Exceed[ing] the gallery remit
Independent practice is challenging: How can it be sustained and supported in Jo’burg?
What are the conditions that enable an exhibition? What are the requirements for an artist or curator to expose their work? For many practitioners, the answer is a gallery and its extensions (art fairs, private museums and foundations).
When Kundai Moyo, Amy Watson and I founded wherewithall in 2020, it was with the aim of supporting alternative responses. By facilitating independent practice through shared exhibition equipment, practical information and commissioned research, we hope to encourage a more dynamic curatorial ecosystem in Johannesburg.
Johannesburg has a patchy history of artist- and curator-led exhibitionmaking. A lack of documentation is partly to blame, but it’s mainly down to the difficulties involved in DIY and independent practice.
If public funding can be secured, the process is complicated, adminheavy and payment is often late. International funding is directed towards mandates that are both sweeping and very specific. Instead of supporting existing initiatives that engage with realities for artists on the ground, funding calls are released for projects demonstrating “Digital Futures in the Global South” or “Art Beyond Borders: Transnational Identities and Climate Change”.
There are, of course, exceptions; instances in which projects and funders have found an effective partnership. Even so, most independent initiatives are conditional on the personal resources (money, space, labour, time) available to the artists and curators who run them. They commonly stem from peer groups and close relationships that provide support that is otherwise hard-won.
The Centre for Historical Re-enactments (CHR) was founded in 2010 and staged its own death in 2012. A revolving cast of artists and curators, including Gabi Ngcobo, Sohrab Mohebbi, Donna Kukama, Khwezi Gule and Kemang Wa Lehulere (among many others), realised projects under the CHR banner before and after its “death”. These projects variously considered the relationship between contemporary art, historical narratives and spatial politics, stretching the exhibition format to encompass research and experimental modes.
PASS-AGES (2010) occupied the old pass office in Albert Street. The building’s historical role as a central mechanism of the apartheid regime was used as a provocation in the exhibition to explore the remembering and misremembering of history as embodied by these often empty and benign-seeming spaces.
The CHR held a number of events at its dedicated space in the east of Johannesburg before We are absolutely ending this in 2012, which marked an end to the CHR’S programming in its then form. “This is absolutely over, partially due to the question of mystery of the audience, partially because of expectations of deliverance and partially the trap of sustenance.” This is the CHR’S epitaph, a baroque version of the struggle faced by many collaborative platforms. “Those who initially walked through the door, now simply must take a leap out the window.”
The move was more than a dramatised ending: it also signalled a casting off of the idea that an institution must remain beholden to the principles and forms on which it was originally modelled. It proposed a more fluid approach to the sustaining of institutions, without the commitment of running costs and consistent programming. CHR members leapt out the window and into projects at institutions locally and internationally. The CHR’S “death” foresaw in its “haunting” of these platforms — a new way of existing.
Institutional space as part of a colonial inheritance is a predominant concern in the work of Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho of MADEYOULOOK. How should decolonial practice address colonial infrastructure that continues to shape and inform contemporary urban experience?
Ejaradini (2019) paired the museum space and gardening as colonial vestiges reimagined through the everyday lives of black South Africans in urban environments. Ejaradini explores colonial impulses such as naming and categorising, infatuations with collecting and “the exotic”, and the accumulation of knowledge as a form of power. The project reclaimed these narratives through photo archives of black gardening in South Africa from the 1950s until today, planting a garden in the courtyard of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and collaborations with black urban growers.
The growing of gardens before, during and after forced removals demonstrates a quiet and radical form of resistance. Time invested in a garden is a projection into an abundant future and a very personal claim on the land. Ejaradini, “sought to make practical the ways in which the death of the colonial museum might serve as the rot that feeds other relations”. MADEYOULOOK will be participating in Documenta15 in Kassel, Germany in 2022. The focus of the exhibition is sustainability and collective practices of sharing.
Founded in 2015 by Mika Conradie and Amy Watson, POOL “evolved out of a need to experience critically engaged experimental practice that exceeded the commercial gallery remit.” In 2019, POOL commissioned narrative responses by Khanya Mashabela, Athi Mongezeleli Joja and Mika Conradie to accompany Dreams of the Sinking World, a film installation by James Webb.
Webb’s installation reflects on the Carlton Hotel, a symbol of wealth and luxury at the height of apartheid in Johannesburg in the 1960s. From enveloping screens, the viewer is led through corridors, darkened stairwells and to the rooftop pool area to witness the hotel’s decay and slow absorption into the bustling city around it. Closed since the 1990s, the hotel’s rotting décor and defunct facilities cling on. Voiced by Lindiwe Matshikiza, the narrative responses fictionalise, politicise and personalise the hotel’s consciousness.
At this time, POOL had its base in Bertrams, though much of its programme was site-specific, occupying locations such as the Ellis Park swimming pool and the Johannesburg Observatory. The location of POOL’S programming is now entirely project-dependent.
Anthea Buys’s curatorial exploits began in an “all-but-condemned” building in 2009. Cloak & Dagger was a one-show wonder of a gallery in Phillip Johnson’s studio that initiated “a pattern in my career: a compulsion to make project spaces that had no hope of ever being sustainable”, Buys says. Buys’s early experiences with makeshift projects shaped her curatorial outlook and enabled her to experiment under more stable conditions later on. Her most recent project, FORMS, is a gallery with no permanent location that realises exhibitions on the internet and in collaboration with others.
1004 is the number of Daniel Bruce Gray and Amie Soudien’s flat and the name of the exhibition space that intermittently occupies their living room. 1004 “is artist-centred and embedded within an ongoing practice of curatorial care”, they say. In 2021 their first exhibition, by Kaelo Molefe, proposed “a visual vocabulary to express the violences, bodily distortions and ontological (im) possibilities that characterise black embodiment and black urbanity under industrial capitalism”.
Although the curation of this exhibition was relatively conventional, its positioning within an otherwise unchanged home environment encouraged an intimate engagement with the work, closing the distance that alienates gallery audiences.
The initiatives described here have found ways to experiment with and subvert exhibition conventions. This, in spite of an art space undercut by inadequate public funding and warped by a thriving art market whose commercial interests are sharply focused. These projects and organisations are tenacious and resourceful but make significant demands on the lives and livelihoods of those who run them.
wherewithall commissions research by independent practitioners to understand and archive their work. It also offers a library of shared equipment and practical information. To find out more, visit wherewithall.org. za. This article was produced as part of a partnership between the Mail & Guardian and the Goethe-institut, focusing on sustainability and the arts