FNB Art Joburg
08-10.09.23
Sandton Convention
Centre, Johannesburg,
South Africa​

Re:View

Downloading a transference of hope

with Lungiswa Gqunta

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The product of defiance, Lungiswa Gqunta’s multidisciplinary practice reasserts black life back into landscapes through performance, printmaking, sculpture and multi sensory installation. Disrupting grief charged legacies of patriarchal dominance and colonialism with care that centres black femmes as a priority she reflects on the disregarded ways we have survived systemic social, physical and spiritual fatalities. Regarded in the context of her current solo presentation at WHATIFTHEWORLD, titled Sleep in Witness, this week’s Re:View surveys the tangible ways intangibles manifest in her practice.

Upon entering WHATIFTHEWORLD, visitors are greeted by a large scale black and white photograph. In it, four smartly dressed teenagers or young adults are seen seated outside around a table looking through photographs, on what looks like a warm summer night. “That’s my mother,” says Lungiswa Gqunta pointing to one of the women. Taken in the 1970s, at the height of Apartheid, this rested, joyful display begins to disrupt the ways mainstream historical texts inform our perception of Black women.

Surfacing feelings and ideas around spatial fluidity, the difference between invisiblity and transparency, a take on intangible modes of dissemination and the dotted lines between observation and participation, Gqunta’s Sleep in Witness is many things. One of them is a passage between two periods: pre-democracy and post-apartheid. A line where women then can talk to women now, through dreams, the show is an invitation to download the love-charged defiance that kept ancestors going.

Employing embodiment as a part of her curatorial affect for Sleep in Witness, Gqunta’s interventions ask the audience for active engagement. “I’m always trying to figure out how else you can experience the work or the idea apart from just visually. It’s considering how people move in a space that offers me the ability to dictate or affect you physically rather than just by offering you the opportunity to just look at something on a wall,” explains Gqunta.

Marking off a large sum of the gallery by covering its floor with barbed wire, Sleep in Witness limits the places audiences can tread on. She goes on, “That kind of a space can be quite disruptive, violent and like, extremely uncomfortable because of the ways it challenges our understanding and experience with access, especially in spaces like these.” Even with these physical limitations, something about knowing that the first people to tread the fresh ground were jovial Black women is comforting and affirming.

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Ruth Ige. Don't hide your glory, 2022.
Acrylic on canvas. 122 x 122cm. (© Copyright 2022, STEVENSON. All rights reserved)

Friday, 8th September

Collection tour of Anglo American

Location
144 Oxford Rd, Rosebank

Date
8 September 2023
11am

Event details

The Anglo American art and object collection is a combination of art collected over several decades through four different companies: Anglo American, de Beers Group, Anglo American Platinum and Kumba Iron Ore.

The collection comprises of 3600 works, with around 1000 pieces in the collection on display at the newly commissioned Rosebank offices. Although vast, the collection experienced an acquisition hiatus from the early 2000s until 2021 creating a significant gap in the collection’s representation of contemporary art. The collection now has a dedicated curator, Megan Scott, tasked with its cataloguing and digitisation, opening an exciting new chapter which will see the gradual procurement of significant works that reflect our contemporary South African and African art world.

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