« Alexandre Joly: Dérive Exotiques at Galerie Rosa Turetsky | Home | Told/Untold/Retold at Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha / Qatar »
Moshekwa Langa: Marhumbini: In An Other Time / Kunsthalle Bern
February 10, 2011
For his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, South African artist Moshekwa Langa created a body of work specifically for the Kunsthalle. The project Moshekwa Langa developed for Kunsthalle Bern deals with loss. It features reworked drawings, gouaches and collages originally created in South Africa, as well as the installation “Pac Man’s Homes”, photography, and several videos. “The works on exhibition are suffused with memories of Langa’s loved ones and they index the experience and subsequent coming to terms with an accident – they are manifestations of ‘Trauerarbeit’, to use Freud’s term. They can be described as poetic and sentimental, but above all vulnerable, because they suggest a deep engagement of the artist with his personal life, and, at the same time, serve as a reminder that meaning is slippery.” (Excerpt from the press release).
Moshekwa Langa was born in 1975 in Bakenberg, South Africa. He participated in the latest Sao Paulo Biennial and the 2009 and 2003 Venice Biennials. Moshekwa Langa held solo-exhibitions at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Modern Art Oxford, and many others. Recently his work was included in exhibitions at the Museum Of Modern Art Oslo, The Studio Museum Harlem New York, Wiels Contemporary Art Centre Brussels, Mori Art Museum Tokyo, and the International Centre for Photography New York.
Moshekwa Langa: Marhumbini – In An Other Time. Solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. Vernissage, February 4, 2011. The exhibition runs until March 27, 2011.
> Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
From the press release:
During Langa’s early successful forays into exhibition-making, foreigners often confronted him with rather conventional questions – questions that appeared to be prompted by clichéd or romanticized assumptions about the artist’s background as a black South African without formal artistic training. But then Langa pursued a two-year residency at the famous Rijksakademie For Visual Arts in Amsterdam. By now, he has exhibited his work all over the world and has spawned a considerable following in South Africa, the members of which mainly belong to a generation that came of age after the demise of apartheid. It is self-evident that Langa’s work is infused with issues like national identity, political participation and the construction of identity as such. But at the same time his artistic practice deftly avoids and subverts the stereotypical expectations that confront an artist working in the ‘postcolonial condition’.
Not confined to one particular medium, Langa’s work consists of gouaches, collages, photographs, expansive installations, and videos. They all reference the larger worlds of art, politics, and popular culture: just like Langa layers diverse materials, he piles up meanings and references that are often cryptic and ambivalent, yet resonant. With his drawings and gouaches, he demonstrates his definition of creativity as the freedom to make links, the freedom to connect heterogeneous elements. Using methods of abstract expression, free association and stream of consciousness, the artist allows work to be created, as it were. The viewing experience of Moshekwa Langa’s untranslatable visualisations is sensuous and seductive.
Entry filed under: art, Bern, no comment, VernissageTV | Comments Off
Tags: Moshekwa Langa
Comments are closed.
