of course profoundly contradictory. The photogram is an impossible object : it is both film’s condition of existence and its total negation. Obviously a film consists only of photograms, yet seeing a photogram for what it is (the frozen image of a film) necessarily means not seeing the film, which can only exist fully as movement. Seeing a film flow past automatically implies not seeing photograms, nevertheless the very essence of a film since they disappear, absorbed into the projection process. Photograms are the only real images and the only invisible images in a film. This is the ontological paradox which makes photograms into cinema’s blind «spots».
(…)

Don’t believe too much in what you can see. Learn to not see what is displayed (and therefore which hides). Learn to see beyond, beside, across and beneath. Look for the spot in the image, texture in the surface, negatives in positives and latent images in the negative ground. Follow once more the route mapped out by the psychic photographic apparatus, shifting from eye to memory, from appearance to unrepresentable. Dig down through the layers and levels like an archaeologist. Photographs are only surfaces, they have no depth, only a fantastic density. Behind it, beneath it or around it, one photo always hides (at least) another photograph, or a film. It is a question of screens, and here you enter in a singular universe, the one of an individual by the name of Eric Rondepierre.

Read this whole essay by Philippe Dubois, and visit Eric Rondepierre’s website. And, if you can read French, there’s a piece which discusses Georges Bataille’s influence on the artist here.

 

sammy slabbinck – “toe dipper” (2017)

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“Toe dipper”. Original paper collage by Sammy Slabbinck, 2017.

Sammy Slabbinck (°1977) renders dynamic collage prints & original paper collages, combining  found imagery with contemporary compositional styles. The images are cut up into pieces and redistributed, playing with exaggeration and proportions .Other times, the images are placed in a reverse context, juxtaposing modern ideals with traditional states of mind.

More collage work HERE.

fleurmach at a4 arts foundation, 13 september 2017

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Fleurmach (Rosemary Lombard) playing at the opening of the A4 Arts Foundation, 23 Buitenkant Street, Cape Town. Photo: Thobani “Nqalastyle” Mbhele.

Last night at the opening of the new non-profit space, A4 Arts Foundation, I had the wonderful opportunity of playing music that responded to artworks in the wide-ranging exhibition curated by Ziphozenkosi Dayile and Kemang Wa Lehulere.

Here’s the blurb, and I urge you to pay a visit if you’re in Cape Town.

The Propeller Group, The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music, 2014. Film. 21 min. 15 sec.

You & I – A group exhibition curated by Ziphozenkosi Dayile and Kemang Wa Lehulere

Please join us for the opening of our inaugural exhibition, “You & I”.

13 September 2017 at 6pm, at A4 Arts Foundation, 23 Buitenkant Street, District Six, Cape Town

About You & I

You & I is a group exhibition that looks at how people come together, asking after the conditions and dynamics of the collective.

Curators Ziphozenkosi Dayile and Kemang Wa Lehulere pull back from any attempt to survey collective practice, opening instead with a series of lyrical articulations. Across the exhibition, instances of community are placed alongside searching questions of who ‘you’, ‘I’ or ‘we’ may indeed be?

The exhibition includes photographs, sculptural installations, films and an instruction piece – and extends for three months with public programme of live performances, screenings and discussions.

Participating artists include Yoko Ono, Zanele Muholi, Santu Mofokeng, Glenn Ligon, Moshekwa Langa, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Malick Sidibé, The Propeller Group, Eugene Paramoer, Goddy Leye, Molefe Pheto, Meshac Gaba, David Goldblatt, Mwangi Hutter, Adrian Melis, Haroon Gunn-Salie, James Matthews, Mushroom Hour Half Hour, Pierre Fouché, Billy Monk, Brett Seiler & Luvuyo Nyawose, Gugulective, Avant Car Guard, B4 Food, Dan Halter, and more.

Image: Goddy Leye, We Are the World, 2006. Video (detail). 4 min 52 sec

About A4

You & I is the first exhibition at the new premises of A4 Arts Foundation – opening to the public as an arts centre from 13 September 2017.

A4 Arts Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to supporting the arts in Southern Africa. A4 is grounded by an understanding of art as a reciprocal resource, a catalyst for innovation, and a medium of collectivity.

Configured within a three-storey warehouse on Buitenkant Street in Cape Town, the A4 Arts centre hosts a gallery and project space, as well as a multimedia library.

gently down the stream…

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“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” – Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

holly herndon – chorus (2014)

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Holly Herndon / Akihiko Taniguchi – Artist / Video Director Statements

Holly Herndon: “So much of Chorus was constructed by spying on my own online habits. It felt fitting to invite Akihiko, who I had been spying on online for a long time before my approach, to contribute the visual treatment of the piece.”

Akihiko Taniguchi: “I was interested in exploring the textures of daily necessities and the embodiment / physicality of the computer and Internet. One of the most striking contemporary images is that of the desktop capture, which is seen commonly on YouTube as part of software tutorials. I like the shots of desktops that are poorly organized and ‘lived-in’.

Referencing one of my earlier pieces “study of real-time 3D Internet”, I considered how it corresponds to the personal environment outside of the screen and how particular it is to my identity and my friend’s identities. I asked several friends to photograph their desktop environments and then rendered these images with custom 3D software, shooting video by moving throughout this virtual space. This video is a collection of records of life of friends and their Internet environments.”

Herndon: “I love the idea of depicting the mundane and quotidian in high definition, and how evocative and individual each of these spaces are. Thinking about intimacy and the laptop is familiar territory for me. I’ve also been thinking a lot about privacy, particularly in light of the ongoing revelations regarding the NSA, which add a more sinister sub-narrative to Akihiko’s piece.

The most crucial conversations happening in technology at the moment focus squarely on our work space, our email, our iSight and our smart phone, and how much we can honestly claim those spaces to be ours at all in an era of indiscriminate and imperceptible surveillance.”

___

In this audio-visual talk recorded at Ableton’s Loop summit for music makers in 2016, Holly Herndon describes the role process plays in her creative vision. Drawing on her experience as a recording artist, her studies at Mills College and Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Holly discusses the conceptual frameworks surrounding her process-based composition methods. Using audio and video examples from her recent work she reflects on how government surveillance, internet age aesthetics and collaborations with Mat Dryhurst, Metahaven and others inform her mission to capture the ‘sound of now’.

And here’s an interesting interview from 2015.

ruby swinney – ignis fatuus (exhibition, 2017)

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Ruby Swinney, 2017, Mystery of Faith (Detail), Oil on paper, Approx. 290 x 270 cm

EXHIBITION OPENING
THURSDAY 25 MAY: 18H00 – 20H00
CLICK HERE FOR PREVIEW


Ignis Fatuus

Those–dying then,
Knew where they went–
They went to God’s Right Hand–
That Hand is amputated now

And God cannot be found–
The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small–

Better an ignis fatuus–
Than no illume at all–

Poem 1551 by Emily Dickinson (1882)


WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present Ignis Fatuus – a debut solo exhibition by painter and installation artist Ruby Swinney. Swinney’s work explores what it means to live in a vanishing natural world that is growing progressively darker and unfamiliar. Through the blurring of both South African and imaginary landscapes her work evokes a sense of loss of faith in what it means to be human in a time of intolerance, mistrust, violence and environmental uncertainty. Drawing on this uncertainty Swinney creates surreal tableaux in which she revels in the strange and unpredictable moods of the natural world and its ability to both alter and transcend human experience.

 WHATIFTHEWORLD
1 Argyle Street
Woodstock, 7925
Cape Town, South AfricaViewing Hours
Tues – Fri 09.00 – 17.00
Sat 09.00 – 14.00
Or by appointment

edge of wrong 12 this week!

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The Edge of Wrong invites you to join us for our twelfth annual festival of experimental, uncompromising and dangerous music.

Expect a variety of sonic and visual explorations of the edges from a huge range of international and local artists: drumming ensembles, thunderous noise musicians, avant-pianists, drone ensembles, ambient artisans, post-post-punks, sonic clay sculptors, algorithmic composers, fringe poets, sound theatre, dance, live painting, the melodies of knitting patterns.

In collaboration with Contour Vinyl we will also be launching our first vinyl series: 12 highly limited lathe-cut 7″s containing exclusive works by the artists performing at the festival. These 7″s, each available in a micro-run of only 10 copies, will be available for purchase at our 2017 events.

“An edge is a special kind of being-in- place; it marks the transition between something and nothing. Edges are limits, and also shape-defining margins. To be at the edge is to exist in the “in” of the “in-between,” in the instant between one time and another. An edge cuts and changes whatever it encounters. It is where movement must stop or turn in a different direction; it is where people plummet into the abyss, or learn to fly. Things end, and begin, at this place—but nothing stays at the edge forever. Edges mark the boundaries of empty space, but they also represent the transformational places where new possibilities open up again.” – David Novak, Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation

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FULL LINEUP

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WED 26th Amuse Cafe, 34 5th St, Linden, Johannesburg, 19:00
– Healer Oran
– Datsrok [Norway]
– MONOMORT [Norway]
– Thomas Holme [Norway]

THU 27th The Bijou, 178 Lower Main Rd, Cape Town, 20:00
– Jill Richards
– Coila Enderstein / Daniel Grey
– Darkroom Contemporary (short film)
– DATSROK (Kenneth Korstad Langås, noise) [Norway]
– Dolly Turing [UK]
– Khoi Konnexion

FRI The Bijou, 178 Lower Main Rd, Cape Town, 20:00
– Daniel W J Mackenzie [UK]
– Aragorn23
– RISK (lliezelellick, nonentia, choir, four drummers)
– As Is with Didi Didloff and Vasti Knoesen
– Belinda Blignaut and Jacques van Zyl
– Cara Stacey and Hanan Benammar [Norway]

SAT 29th The Common Room, 135 Albert Rd, Woodstock, Cape Town, 19:00
– Justin Allart and Thomas Holme [Norway]
– Gareth Dawson and Rhea Dally
– Jason Stapleton, Lucy Hazard (projection to audio by Justin Allart)
– Chantelle Gray and Anastasya Eliseeva
– MORKEN [Norway]

SAT Afterparty at the Common Room
– DJ’ing by 3EYE, Violet Beausoleil and Kenneth Angerhand [UK/SA/UZ]

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EXHIBITION

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Hanan Benammar (DZ/FR) – Giraffes don’t Whistle

Giraffes don’t Whistle is a silent karaoke video installation made in collaboration with the students of Brendon Bussy’s class at the Dominican School for Deaf Children.
The videos will explore the relationship between dream, landscape, night activities and perceived sounds from the narratives of the participants.

Mattias Cantzler (SE) – Marius Stocking Blues

Marius Stocking Blues is an experimental sound installation consisting of a self made busker organ.
The organ plays automatically by using a handle and based on a traditional Norwegian knitting pattern called the Marius pattern.
The knitting pattern used in the project is translated into braille, a script for blind people. Inspiration for the project is taken from phonography, cryptography, geometry, mosaic and textiles. The work relates to older forms of communications like for example telegraphy, smoke and light signals, but also has similarities to early computer technology.

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DETAILS

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R100 suggested cover charge per event (more or less according to means).

Right of admission reserved. Cellphones to be switched off during performances.

STUFF TO BRING: A comfy cushion you don’t mind getting dirty. Your own drinks. An open mind.

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A BIT MORE ABOUT EOW:

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HUNTER THOMPSON ONCE SAID that there is no honest way to explain the edge, “because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

It is a kind of hidden place that is revered and feared by some – the hellish underbelly of the world. Yet it is also a place searched for, written about, and found in the music of the strange. And it is this edge we want to bring to you by creating a space which allows musicians to etch out the edge of wrong, pushing the boundaries so that new sounds might be found.

The EDGE OF WRONG festival is currently in its twelfth year and serves mainly to facilitate cultural exchange. Though it has become an established production network it is forever evolving, intent on creating a sustainable environment for quality art of an exploratory nature.

SITE: http://www.edgeofwrong.com/sa
FACEBOOK PAGE: http://www.facebook.com/edgeofwrong

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Perfection is death, as it leaves nothing to be desired.