A dot is a mark. Connected dots become a line. Connected lines become a shape. Multiple shapes, over time, become a pattern. A pattern becomes a poem. 

“Markers” is a solo exhibition presented by Paul Senyol at David Krut Projects in Johannesburg (20 June to 13 July 2019). This record of spaces, traces and transition through mark-making coalesces paintings by the artist— reflecting beautiful poetry shaped by fluidity and movement.  In this body of work, Senyol embraces liminality—both in form and in concept—liminality as a disorientation that occurs when we are in transition or in between. For him, this sense of disorientation and reflection upon it, comes through his observation of the environment. 

Organic and non-organic shapes within the painting are foregrounded on the idea of a mark —what the mark communicates and the gestures necessary to create that mark. Through a process of breathing and respiration, these marks create a continuity between the  human body and the landscape while at the same time reflecting on the manner in which humans insert themselves into various cityscapes and landscapes (e.g. carving one’s name into a tree, graffiti scratchings on a bus stop).  

Senyol and I had a brief conversation prior to the opening of “Markers”. 

NM: Can you speak to the title of the show? 

PS: “Markers” is an attempt to highlight the process and act of mark-making within my works. It is a title that has been on my mind for a while. The title itself alludes to certain geographic markers that I have come across, as well as the actual implement/tool of a marker pen used to produce the works. Mark-making, repetition and abstraction are key aspects of my process and work.

NM: Can you speak more on this idea of how you see  humans imposing themselves onto different landscapes?

SM: There is a tension. As mankind, we impose ourselves onto the natural environment but at the same time we abandon certain areas. These areas that have been permanently abandoned can sometimes show a slow process of reclaiming themselves. I am very interested in the intersection between the natural and manmade spaces. I quite enjoy the spaces where the two meet. Most often this is where present day mark-making is found, for instance street art/graffiti. I really enjoy being in nature, and take a lot of direction from shapes, colours and forms found outdoors. At the same time I also enjoy the grittiness of urban spaces. I draw on both as inspiration in my work.

NM: I’m interested in your reflections on these notions of colour, line and form. How you think through each one of these elements as you make the work?

SM: I enjoy the tension that even a very small line or mark can make on a canvas. Even accidental and unintentional marks can become beautiful…..hopefully this tension and beauty carries through in my work. I often have bits of scrap paper and tracing paper which I use as starting points to make drawings for my paintings. These serve as reductions in composition and give a direction for the paintings. Most are gleaned from quick snapshots on my phone—snapshots of landscapes, cityscapes, flowers, etc. As these get drawn and redrawn they abstract themselves and find their way into my paintings.

NM: I’m interested in understanding your process of making….do these abstractions (in the paintings) end up depicting the movements that you witness as you’re paying attention to the environment or do they end up reflecting a general mood and emotion? 

SM: I would say that mood and emotion are a tangible goal for me as I work on pieces. As a painter, I feel as though I am a witness as well as a translator. I draw out combinations of colours and shapes from the environment.

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This is a recording of visual artist and activist Prof. Zanele Muholi on a documentary series—Art21. Muholi’s mission is ‘to re-write a black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in SA and beyond’.

In late 2018, Muholi commissioned 25 emerging artists to interpret photographic images from their self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama—an ongoing photographic series where Muholi has decided to turn the lens inwards as a way of speaking to the politics of race, class, gender and sexuality. This group of artists responded through their own personal creations and interpretations, shining light on ideas of collectivism and visibility. Works created by the artists were later displayed as part of an exhibition at the KZNSA Gallery, Ikhono LaseNatali, curated by Thobeka Bhengu and Bajabulile Dhlamini.

I had an opportunity to chat to the curators about this impactful intervention.

NM: Can you tell us about  the title of the show: IKHONO LASENATALI, what does it speak to?

Curators: Ikhono LaseNatali speaks to the ability or skills of artists in KwaZulu-Natal. The title of the show is daring and direct in acknowledging and affirming skilled artists in KwaZulu-Natal.

NM: How was the reception for this exhibition, particularly from the local Durban communities? Who seems to be engaging with the work?

Curators: The exhibition has been open for close to three weeks and the reception of the work has been more than what we expected. The education programme has attracted more schools, including township schools that Muholi and Inkanyiso Media have been working with around Durban. This has opened opportunities for young people who have never had the privilege of being in a gallery to access the space and engage with this important work. Different people have been engaging with the work, people of all ages, races and backgrounds. We are humbled by the response and thankful to the Durban community for responding to this work.

NM: What kind of conversations do these images (responding to Prof Muholi’s work) create? What do you believe happens in that process of translation?

Curators: The entire body of work (Somnyama Ngonyama) confronts systematic and political nuances through visuals; looking at politics of race, gender, blackness, beauty and personal experiences in social spaces and constructs. It confronts complex personal, political and social experiences through visual representations and articulations.

It is usually said that certain things are lost in translation; however in Ikhono LaseNatali- Somnyama Ngonyama interpreted, the work has not been lost in translation. Instead, it has been intensified and multiplied. The translations by the twenty five artists brought the voices of the artists themselves to the fore, in addition to the themes addressed by Somnyama Ngonyama as a body of work.

NM: I’m interested in the manner in which these interventions  begin to formulate ways to deal with inequality (race, sexual and gender), can you speak to this?

Curators: This kind of intervention is looking at making art spaces accessible to black artists, ensuring that younger generations can visit galleries and experience black artist’s work on the walls of spaces that were previously inaccessible to these artists. The intervention also provided monetary compensation for the commissioned artists and explored the idea of collectivism.

NM: Can you tell us about the programme in its entirety? (Labs etc?)

Curators: The exhibition in its entirety features Educational Programmes that are accessible to the public at no fee—the Public Walkabouts, Lab talks and Education Programme for schools.

The Public Walk-Abouts give insight to the work displayed in the exhibition and they allow direct interaction with the artists. Lab Talks are more interactive and engaging, where the artists share their journey, mediums, styles and materials with attendees. The programme is open to KZN schools and it has been a resounding success.

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The ocean is the world, without partition and division, only depth and expanse. Because of its depth, it serves as a burial place. So if you point a camera at a mass of water, you get an opaque representation, of gods and languages and objects and songs, everything thrown in with bodies from the West African coast. The opacity of the sea is therefore its rich, dangerous promise. Some will drown, and some will reach harbour. –

Emmanuel Iduma, The Stranger’s Pose (2018)

Jo Ractliffe writes:

I live in a house on the mountainside, overlooking the sea. Every morning I breathe in the sea’s air. It’s a smell like no other, sometimes intensely humic, at other times bearing just the faintest trace of brine. I draw it in as deeply as I can, as if that breath could gather in all the depth of the ocean. It fills me with a pure momentary contentment and I know I am here with the living, not the dead.

In 2015 I sustained an injury that altered my life and the way I see things. Consequently, my photography has shifted away from the research-based, extended photo essay, which required lengthy and repeated journeys into the landscape. These days I find myself working in spurts, more spontaneously and responsively, and observing the dynamics that emerge when a collection of apparently disparate images, made without a clear or sustained intention on my part, comes together. I find myself less invested in my own desires than in what the photographs appear to want from each other. When selecting and editing images for Everything is Everything (2017), I was curious to see the patterns and repetitions that had developed – independently, it seemed, of my intentions – as well as the tone of the work as a whole – despite the range of visual attitudes, photographic modes and camera equipment used over a 30-year period. Similarly, with this body of work, there have been a number of images that have refused to comply with my attempts to edit them out and repeatedly found their way back into the group. This may sound strange: we don’t usually grant the image its own agency, but I’m beginning to see that photographs do have their own force; they push back at us, and if we pay attention, we can enter into different relations with them.

Most of the photographs on this exhibition were made during the past 45 months; a few extend back as far as 1986. They come from many places: the Southern Cape, up the West Coast, to Angola and across the Atlantic to Mexico. From the mermaid in St Helena Bay to Buffel, the southern elephant seal, who journeyed some 2 100 kilometres from Marion Island to undergo his catastrophic moult on Fish Hoek beach earlier this year, this exhibition begins and ends with the sea.

The exhibition will open on Thursday 16 May from 6 to 8pm.

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STEVENSON

Stevenson gallery, has an international exhibition programme with a particular focus on the South Africa region. The gallery opened in 2003, and has spaces in Cape Town and Johannesburg. It is jointly owned by its eleven directors. Stevenson participates in Art Basel, Frieze London, Paris Photo and Art Basel Miami Beach.

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A warmed globe needs new writers to guide us through it; will climate change, like World War I, usher in a new novel?

Stephanie Bernhard

In carrying on Bernhard’s thinking above, one wonders whether a warmed globe will usher in new modes of thinking and new modes of creating. What images, creations and conversations will be generated ? And how will those expand our notions of how we relate to each other as human,  as well as how we relate to other creatures and living organisms ?

Through this exhibition, presented at Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg (30 March – 2 May 2019), Penny Siopis opens up new options through which to explore images that speak to climate change —colour, form and texture construct a powerful sensory experience and open up a space for reflection on climate change. In the weightlessness of the material (glue and ink), the mind is stretched towards new imaginaries and material ways of creating fantasies.

The material process of the paintings is a fluid affair; the glue’s capacity to change its form and colour when it comes into contact with other forces – air, gravity, water, my gestures – imbues it with a presence that holds onto itself as ‘something other’, yet can simultaneously take on the guise of an image.

Penny Siopis

Penny Siopis embraces the figure in these paintings. Still and moving bodies creep into the canvas creating a delicate and disquieting atmosphere —the use of glue and ink simulates a sense of pliability and malleability and brings forth an array of immense emotions.

These material incidents – especially when they evolve into bits of figuration – have the potential to draw together wildly different states of being, real and imagined, dreams, history and myth, or stories from the realms of politics, philosophy, critical theory.

Penny Siopis

This body of work does not present us with definitive meanings or interpretations but rather serves as entry points into multiple readings —among other possibilities, the show can be extrapolated into our readings and understandings of environmental disasters; what is natural, who is affected, who is implicated? Climate change is negotiated in the context of life itself; human and non-human matter, encounters with other creatures, the forces and elements of nature; earth, water, air and fire? Siopis questions how we imagine global warming; its forms and formlessness—do we imagine burning, drowning or absolute alterity?

Old stories are used as a grounding through which to imagine new worlds; the story of Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, for instance, considers the narrative of the island of Mauritius and annotates our dialogues on political ecology. All is connected; history and myth, dreams and reality, politics and philosophy —ideologies converge.

Penny Siopis’ ongoing inquiry reverberates in the oscillating waves of the abstracted paintings, playing on how colour commands attention and produces meaning—piercing blues and blazing reds and oranges of varying forms and intensity pulsate into the hallowed atmosphere while expanding our imagination forward.

→ Warm Water Imaginaries, solo exhibition by Penny Siopis in Johanesburg

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The works in this exhibition were made in response to an invitation to participate in Rising Waters: The Indian Ocean in the Twenty-first Century, a group exhibition at the McMullen Museum, Boston, in 2020. The show proposes to look at climate change and the migration of people, objects and ideas across the Indian Ocean. With Warm Water Imaginaries,Siopis responds to this vast history and complex geological and social present through the creation of imaginary worlds in small and large paintings, as well as object-assemblages and a new film in progress. While alluding to narratives and images that speak to climate change, the works’ open form, associative materiality and vibrant process invite the spectator to project their own imaginings.

Read the article on this exhibition by clicking on the following link:   → A union of form, texture and colour reflects on climate change

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STEVENSON

Stevenson gallery, has an international exhibition programme with a particular focus on the South Africa region. The gallery opened in 2003, and has spaces in Cape Town and Johannesburg. It is jointly owned by its eleven directors. Stevenson participates in Art Basel, Frieze London, Paris Photo and Art Basel Miami Beach.

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