Steven Sack

Steven Sack is a South African artist whose primary medium is sculpture. One-time Chief Director of the Department of Arts and Culture, he has built a reputation as a respected pioneer of the arts in South Africa. As a dedicated CEO in his various leadership roles, he had little time to be in the studio, which meant having time to practice art was constrained and he needed to work at speed. He once remarked “I was always only capable of short spurts of focusing, condensing, and the beginning of rather rambling thinking. A thought containing an idea or a possible action would emerge and be forgotten.”
Read more...

Sack recalled a drawing class he had where the instructor taught the class that “An artist should be able to draw a man falling from a four-story building before he hits the ground.” This stuck with him, and in his most recent exhibition, became Sack’s point of origin.

In his last exhibition at Nel, he worked with broken wooden “Colon” figures which had been intended for trade in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Ivory Coast. He sourced the figures from Baule in West Africa, drawn to them because of the sculptural iconography and its relationship to colonialism.

The colon figures he sourced depicted generic, professional images tourists might be interested in buying, sculptures of traders, professionals, and comic characters. In his artistic exploration, he found that he could flip them upside down and alter their materiality by visually connecting them to traditional Baule masks. This act of cutting the figure became a form of re-figuration. It also became a way to acknowledge the anonymous carvers from Africa.

Sack then turned the figures into clocks by attaching a clock mechanism on each refigured colon figure. Adding another dimension to the already complex refigured pieces. This could reference the looking back at a previous colonial period, but the clocks could also be counting our failing present attempts at decoloniality. Time itself is referenced, it remains an ever-developing thing that we are all bound by, that waits for nobody.

In addition to the colon figure clocks, Sack also worked with cut-offs of Jelutong, which is a protected tree and is often used by puppet makers because of its light yet strong properties, making it easy to carve. He had the urge to carve protective clothing, masks, hats, and finally six casements for clocks and five casements for his tools.

This was not inspired by Covid, but instead by the urge to mask his face from the decolonial skirmishes which became characteristic of the intellectual discourse in the academies while he was working towards a proposal for a master’s degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in recent years.

The casements were the formations or maquettes towards a proposal for this master’s degree at WITS university. He and his family moved to Cape Town and the master’s degree could not develop further now. Instead, Sack worked towards a solo exhibition, which we were proud to host at Nel in November 2022.

In the interim between having moved to Cape Town permanently and the date of the opening of the solo at Nel (a period of over a year), Stephen Sack experimented with a completely new language, that of paint and inflatable weather balloons.

In a series of painted balloons, all in muted tones and occasionally some blue, the rubber was inflated, then deflated at varying degrees, it resembled skin, anatomy, and ageing. This body of work was at once playful but also ultimately tragic or as the artist would say “pathetic.” The balloons immediately lead to reminiscing of childhood, and children’s parties, there is even a number of balloons tied to party whistles, as the air is let out it escapes through these fun whistles, which are a strain on the ears when taken out of its original intended context and instead placed in this format which in so many ways lays bare a vulnerability in a very brief amount of time. The time it takes to exhale. Ultimately these sculptures speak to our mortality - how brief life is, and how inconsequential we all ultimately are.

Read less.

Oupa Sibeko

Oupa Sibeko is an interdisciplinary artist with a foundation in performance. As a younger artist, he was mentored by the esteemed performance artist Robin Orlin. This afforded him a dexterity in the tone of his work, it can range from the deeply charged and highly spiritual to the playful and, at times, satirical approach to his art. This extends itself over many genres. Moving between photography, film, drawing, performance installation, and community-based activism, Sibeko’s work navigates the politics of the body, as an object and a contested site of labour, provoking a deeper sense of understanding of societal issues in its viewers, and directly addressing attitudes towards issues such as toxic masculinity, slavery and our colonial past.
Read more...

An artist whose name has swiftly grown in the last few years, Sibeko evokes deep thought through his challenging of heteronormative masculinity, and representation of methodologies, such as the act of self-becoming. Sibeko's work utilizes the collaboration between his body and his artistry to create a platform wherein the spirit of movement and expression allows viewers to critically engage with approaches to the body, particularly the black male body.

Though his work deals largely with complex and thought-provoking themes, Sibeko’s artistry heavily invokes the spirit of play, going beyond its associated frivolity, and using it as a channel through which people can engage with each other, and the issues affecting them, in a light, accessible manner. His work acts as an encouragement to people to take charge of the narrative, and rewrite their history. Through play, Sibeko’s work communicates and embodies the knowledge of its artist, acting, in turn, as an imaginative exploration of the world around him. Borrowing elements of performance through the exchange of cultural knowledge and ritualistic communal practices, Sibeko allows his artistic practice to continuously morph and reshape itself with each iteration of his work.

“The body knows things that the mind cannot express and it’s in playing, and being playful, that I can continue becoming. It’s in the act of becoming that my body produces images, artworks, and performances that are never planned but are a result of playing.”

As an independent artist, Sibeko continues to make waves through his contribution to art and education, both teaching and volunteering in educational institutions across Johannesburg, South Africa. He has taken part in group and solo shows in Namibia at the National Art Gallery of Namibia, Wits TPO Gallery, Wits Art Museum, Room Gallery, Melville Art Project, Greatmore Studios in Cape Town, The Freezer Hostel and Theatre in Iceland, and Art Room in Parkhurst. Sibeko was awarded a Mail & Guardian top 200, David Koloane award in 2019, and a Richard Haines all-rounded performer award by Wits University Humanities Faculty in 2015. More recently, Sibeko was shortlisted for the top 17 in the Henrike Grohs Art award 2020.

Read less.

Belinda Blignaut

Emerging in the early 1990s, Belinda Blignaut (b.1968) was one of a group of young Johannesburg-based conceptual and experimental artists whose work served as a commentary on the social and political uncertainty of South Africa, often in challenging or, at the very least, critical terms. Belinda Blignaut's work suggests an urgency for protest and change.
Read more...

Through varied mediums and series over decades, she has been processing issues around transformation, with the body at the centre of all. Through an engagement with readily available and everyday materials, processing immediate surroundings, she hopes to translate the ways we adapt, a quiet visceral investigation into life and the creative process.

Surfacing in all she does is an exploration into a more fluid world, to actively resist the effects of institutionalized culture. Her work of the past decade takes her interest in materiality as a metaphor for psychological transformation into an ongoing series of sculptural clay vessels, a love affair with earth and organic matter. There are purely intuitive hand-built shapes, often cut and joined, setting out to make ‘an other’ whole. Through these intuitive choices and tactile joining processes, intimacy with the material is experienced. In looking to create from a deeper source, Blignaut began digging her own wild clay, using it unprocessed to allow for chance, unknowns and the natural reactions between the foraged raw materials and minerals. She uses plants as glaze. Through the work Blignaut is interested in translating psychologies of person and place.

On Saturday, the 30th from 11 am to 1 pm, Blignaut premiered her performance art piece Mud Rites inside the Church Street window display of Nel. Her performance work often involves getting literally into the vessel and emerging as if from a chrysalis. It can also, more recently, see her climbing into and under the wet clay, connecting directly with the earth. Blignaut comments:

"This act is a surrender to earth, to a path in my practice, to passion. Rites mark a passage between one state and another. Both art and rites enable us to express the intuitive in a visceral, visible way. Placing my body into earth speaks of transformation, a continual dying and rebirthing, a celebration of a mud connection. I see my body as earth, as dirt, as soil, as loss, as transforming, as finding I’m learning every day from nature: how it grows, how it forms, how it adapts and survives, why it adapts and survives. I remain in awe. Finding and exploring an earth connection has become a guide in learning to work deeper".

Read less.

Artist statement

Art is a form of research. The things that preoccupy my mind is the material that I make art with. I can play, order and grasp, even if just for a fleeting moment.
Read more...

My first three solo exhibitions, REFLECTION (2003), REPETITION (2006) and CONSTANT MOVEMENT (2008) consisted of large monochromatic fields of repetitive patterns and reflected my interest in Zen and a mid-life obsession with existential concerns.

With EXCHANGE (2010), most of the patterns morphed into forms that referenced pre-historic organisms, palaentology and a newly discovered interest in the origin of life itself.

In 2013, I turned the focus on my own life and my identity as a man. Relying on memory, personal photographs and literature on the phases of existence, I created a series of figurative paintings which culminated in SAMULACRUM (2014), an exhibition about coming of age, DOOP//INITIATE (2016) which examined initiation processes, group identity and belonging, and WRONG ARCHIVE (2017), a reflection on my experience of National Service and war.

Global political scenarios, recent hashtag movements and other revelations of toxic male behavior have plunged masculinity into a crises and have become an enormous burden to men. The myths of antiquity have always been an inexhaustible source of ethical enquiry, intellectual speculation and artistic renewal and have captivated me since childhood. My new work use classical mythology as storied vehicles through which to explore fundamental sources of origin, being, power and truth.

Download JPs CV

Read less.

The Artwork and Artist’s narrative.

After going through some literature on the subject of guilds and unions, I was keen to meet craftsmen at their place of work. At large factories there were unforeseen difficulties. Usually there is a security guard at the front gate who is the first to meet you. Then there is a secretary at reception, then a PR officer, then a manager, then a general manager, and eventually, the craftsmen. You get passed on from one to the other, which can take months. From gate to craftsmen, each person you encounter in the chain has a repertoire of social interaction that takes a long time to get used to.
Read more...

None of the idiosyncratic (or complete lack of) social skills of the people in the access chain matched those of the craftsmen themselves. The first real problem (rather than a challenge) occurs when coming face-to-face with craftsmen. Craftsmen learn their particular skill by completing the magical 10 000 hours in various set-ups. One can imagine that a successful master craftsman in charge of a guild bottega has negotiation skills, able to cut deals with patrons to ensure liquidity in the firm, such skills are not part of the learning for most craftsmen, especially in large factories.

To engage craftsmen in large factory circumstances one needs something special. For me it came in the shape of remembering the story of the Trojan Horse tale, with my benevolent ‘horse’ being a skill learnt at art school - drawing. For a period of up to two weeks I would arrive at a factory and draw what I see: people, machines, tools, furniture and architecture. It would take 5 years to complete the 30 drawings.

Provenance

Exhibited as a body of 30 drawings in 2015, at the 56th Venice Art Biennale on the main exhibition, All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor.

Press

Hereby a small selection:
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/all-the-worlds-futures/
http://www.apollo-magazine.com/verbal-assault-all-the-worlds-futures-reviewed-venicebiennale/
http://momus.ca/labor-lost-owkui-enwezors-artworld-biennale/
http://frieze-magazin.de/archiv/kritik/all-the-worlds-futures/?lang=en
http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/bien/venice_biennale/2015/tour/all_the_worlds_futures_2/joachim_schoenfeldt
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/359725088965935713/
http://fiskfrisk.com/2015/05/10/images-from-the-preview-of-the-56th-biennale-di-venezia/
https://www.collectorsagenda.com/eng/journal/review/56th-international-artexhibition-venice-all-the-world-s-futures


Biography

b. Pretoria, ZA. Education: BA Fine Arts (Wits) H.Dip. Ed PG. (Wits) Lived in Namibia, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium. Currently lives and work in Johannesburg. Schönfeldt is a practising artist who have exhibited in New York (White Box), San Francisco (Centre for the Arts) and Massachusetts (Brandeis University) in the States and in Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada. He has also exhibited in Paris (Gallery d’Esplenade), Rome (Sala 1) Berlin (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), Rotterdam (Netherlands Architecture Institute), Lisbon, Porto (Moagens Harmonica), Glasgow (Tramway), Turin (Castello di Rivolli), Umea (BildMuseet), Sierre (FAC) and Copenhagen in Europe. He represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale and at the Sao Paulo Biennale. He also participated in both Johannesburg Biennales, Gwangju Biennale in 2008 and on the main show Venice Biennale 2015.

In his career he has worked with curators such as: Okwui Enwezor (2015 Venice Biennale), Peter Weibel (past director of the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, Austria), Lauri Firstenberg (Independent curator in New York), Joao Fernandes (curator at the Seralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal), Jean-Yves Jouannais (Independent curator) and Julia Charlton (Wits Art Galleries, Johannesburg) His work is represented in various private and public collections, like MoMa, NY, The Smithsonian, Hangart-7-Sammlung, University of the Witwatersrand Art Gallery, Johannesburg and National Gallery, Cape Town.

Articles on him and his work have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Art Agenda, Flash Art, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Frieze and Atlantica. In 2001 he was short-listed for the Daimler Chrysler Award. Read less.

Brett Charles Seiler, b.1994, Zimbabwe. Works and lives in Cape Town South Africa.
Graduated from The Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2015. Solo exhibitions include ‘ Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart ’, 2016 at AVA, Cape Town and
Read more...

‘ More Scared Of What Was In My Closet Than What Was Underneath My Bed ’, 2018 at CIRCA gallery, Cape Town. Seiler has also been included in various group exhibitions including a performance piece with Luvuyo Nyawose titled ‘ Read ing Homophobia ’, 2017, at A4 Foundation curated by Kemang Wa Lehulere and Zipho Dayile.

Seiler works in painting and installation. The use of text and language is critical to Seiler’s work. The poetic and the religious often combine in what read as something from the confessional. He deals with romantic gestures and sexual interactions.

Seiler’s work dives into historical gay modes of communication and conduct. Bringing forward a collective memory of gay rights movements and focusing on the sexual oppression of gay men. One is left with a sense of longing, distance and nostalgia.

Seiler also brings performance, work where process is key and acts of intervention into play in much of his narratives. Works that ‘queer’ the gallery space, including writings and imagery directly on the gallery walls – this almost as a revolt or at the very least disobedience.

Being from Zimbabwe, Seiler knows what it is like growing up in a country that although critical of colonialism, elects to bide by colonial homophobic laws as well as the homophobia encountered in day to day living. His work seeks to highlight gay rights or the lack thereof within this context by focussing on punishment metered, education, the media and the current status quo with regards equality and human rights.

Brett Charles Seiler, b.1994, Zimbabwe. Works and lives in Cape Town South Africa. Graduated from The Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2015. Solo exhibitions include ‘ Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart ’, 2016 at AVA, Cape Town and ‘ More Scared Of What Was In My Closet Than What Was Underneath My Bed ’, 2018 at CIRCA gallery, Cape Town. Seiler has also been included in various group exhibitions including a performance piece with Luvuyo Nyawose titled ‘ Read ing Homophobia ’, 2017, at A4 Foundation curated by Kemang Wa Lehulere and Zipho Dayile. Read less.