Practice

A FRAGILE ARCHIVE

Curated by Nontobeko Ntombela

Johannesburg Art Gallery 29 January - 8 April 2012

I think I can claim to be the first South African woman in the country to hold an exhibition. As far as I know I am the only African woman who has taken up painting seriously. Gladys Mgudlandlu

A Frgile Archive

For her MAFA exhibition, Nontobeko Ntombela (Curator of Contemporary Art, Johannesburg Art Gallery) curated A Fragile Archive, an exhibition that “re-stages” Gladys Mgudlandlu’s first commercial exhibition at the Contact magazine boardroom in Cape Town in 1961, in order to critically engage the construction of artists’ biographies. Ntombela draws on curatorial and exhibition practices to navigate the archive of Mgudlandlu’s public acclaim and positioning within histories of South African art. In revealing the fragility of the archive around Mgudlandlu’s first exhibition, Ntombela’s research presented a unique opportunity to examine the 1961 show through a visual re-presentation of the presences and absences of an archive in exhibition form. This included using an analysis and explication of art historical provenance to recuperate details of the works on the original exhibition, and using conversations with figures active in the Liberal Party and Contact magazine in the 1960s to re-map the original space. A Fragile Archive also includes previously unexhibited drawings by Mgudlandlu that at one time belonged to the artist’s son, as well a small selection of paintings by Valerie Desmore, whose working period predates Mgudlandlu by some twenty years, and whose absence in histories of art bear out the complexities and contradictions of the making and meaning of artists’ biographies.

Life of bone: Art Meets Science

Curated by Joni Brenner, Gerhard Marx, Karel Nel

Origins Centre, Wits University 4-31 May 2011

To become part of a culture, discipline, or project, bones need interpreters, palaeontologists, painters, sculptors, kin. Stories must be told about them. Kopano Ratele

Life of bone is an exhibition and accompanying book published concurrently by Wits University Press. The project represents an interdisciplinary enquiry by a small group of artists and fellow academics, for whom bones, far from being simply a reminder of the inevitability of death, are repositories of the life that was; evidence of life even if that life is no longer. Indeed, bones have the potential to draw to themselves all manner of meaning we can connect with them as immediate kin, regard them as the evidence of the death of one’s foe, as the remnants of the violations of a genocide, as the continued presence of one’s ancestors, or part of an evolutionary puzzle. These meanings are multiple: personal, political, social, spiritual and scientific to name but a few.
Three South African artists - Joni Brenner, Gerhard Marx and Karel Nel, a writer, a poet and a group of prestigious scientists engaged in a variety of ways with the thoughts which bones engender about death and life, about the past, the present and the future. Central to their enquiry were three skulls: the Taung child, the fragments from Border cave and a modern chimpanzee skull.