VALENCIA GOVINDASAMY
RUNNING for the next two weeks is an exhibition featuring seven artists at the KZNSA Gallery titled Sightings. It reflects upon the ways in which the materiality and veracity of the present are constructed from scattered and partial remains of personal and collective memory. The artists include Bridger Baker, Bianca Baldi, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Abri de Swardt, Uriel Orlow and Kemang Wa Lehulere.
In an interview with Tonight, curator of the exhibition, Amy Watson, explains the works in detail: “The exhibition brings together seven contemporary artists’ practices that variously explore the slippages and omissions in the construction of historical narratives. The artists included work primarily in lens-based media (16mm film, video and photo-graphy), realising installations through a process of researched-based practices in archives. Both lens-based media and research-based practices are afforded a kind of authority. In working in their chosen media and with archival material, the artists signal the construction at work in producing official and commonly-held accounts of history and question what photography and film documents and evidences and what is overlooked, and the fixity that lens-based media assumes in its representational form, thus the artists destabilise photography and lens-based media as technologies of remembrance.”
Asked what she found most appealing about this exhibition, she says: “I am interested in the relationship between analogue and digital technologies in this exhibition. I think this is important given our current de-materialised trajectories and economies, in which the analogue is largely understood to be increasingly obsolete. Digital does not replace or surpass analogue, but both offer different relationships to the veracity of the past. The exhibition includes works in both media, and the artists have shown how both are implicated in the construction of hegemonic narratives of the past and present.”
On what art lovers can expect from viewing these works, Watson says: “I think one can expect to spend time with the works on Sightings, they are largely durational works, and audiences can anticipate to engage works, piecing together information for themselves. The works require your time and for you to come to your own understanding and inter-pretation, as most works do. There is no right or wrong interpretation but rather the works resist singular narratives, reminding us that history is made of multiple and sometimes overlooked accounts.”
One of the participating artists, Bianca Baldi, also shares her hopes for her art: “I always hope that the audience takes a little of my process with them. I am an obsessive researcher, meaning I read, see and travel continuously.
“This is the fuel for my practice. But the biggest challenge is getting everyone else to be as excited about the work as I am.
“The development of audience is the most difficult challenge even beyond the more obvious financial precarity that artists are faced with.”
l The exhibition runs at the KZNSA Gallery until September 6. Call 031 277 1705. It is funded by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund and the National Arts Council.