"The New Spell" Exhibition
David Krut Projects
This event has ended.
"The New Spell," a group exhibition of contemporary South African art curated by Lucy Rayner.
With a certain shift in tone, an equivocal and satirical vocabulary has developed within the language of recent South African art. Artists are teasingly subverting contemporary politics and societal norms with a liberated sense of detachment and satiric self-reflexivity. The resultant works are consciously current, sometimes self-consciously hip, and self-consciously oppositional. Bringing together the work of six artists who share an affinity for a particularly vulgar aesthetic, The New Spell aims to consider one of the many enlivening tendencies within this approach. The exhibition explores how the grotesque is exercised through works of art to reveal the fetish within contemporary South African social and political relations of power. By contemplating the grotesque within works by Nandipha Mntambo, Michael MacGarry, Maja Maljevic, Themba Shibase, Nina Barnett and Robyn Nesbitt The New Spell hopes to invite viewers to consider relations of power in South Africa with a greater sense of intimacy - and perhaps even humour - by moving beyond the binary categories such as autonomy versus subjection or resistance versus passivity. The works on exhibition kidnap instances of the fetish and force them to examine their own vulgarity, exposing ways in which official culture in South Africa is characterized by a distinctive style of improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion.
Media
Schedule
from June 05, 2008 to July 30, 2008
Opening Reception : June 5 6-8 pm