A tribute to the gatekeepers of tradition

This richly detailed textile work made up of striking strips of burgundy, coral, crimson and indigo fabric, soaring 4 stories high, will adorn the museum’s interior wall in the Zeitz MOCAA BMW Atrium. The work honours two thinkers distinguished for their contribution to culture and history: Malian historian and ethnologist Youssouf Tata Cissé (1935-2013), who specialised in canonising oral history from various parts of West Africa, and Germaine Dieterlen (1903- 1999), a French anthropologist who pioneered research on Dogon astronomy and the Bamana cultures of Mali. With this artwork, Konaté references ancient writing and knowledge systems, transposing it into the present. Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator at Zeitz MOCAA, states: “It is an honour to have one of our continent’s foremost artists represented in our museum and to introduce our audiences to the vitality of practices which are now part of global art history.

An artist addressing several socio-political issues

The myriad of individually hemmed appliqued fabric fragments in Idéogrammes, signes, symboles et logos (Hommage à Youssouf Tata Cissé et Germaine Dieterlen), not only add rich colour and texture to Zeitz MOCAA’s concrete walls, but also contribute to an important dialogue around materiality in contemporary art from Africa.”

Konaté grapples with the way in which societies and individuals, both in Mali and beyond, have been affected by factors such as war, power struggles, religion, from global epidemics such as HIV/AIDS to freedom of expression, globalisation, ecological shifts and the AIDS epidemic. Employing material from Mali, namely woven and dyed cloths, the artist creates largescale abstract and figurative compositions. The installation at Zeitz MOCAA has been unveiled on 12 February 2020 and will be on view for one year. This commission was made possible with the support of Blain|Southern, London.

Idéogrammes, signes, symboles et logo

Zeitz MOCAA

From February 12, 2020 to February 12, 2021

V&A Waterfront Silo District, S Arm Rd, Waterfront, Cape Town, 8001

South Africa

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The Zeitz MOCAA Collection houses a unique and extensive body of works by some of the continent and its diaspora’s most exciting established and emerging artists. The exhibition, which includes a selection of these works, will open on 7 November 2019, taking up all gallery spaces on Level 4. This forms part of a recent reimagining of the museum’s galleries and spatial organisation, with exhibitions in this space changing annually.

Titled Two Together, the show is built around major themes explored by artists from Africa and its diaspora represented in the collection, and each gallery contains a pair: either two objects, or multiple works by two artists, or two major themes – either in dialogue, as counterpoints or in complementary ways. As couples do, in comedic duos or in romance, the exhibition embrace a rigorous engagement between objects and ideas.

“We wanted to explore what happens when two things come together,” explained Senior Curator, Storm Janse van Rensburg. “Two photographers can subvert a gaze, whileprobing issues around representation, presence, omission, authorship and voyeurism. Speaking from contrasting geopolitical vantage points, two can highlight the perpetual and impeding undertone of violence still manifesting in present-day psyche. The numerous lines between collective memory, imagination and folklore are blurred when two artists use material to make visible intangible heritage.”

“This exhibition presents works from the Zeitz MOCAA Collection in a new way. Whilst some works will be familiar to regular visitors to the museum, the curation of the exhibition allows them all to be experienced anew.” 

Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator at Zeitz MOCAA.

The exhibition includes a diptych by Isaac Julien, as well as pairings of and conversations between works by Zanele Muholi and Mouna Karray; Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Joël Andrianomearisoa; Nicholas Hlobo and Taiye Idahor; Sethembile Msezane and Glenn Ligon; Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou and Athi-Patra Ruga, as well as Mishack Masamvu and Lungiswa Gqunta.

“It feels like a fresh and exciting way to relook at our permanent collection. The goal of the museum has always been to build a cohesive collection that is as representative as possible of Africa and the diaspora, with strong political, social, environmental and personal messaging. This is demonstrated in this exhibition,” says Koyo Kouoh.

Two Together

7 November 2019 – 25 October 2020

Curators : Storm Janse Van Resnburg, Tandazani Dhlakama, Sakhi Gcina, Tammy Langtry, Precious Mhone

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA)

Level 4, Collections Galleries

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The first exhibition to address Kentridge’s output as a sculptor

Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture will be the first exhibition internationally to address Kentridge’s output as a sculptor, and is a unique focus on this aspect of his practice. Covering several bodies of work, and testifying to his longstanding improvisation when handling three-dimensional form, this exhibition sees the origins of these works in props from his operas and images from his animations stepping off the stage and out of the screen, confronting us directly at ground level. Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture will also premiere new works commissioned for this exhibition.

A central concern of Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture is an understanding that Kentridge’s sculptures have agency. Kinetic sculptures make use of megaphones on survey tripods, a deft nod to Russian Constructivism, and imply a propogandist’s broadcasting of an impersonal and mechanical authority. In Singer Trio (2018), for example, ‘ready-made’ sewing machines are given voices for a performance enacted in unison, their megaphones synchronised as they take on a new and humorous presence in this world. Many of Kentridge’s sculptures embody an animated spectacle. Proceeding through a seemingly random construction of abstract planes, as in World on its Hind Legs (2009), we see how graphic forms unexpectedly align, snapping into an organized whole which is visually and metaphorically charged. Move a little further, and the form dissipates once again.

“Norval Foundation is presenting, for the first time, an exhibition focused solely on William Kentridge’s sculptural practice, working in conjunction with the artist and his studio. Kentridges’ sculptures embrace a spontaneous approach and have recently evolved towards the massive, and the monumental. Simultaneously, and in tension to the monumental aspects of his practice, he is revealed to be a choreographer as much as a sculptor.”

Karel Nel, Senior Advising Curator, Norval Foundation.

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Elsewhere, Kentridge’s repertoire of everyday objects and off-the-cuff ideas are translated into rows of small bronze sculptures, syntactically arranged on a shelving unit to read as lines of text on a page. In Paragraph II (2018), horse, nose, jug, camera, megaphone and others, line up to seemingly make rebuses, those visual puzzles evoking words which so delighted the early Surrealists. Several pieces from Kentridge’s visual lexicon have been reworked into scaled-up plaster prototypes from which monumental bronze sculptures have been cast: a gigantic corkscrew, a collapsing jug of Cubist descent, a visual flourish in the form of an ampersand, and the intense presence of an enormous ciné camera – the observing alter ego of Kentridge’s prodigious output perhaps?

The ruptured narrative, so powerfully visible in Kentridge’s work, is choreographed into serried dislocations which collide the space between the personal and the political, the operatic and the mundane, the apparently irrelevant and the socially pertinent. Approaching Kentridge’s sculptures opens us up onto a Dadaist landscape, which both challenges and beguiles.

“Norval Foundation is proud to be hosting Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture. A key aspect of the Foundation is our commitment to exhibiting the sculptural and installation based practices of a variety of artists, which is facilitated by our purpose-designed building. In particular, we invite artists and curators to respond to gallery eight, our largest gallery, with William Kentridge’s exhibition exemplifying this. The gallery has reinforced floors to support works that weigh as much as eight tons, and reach as high as nine metres. The monumental size of this gallery sits in an ideal contrast to the anti-monumental, spontaneous and theatrical sculptures that form part of this exhibition.”

Elana Brundyn, CEO, Norval Foundation.

Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture will be accompanied by a visually rich publication, conceived in collaboration with the artist, extending the exhibition in print form. It includes a section that is a catalogue raisonné of William Kentridge’s sculptural practice to date, with another presenting preparatory sketches for several key artworks. It also includes a photo essay charting the development of Kentridge’s large Lexicon sculptures that are included in the exhibition, from maquette stage to plaster original, and then through the bronze casting process itself. A comprehensive essay by Dr. David Freedberg, Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art at Columbia University, and Director of The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, locates William Kentridge’s work within several key artistic practices and movements of the Western art historical canon.

William Kentridge, Why Should I Hesitate : Sculpture

24 August 2019 – 23 Mars 2020
Atrium and Galleries 2–8
Norval Foundation
4 Steenberg Road Tokai, Cape Town 7945 South Africa

Exhibition Curators: Karel Nel, Owen Martin, Talia Naicker, Vicky Lekone

Monday – Sunday 10:00 – 18:00
Tuesday Closed
Last admission 45 minutes before closing

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The largest ever survey exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist William Kentridge opens in Cape Town in August. This major exhibition will be hosted simultaneously in two parts by the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), which will host his multi-media works; and at Norval Foundation, which will present his sculptural works.

Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work, hosted at Zeitz MOCAA, will stage a large oeuvre of Kentridge’s 40-year career, showing works including charcoal drawings, woodcut prints, stop-frame animation, tapestries, installation and video. In addition, the exhibition will pay particular attention to the role of studio practice in Kentridge’s career.

“When conceptualising this exhibition, we wanted to do more than simply attempt to condense many of Kentridge’s projects from his illustrious career into one space. It was vital to unpack Kentridge and reveal more of his processes and how two-dimensional forms assume life. We also wanted to offer a sort of ‘backstage’ view of the artist on his journeys and his experimentations, and sometimes at his most uncertain and vulnerable.”

Explains Azu Nwagbogu, curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition title, Why Should I Hesitate, is taken from the artist’s recent opera, The Head and the Load (2018), which explores some of the paradoxes of Africa’s involvement in the First World War. This question was first posed by an African soldier who had a difficult choice: accept conscription – leaving behind the security of his home, to risk his life in a war of which he had little knowledge – or reject conscription and face certain persecution. Read in the context of Kentridge’s studio practice, Why Should I Hesitate is, therefore, a question that stresses the importance of process over procedure or product. It is an attempt to draw out the artist’s work from the uncertainties of legend, so it can be understood within the context of our ever-changing cultural climate: an exercise that resists inertia but is necessarily framed by doubt.

“While Kentridge remains dedicated to a South African narrative, his projects pose humanist questions of other such similar historical failures and other utopic possibilities for success. In this way, the exhibition may be viewed as a historiographic reading of the world over the last century.”

Adds Tammy Langtry, curator of the exhibition.

Due to the breadth of the artist’s creative practice, the exhibition spans five independent spaces throughout Zeitz MOCAA – Level 3, Level 1, Centre for the Moving Image, BMW Atrium, and a nighttime projection in the Track Shed.

Level 3 : The Biography

The exhibition begins here, charting a course for the visitor from earliest works of drawings and prints (1976 – 2019), to larger theatrically staged works. It encourages the viewer to make imaginative, cross-continental leaps, bridging social, political, and economic systems until they are finally able to land at a personal and granular connection – a product of the catalysing force of Kentridge’s work.

Level 1 : The Processional and the Processes of Making

The exhibition here observes the formalistic aspects of Kentridge’s creation, from drawings to processes of making across multiple media. These galleries focus on the global histories of movement, rooted in a project Kentridge created in Rome, Italy. Titled Triumphs and Laments (2016) Kentridge created a 500-metre temporary frieze on the walls of the river Tiber. This frieze depicted histories of the Roman empire, both with its triumphs and lamentations.

Centre for the Moving Image -Drawings for Projection (1989-2011)

Built out of the form of the original grain silo bins, the viewing rooms exhibit the animated film series, Drawings for Projection (1989 – 2011). This series began as a way to record the process of drawing; a desire to, as Kentridge explains, understand the drawing “not as a finished, finite fact, but as something that is provisional”.

BMW Atrium – Almost Don’t Tremble

Commissioned as a site-specific installation for the exhibition, Kentridge’s recognisable megaphones surround the Zeitz MOCAA BMW Atrium. Through the megaphones, the musical pieces echo currents found within previous musical collaborations, built on existing lexicons of song and sound, and stretched to fill the expansive space. The megaphone is often associated as an instrument of political propaganda. It amplifies and exaggerates sound. Kentridge makes a sculptural caricature of the instrument. Used for both revolution and order, the megaphone’s sphere references a point of origin and trajectory. The visitor can follow the sound around the BMW Atrium as the collective of megaphones plays the intimate song by each composer.

Track Shed – Shadow Procession

The first site, at the entrance to the museum, is historically where the grain silo would receive and send out its stores of grain. Shadow Procession (1999) is projected amongst the original grain silo machinery. The work, an ode to the allegory of Plato’s Cave, speaks to the enslavement of people through the enslavement of knowledge.

The exhibition will be supported by a number of public programmes and events, including a symposium on 27 October that will bring together leading figures in the art world to extend the important dialogue and thematic concerns emanating from Kentridge’s work. An exhibition catalogue/ artist book, entitled Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work, will be on sale at the Zeitz MOCAA shop from 25 August 2019.

Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings To Work

25 August 2019 – 23 March 2020

Exhibition curators Azu Nwagbogu and Tammy Langtry

Zeitz Mocaa

V&A Waterfront, Silo District, S Arm Rd

Waterfront, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa

Level 3, Level 1, Centre for the Moving Image, Trackshed and BMW

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At 15.6 m x 25 m and comprising eight vertical panels – this wall-hanging sculpture is one of the largest the artist has made to date. Inspired by the limitless possibilities of the blank canvas and adopting the method of weaving to create a tapestry – Anatsui uses aluminium bottle tops and various alcohol by-products as paint to create abstract strokes, shapes, and patterns. 

In this process of abstraction, the artist represents the fluidity of life and geographical identities. It is said that at times of global turmoil, abstraction takes on heightened significance. This ideology is represented here in TSIATSIA – searching for connection as Anatsui adopts abstraction as the language to seek globalised networks of new energies and reformed progressive narratives. In 2013, with TSIATSIA – searching for connection, El Anatsui was awarded the prestigious Charles Wollaston Award. Anatsui has also received numerous other honours for his work: In 2014, he was made an Honorary Royal Academician and was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2015, he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 56th Venice BiennaleAll the World’s Futures; and in 2016, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cape Town, and was honoured with the Praemium Imperiale Award for Sculpture in 2017.Anatsui embraces both the formal and conceptual properties of found materials to convey rich and complex narratives pertaining to colonial and postcolonial economic endeavours and cultural exchanges in Africa and the amalgamation of histories through trade. In this sense, Anatsui uses discarded and abandoned materials as a layered means to express rich histories. It is the materiality and essence of the individual fragments that give TSIATSIA – searching for connection visual impact.

In this same way – paradoxically, Anatsui’s tapestries are both weighty and light in appearance. This luminous gold tapestry draped across the architectural fabric of Zeitz MOCAA, cascading down four floors of the museum, uses the concepts of consumption and transformation as a means to unite humanity— celebrating a plurality of cultural influences through the universal language of abstraction. The installation is presented in collaboration with October Gallery, London.

TSIATSIA – Searching for connection

Exhibition curators: Julia Kabat, Alistair Kennedy
Exhibition dates: February 2019 – December 2019

ZEITZ MOCAA
V&A Waterfront, Silo District, S Arm Rd,

Waterfront, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa
 http://zeitzmocaa.museum/

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Koyo Kouoh brings two decades of experience as an international curator and cultural producer to her new role. As the founding Artistic Director of the thought-provoking RAW Material Company, a centre for art, knowledge and society in Dakar, she developed numerous art programmes and published widely on contemporary art. She has served as Curator of the Educational and Artistic Program of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair for eight consecutive editions in London and New York, as well as on the curatorial teams for Documenta 12 and 13.

Active in the critical field of the arts community in a Pan-African and international scope, Kouoh has a remarkable list of publications under her name, including the upcoming “RAW Académie: A Matter of Knowledge” “Word!Word?Word! Issa Samb and The Undecipherable Form” (2013) and “Condition Report on Building Art Institutions in Africa”, (2012) to name a few.

“Koyo is an outstanding leader and a passionate visionary who has an exemplary competence and extended network in all capacities of institutional operations with the arts in Africa and globally. She will be invaluable to Zeitz MOCAA in writing a progressive vision for the museum”

Said Jochen Zeitz and David Green, Co-Founders and Co-Chairmen of Zeitz MOCAA.

“I have known and worked with Koyo for many years on projects related to the contemporary art of Africa and much more. I believe that she will be a huge contributor to the further development of Zeitz MOCAA as an institution, as her knowledge of the continent’s contemporary players contributing to Africa’s cultural history will help the museum with its core intentions of being a major voice in the field of visual culture. The Trustees have made a bold and daring choice that indicates the museum’s ambitions”

Said Gavin Jantjes, Chair of the Zeitz MOCAA Curatorial Advisory Group.

“I am thrilled to be joining Zeitz MOCAA in an executive and curatorial capacity at this crucial time in the museum’s development. It is an unprecedented opportunity to create a strong home for the production, exhibition, discussion and collection of contemporary art in Africa”.

Koyo Kouoh

Kouoh’s appointment is effective immediately with her full-time position as Executive Director and Chief Curator commencing on 6 May 2019, from when the wider executive team of Zeitz MOCAA will comprise of Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator; Brooke Minto, Director of Institutional Advancement; and Fawaz Mustapha, Director of Operations.

In its press release dated March 4, 2019, the Board of Trustees of Zeitz MOCAA wished to thank Azu Nwagbogu for assuming the role of Acting Chief Curator in May 2018. Nwagbogu’s contributions to the museum’s exhibition programme and personal commitment to ensuring continuity during this period of transition have been greatly appreciated. Nwagbogu will continue in this role until May, working alongside Kouoh during the transition and handover period, and will continue to work closely with the institution going forward.

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