This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
| Capital: How heads talk |
|
The annual Wits Arts and Literature Experience (WALE) has come and gone, but one of the festival’s key elements is still on display. “Capital: How Heads Talk” is an exhibition showcasing a number of items from the university’s collection of contemporary and historical African art, on the site of what will be the new Wits Art Museum. The collection – which has been ‘hidden’ over the last few years during the search for funding and an appropriate gallery space – is a substantial one and the current exhibition features some celebrated South African artists: William Kentridge, Gerard Sekoto, Walter Battiss, Sam Nhlengethwa, Penny Siopis, Robert Hodgins, Brett Murray, Pieter Hugo and Cyril Coetzee, to name a few. Equally important, however, are the anonymous artists whose work is categorised as “historical African art”. This includes ritual masks, figurines, headdresses, funerary busts and other ‘traditional’ pieces from Nigeria, the DRC, Sudan, Angola, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Côte D’Ivoire and other countries from the western and central regions of the continent. Indeed, explains Julia Charlton (from the curatorial team of staff and postgraduate students at the Wits School of Arts), it was the resonance between some of these masks and contemporary South African works such as Hentie van der Merwe’s “The Judge” – a yellow, moulded plastic death’s head or skull with a pronounced beak lending it a vulture-like quality – that provided the impetus for exploring ‘conversations’ between other ‘heads’ in the collection. There is, of course, an obvious (albeit essentialist) dialogue is between European and African, or ‘western’ and ‘southern’ cultural practises. One of the more intriguing artefacts is a crown, created by a Yoruba artist out of vivid red beads, that mimics the style of a barrister’s wig: a fusion of British colonial and indigenous Nigerian symbols of authority. A similar conflation – or disjunction – is evident in Michael McGarry’s quirky “Karl Marx in Angola, 1974”, which adapts a traditional Fang mask by giving it the fluffy white hair and beard of the famous communist. The confrontation is made explicit in Sandile Goje’s linocut “Meeting of Two Cultures”, which literalises the phrase ‘having a roof over your head’ by introducing two figures with houses (instead of heads) made of brick and mud respectively. Likewise, Brett Murray’s “Protect and Serve – Marge” teasingly merges an animal skin-clad, spear-wielding warrior with the longsuffering mother of The Simpsons. This hints at another dialogue (identified by the curators in their “Generic/Specific” category) between famous, instantly recognisable heads and heads that represent ‘everyday’ individuals. Thus, viewers will find the faces of local icons such as Jacob Zuma, Nelson Mandela, Edwin Cameron, Hendrik Verwoerd, Lucas Radebe and Steve Biko, as well as international figures such as Charles de Gaulle or W.H. Auden; but they will also see portraits of unglamorous and unnamed citizens. Other paradigms for understanding “how heads talk”, the curators suggest, are the ways in which heads can signify justice, power, death, memory and our sense(s) of beauty and the aesthetic. At the opening of the exhibition, Bobby Godsell elaborated on its punning title by pointing out that – in light of the recession – there has “never been a time when the Humanities have been more relevant” because our artists and their art works are “the talking heads and the capital our country and, indeed, our world needs right now”. Such an affirmation bodes well for the future of the Wits art collection and museum.
|
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|