Katz makes a jum

The artist, in her first international show, also uses the ground to map out the directions people take

The Palais de Tokyo in Paris is hosting an exhibition of work by Bronwyn Katz. This is the artist’s first international solo exhibition since two shows at blank projects in Cape Town.

Katz (25) is a founding member of iQhiya, an 11-women artist collective who performed at documenta 14 last year.

In the months leading up to the exhibition, Katz, who is based in Johannesburg, was a recipient of the Sam Art Projects residency in the French capital, nominated by MarieAnn Yemsi, who curated her latest exhibition, A Silent Line, Lives Here, at the Palais de Tokyo.

Since its inception in 2002, the Palais de Tokyo has arguably established itself as the main contemporary art space in Paris.

Katz’s sculpture is quite distinctive in the South African art landscape. Abstract and poetic on the one hand, it is also deeply symbolic on the other.

The artist initially appropriated a found mattress in its entirety (stains and all) in the gallery space in her first exhibition Groenpunt (2016) with works such as Blommetjies, à la Marcel Duchamp. Poetically titled, Nicoletta Michaletos wrote in ArtThrob in 2017 that “it manages to imbue the work with an ultimately tragic character, effecting its dual personality as a pitiful ruin but with the life-affirming charm of little flowers”.

In works like Droom Boek, from her second exhibition Grondskryf (2017), one still recognises the form of the bedsprings and sponges attached to them, which hint at a more nonrepresentational direction.

In Paris, she cuts the figurative umbilical cord, resulting in new abstract forms, unrecognisable from whence they come.

In Here, a Line is Drawn (2018), she draws with the thick bold outline of a metal bed frame. In contrast, the nondescriptive Untitled, Notes on Perception (i) is a lyrical triptych of transparent lace curtains in thin vertical metal wire lines, intermeshed with softer horizontal zigzag lines in rope. The staid old materials are given new artistic life.

Of the three other contemplations, Untitled, Notes on Perception (ii), (iii) and (iv), with (ii) resembling the style and lightness of (i), (ii) and (iii) are thicker free-standing sculptures in metal, cotton and rope placed directly on the ground, giving the sense that the artist is enjoying the tactility of the materials and a new-found confidence to play.

Château Vert (2018), sketched with salvaged bedsprings, is not easy to look at. It resembles a prison courtyard fence, albeit closed only on three sides, and sits clumsily in the centre of the space. But there is something aesthetic in the detail of the incongruous juxtaposition of mild steel mesh and withered green cotton.

The work pays homage to the area known as Château Rouge in Paris, says the artist. “It refers to those spaces where people seem to have multiple identities. They carry their own identity as well as a French identity, without them having to choose a dominant one.

“Some people I spoke with in these spaces were interested in integrating and standing out as little as possible. It’s about access and about knowing my limits to these spaces.”

A stone-and-wire triptych hanging from the ceiling, Under the Barbès Bridge (2018), completes the exhibition and is strikingly different from other works in the artist’s oeuvre. It was made while Katz was in residence in the Netherlands earlier this year and the work is intended to evoke the inaudible plight of immigrants there who are pushed further out of the cities.

Katz’s drawings also carry the silent histories of those displaced at home.

Yemsi’s curatorial statement provides further clues. “The worn mattress, as a central figure of her work, also alludes to forced movements and the current economic difficulties of a large part of the black population of South Africa.”

Without delving too much into the discriminatory land legislations of the past, it is not uncommon today to see the hangover effects of this, when mattresses lie in the streets of downtown Johannesburg and the city’s suburbs of Hillbrow and Yeoville at the end of every month.

Intrigued to know more, I caught up with Katz at the Palais de Tokyo.

Tell me a bit about the theme of your exhibition.

It’s about being in a new space and encountering barriers and blockages. How much do I take from here and how much do I assert of myself? Coming directly from a multilingual space like South Africa, where everyone speaks English but where we can appreciate people with different accents and from different backgrounds … so, it’s about me drawing a line and saying this is as far as I go. My not wanting to learn French is an