!KAURU 2015 EXHIBITION: TOWARDS INTERSECTIONS

21 MAY 2015 - 30 JUNE

UNISA ART GALLERY

Towards Intersections explores conversations through artworks of contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora. It illuminates intersectional ideas, experiences and potentials whilst reflecting on socio-political fluctuations, cultural affairs, historical shifts and aesthetic preoccupations. Motivated by the complexity of living and working under frustating yet exciting times in the twenty-first century, the exhibition is a probing mediation to establish seams and points of exchanges. It is a contact zone in which economic cultural transactions and intellectual perspectives are articulated from personal and socio-political interests.

Though emanating from the southern African region and taking place in South Africa, Towards Intersections understands the expansive reach of its tentative preoccupations without collapsing the singularities of each imaginative contributing force. Instead it seeks to forge relationships between South Africa, its’ neighboring and distant countries and African diasporas through creative mediations, dialogues and inputs. Thus its conception as an intersection in view of its call as a point of contact, of momentary pauses, reflections, observations, yielding and civil interfaces. A space of influx, entries and exits, where contradictions are allowed, taken rather as dialetical requirements for the coexistence of both the known and unknown. It is a zone of negotiations, exchanges and exploration of democratic possibilities. As much as it is a place of colour, shapes, textures, decisions, possibilities and surprises, it is also a place of procedures, dark smoke, errors and thus unpredictabilities.

Although the concept of intersections is intentionally open for engagement and interpretation, artists are invited to present artworks that offer a critique of and lessons from history, artworks that reflect on contemporary complexities, artworks that project or imagine (chance) futures and utopias. The diversity of the artworks include two- and three-dimensional pieces, sculptural and video installations, recorded and live performances. These discrepant artworks come together as a constellation of subjects, objects and contexts both real or imagined, symbolic and literal, tangible and ephemeral. Their intersecting forms and contents make up an exhibition within which there are inextricably articulated aesthetics, politics and social concerns through visual and sound representations.

Thembinkosi Goniwe