Using the Internet and exquisite sound technology Tabita Rezaire explores original and subversive ways of producing new work with the aim of investigating the process of decolonization. Self-identifying Franco-Guyano-Danish artist, Rezaire is a known practioner of Kundalini yoga, and centralized self-love as part of the process of decolonization with most of her work dealing with the concept of race and feminism. She produces videos and digital works which navigate the matrix of coloniality and energy to create works where technology and spirituality intersect. Her work Moon Center is an online interactive site that operates as a digital meditation hub dedicated to the variety of cultures that worship the moon immersing viewers in both a spatial and ambient experience.

South African artist Nolan Oswald Dennis also explores the politico-spiritual dimensions of time, identity, and knowledge production in his practice. With themes grounded in decolonial politics, his 2017 work Black Liberation Zodiac is a constellation of elements. The artwork uses video, prisms, drawings, and symbols that consider a variety of histories displayed non-linearly. Liberation movements are mapped based on star patters and star signs are used as iconology for global black liberation languages highlighting shared references from the global African diaspora of a gun, a book, a dove, a fist, a lion, and a panther. The spiritual constellation is evocative of broader Afro-futurist aesthesis.

Angolan multimedia and performance artist Nástio Mosquito artwork is also heavily political, with challenging and occasionally profane works. He creates digital-performative works that challenge African stereotypes in Western contexts. His practice revolves around cultural inheritance, as a constantly evolving idea showcasing elements of Afrofuturism, examining the production of future inheritance. Using technology as an archiving tool is a common theme.

Afro-futurism

The Afrofuturism movement has also experienced a renewed interest in recent years as fresh perspectives on African stories emerges. Using technology, and elements of science fiction, new narratives are explored as part of the new generation of African storytellers as a postcolonial reclamation. Celebration of an Afrocentric future is seen in various works in the continent and its Diaspora.  The myriad levels of social commentary found in Afrofuturism envelops architecture, urbanity, as well as evolving identities.

Nigerian-American visual artist Olalekan Jeyfous, originally trained as an architect and his practice investigates the idea of place, arranging the concept as continuously constructed rather than given or imagined. His work in public art, installation, drawing, collage and design explores the past and potential futures of urban environments. His artwork Shanty Megastructures is series of a dystopian vision of Lagos, the dispossessed are given prominence and visibility in a somewhat dystopian vision of the city. In his latest self-initiated line of work he focuses on ideas central to Afro-futurism, eco-futurism, and agro-futurism in the Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy neighborhood in New York City. At the core of Jeyfous’ work is an investigation that confronts tensions between utopia, progress, and urban design.

Contemporary African and Diaspora society is infiltrated by technology. The exploration of a fictional possibility is part of Ghanaian-Moroccan Afro-surrealist David Alabo’s projects. Alabo’s work pertains to showcasing and critiquing African society culture using 3-dimensional abstract work; highlighting the ‘fantastical and strange’.

Another practitioner within the field is Lagos-based visual artist Joseph Obanubi whose Afro-surrealism work attempts to communicate an idea of metaphysics in an African context. His background in graphic design explore fantasy, delusion, and identity. His series Techno Heads (2018-ongoing) uses tools and tropes of science fiction and local cultural aesthetics as a means to confront and analyze present day issues within a globalized context.  

Global contemporary society strongly revolves around and depends on technology for communication, motion, and navigation, all of which are central aspects of human existence. New Media and Technology is now assisting artists in sharing their work in completely new environments. As pioneers in immersive creative landscapes, there is a whole group of artists from the continent that are piloting this new way of artistic exchange.

Virtual Reality

Navigation of spaces examines globalization in how it affects technology, human interactions and physical movement. François Knoetze artwork Virtual Frontiers, (2017) is a VR experience for HTC Vive, Oculus Go, Oculus Rift or Mobile VR. Virtual Frontiers was created over two months on location in Grahamstown. The work takes the idea of the frontier as its starting point, probing its connotations both as a historical concept and as a technological one. The series comprises six short virtual reality films shot in over 60 locations in Grahamstown bringing to light the multiple experience and contracts in the small town. The hybrid world created in the work is represented through archival footage, sound recording, and interviews exploring elements of the past, the present, and imaginings of the future

Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare is at the forefront of leveraging new machine learning techniques to bring fully immersive VR art exhibit to life. In a recent exhibition with The Royal Academy of Arts: From Life Shonibare used emerging virtual reality technologies to create a 3D rendering of a neoclassical painting, Gavin Hamilton’s ‘Venus Presenting Helen to Paris’ (1785). Shonibare gives the view the ability to move around the 360 image and to inspect the artwork from all angles. The view can then move into a courtyard behind the painting where Shonibare’s Townley Venus (2017) is on display dressed in his trademark batik fabric, contrasting with the previously viewed painting; juxtaposing the two worlds.

Dakar-based designer and artist Selly Raby Kane work is a fantastical confluence of art and fashion. Her brand of ‘otherworldly’ visuals focuses on the juxtaposition of things, highlighting the surreal and abstract. Her latest project The Other Dakar is a continuation of her artistic practice of reassembling Senegalese traditions into a bold, idiosyncratic aesthetic. As a homage to Senegalese mythology, her debut into VR in partnership with Electric South, a South African platform working with African storytellers and artists on Virtual Reality transports the audience into a place where past and future meet and where artists are the beating heart of the city. As AI continues to evolve, its role in artistic applications globally have only just begun to be explored.

African artists are creating work that’s internationally celebrated, while focusing on issues that are specific to the African continent. Artskop3437 plans on continuing to elaborate and grow our understanding and appreciation for the multitude of experiences in new media practices.

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Goodman Gallery is holding a charity fundraising sale to support the Witkoppen Clinic in Johannesburg

In South Africa, with an already overwhelmed public health care system, vast numbers of lives are at risk from COVID-19. At this unprecedented time, Goodman Gallery is asking for your help in raising funds for their charity partner Witkoppen Health and Welfare Clinic, a non-profit organisation which services 1.3 million people across the most deprived communities in Johannesburg. To support the clinic, Goodman Gallery is selling a series of limited edition covers, designed by artists from the gallery, which 100% of profits will go directly to Witkoppen Clinic to enable them to engineer new programmes to cope in this moment of great need.

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

For the past twenty years, Broomberg & Chanarin have engaged in a forensic and paranoid interrogation of the medium of photography in search of its source code; the cultural, emotional, political and financial currency of photographs. This work is a reference to their 2018 solo exhibition Bandage the knife not the wound, in which the artists reflected on their precarious sense of place and belonging to their homeland (South Africa), to photography and to each other by turning to the handful of images that remain meaningful to them.

Nolan Oswald Dennis

Nolan Oswald Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. His practice explores what he calls ‘a black consciousness of space’ : the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonisation.

His work questions the politics of space and time through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach. He is concerned with the hidden structures that pre-determine the limits of our social and political imagination. Through a language of diagrams, drawings and models he explores a hidden landscape of systematic and structural conditions that organise our political sub-terrain. This sub-space is framed by systems which transverse multiple realms (technical, spiritual economic, psychological, etc) and therefore Dennis’ work can be seen as an attempt to stitch these, sometimes opposed, sometimes complimentary, systems together. To read technological systems alongside spiritual systems, to combine political fictions with science fiction.

Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh

Ghada Amer has received widespread attention for her thickly embroidered canvases that feature fragmented erotic imagery sourced from pornographic magazines. Originally produced to inspire lust, in Amer’s hands the pornographic images are transformed into meditations on the private nature of ecstasy. “I liked the idea of representing women through the medium of thread because it is so identified with femininity,” she once said. “I wanted to ‘paint’ a woman with embroidery, too.” Otherwise known as a painter and sculptor, Amer has dedicated her career to a highly personal exploration of femininity in various contexts. Her 2008 mid-career survey at the Brooklyn Museum included paintings, sculpture, illustration, performances, and installation pieces that explored the mysteries of love, war, and violence.

Samson Kambalu

Samson Kambalu is an artist and writer working in a variety of media, including site-specific installation, video, performance and literature. His work is autobiographical and approaches art as an arena for critical thought and sovereign activities. Born in Malawi, Kambalu’s work fuses aspects of the Nyau gift-giving culture of the Chewa, the anti-reification theories of the Situationist movement and the Protestant tradition of inquiry, criticism and dissent. He has been featured in major exhibitions and projects worldwide, including the Dakar Biennale (2014, 2016), Tokyo International Art Festival (2009) and the Liverpool Biennial (2004, 2016). He was included in All the World’s Futures, Venice Biennale 2015, curated by Okwui Enwezor.

The blankets are made each in an edition of 50 and sold for £500 GBP. We are so grateful for your support, every sale will go directly to saving lives in South Africa. Thank You.

Please note: Due to the current state of quarantine, delivery will be delayed until South African shipping channels are reopened. Witkoppen Clinic, however, has urgent needs right now and your support would be invaluable at this time. 

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Dennis recently presented his second solo show with the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town; “Options” (24th January – 9th March 2019),  comprising a new series of drawings and installations. These drawings convey an intense process of gesturing and mark making —incisions revealing complex patterns and points moving in space.

One is not quite certain what is depicted in Dennis’ drawings; are these intestine, worms or unspecified worm-like shapes ?

The artist complicates iconography, notions of “finished work” as well as the one-directional nature of the art making process (with artist as teacher and viewer as learner). His work is open but not hollow—this openness of the work exposes itself to misreading and misinterpretation. Dennis uses the work’s vulnerability to misinterpretation as an opportunity for new knowledge to enter the space; where the viewer/interpreter takes on the role of “completing” the artworks. In this sense, the work’s impact can only be multiplied as each new set of eyes creates a possibility for a new narrative to emerge.

I had the opportunity to briefly interview the artist about his process as well as his  reflections on the recent show.

Nkgopoleng Moloi: I’m interested in this idea of using drawing as a way to think about something else, while simultaneously being the actual thing. What is your relationship with different mediums, how you approach them and how you use them to say (or not say) different things ?

Nolan Oswald Dennis: I was thinking about Audre Lorde’s idea — the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. And I was thinking about when a tool stops being the master’s tool and becomes your tool? What kind of transformation must happen to give these tools the capacity to dismantle houses ? I think of the media I work with in similar ways. Who does this belong to? What can it do ? What do I need to do for it do something else ?

This is mostly an unspectacular process, and in my practice consists mostly of small gestures for holding secrets: marks, notations, clues. I want the work to be open to misreading as both a tactic for concealing things in the work (world) as well as a way of revealing things in the viewer.

NM: I have read a couple of articles of your last show; “Options”, each one is different and interprets the work differently. What is your view on this openness with which we are reading your work? 

NOD: I think the work is only halfway done until it is read —the question is always who is reading, and therefore who is doing the other half of the work?

It’s actually a huge responsibility to put on a reader/viewer, to demand that they put themselves into the work. I’m all about leaving some space which demands filling — the idea that to “see” the work requires you to first put something of yourself into the work. The viewer must start with an interpretation before they can “see” the work, not after they see it. I think what you see is also an invitation to share the labour of making this art work.

NM: Susan Sontag speaks of this idea of needing to interpret artworks, that we can often do it at the expense of the form; placing too much attention on what we think the work means vs what the work is, especially in terms of materiality etc. What  are your thoughts? 

NOD: I guess I am interested in those forms, in terms of materiality and technique, which are already inadequate. What I mean is that some forms (drawings, models and maquettes ) already assume that they must be interpreted —that they are working forms and not final forms. The materiality of an architectural model is only a simulation of whatever concrete or brick structure might ultimately be built. So formal questions become themselves interpretive —you have to ask yourself on the level of the material; what does this cardboard mean?

For me that’s an important place to occupy —the place before or parallel to the real world. It’s a place that allows asks us to do some interpretive work.  I think art is important for its ability to operate from this parallel position where little can be taken for granted. It’s a place where things can be remade, and I think it’s interesting to think about how things can be both one thing (materially) and a totally different thing (interpretively)……that objects can have this double life.

NM: Can you explain how the printers installation in the exhibition work on a technical level (Biko vs Fanon and Winnie Mandela) ?

NOD: The first part of the work is research to build the dataset. In the case of Biko/Fanon, that means reading “I write what I like” and “The Wretched of the Earth” and extracting every sentence with the words ‘touch’ and ‘hold’.  This is then converted into two long lists of sentences. 

The second part is writing an algorithm which selects sentences from this dataset and produces new sequences as an ongoing poetic conversation. Part of what this algorithm does is recombine the sentences based on a number derived from the ambient noise (static) in the room where the printer is placed.

There are two printers which run this code in real time, reading text from the dataset and combining it in a sequence read from the electrical noise of where it is installed. The printer then prints, on roll of thermal receipt paper, an ongoing conversation between Steve Biko and Franz Fanon about touching and holding. 

Nomzamo is a single printer which does a similar thing with the archive of Winnie Mandela, except she is alone, having a dialogue with no-one (or everyone) based on the words ‘before’, ‘between’ and ‘alone’.

NM: I’m interested in this concept of Ubuntu vs black loneliness as you speak of it. When we experience one and not the other or both simultaneously etc. Can you elaborate on your thinking through this? 

NOD: I guess it is something I’m still working through; Ubuntu as a theory of radical interconnectedness and Biko’s declaration “black man you’re on your own” as a kind of radical loneliness. I’m interested in how these two concepts work together—as a dialectic of black consciousness. And also how they are both theories of love and theories from love. Radical empathy and radical entropy, a tactic of black entanglement.

NM: What texts are you currently reading or engaging with that are informing your thoughts/work?

NOD: I’m always reading Angel Kyodo William’s “Being Black” about black zen practice.

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