Art in the heart of the city
JOZI: ONE BUILDING IS COVERED WITH STUDIOS FOR EVERY ART FORM YOU CAN THINK OF
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she’s on top of One Eloff.
All covered with artists, it’s not the top of the highest point, but the top of the parking floors section. There’s a taller residential section attached and another still to be built. But here, from a neat formation of art studios, you can step out onto the rooftop and gaze across the centre of Joburg.
A leaping rabbit over the door and a sign saying “The Artist Is In” marks the studio where the artist will soon be out, moving her press, lino and screen prints to a Newtown studio. Fiver Locker is often out of the country anyway.
“I’ll miss seeing the exchange
rate on the Absa building.” The cornflower-haired artist travels assiduously, producing her fantastical folded sketched-books of urban observations. The studio with the noise in it is that of beaten-metal artist Peter Majaha Mumbi, cutting mesh for his current collection of urban, social statement heads. I look at the images on his Mac and they don’t seem to end, like a continuous art exhibition of Mumbi’s life in metal and clay. On the way down to lunch, we peek at Manuela Knaut’s boat through her studio windows. It’s a major carrier of her recent philosophical installation but she isn’t in. Before returning to the top, we find Nkhensani Rihlampfu in his very large studio on the ground. Responsible for the recent over-lifesize sculptures of cricketing icon Basil D’Oliveira and politico-philosophical hero, Robert Sobukwe, he’s working on his current rope sculptures, “a continuum of the economic heroes” for three exhibitions around SA.
Think archeologically urban art, inner city, public space and Hannelie Coetzee is right here, beyond her scrape-figured doors. We might not have considered these 10 000 crisp locusts to be that urban but, as Hannelie says “they could be our food”. When I first met Hannelie at one of her exhibitions, she said, “I work with waste.” Some of her works we agree not to mention. They’re yet to be made public.
For different takes on urban signage, its send-ups, intellectualising about advertising and wild ways with letters as art, Lucky Xaba is pure fascination in his studio. “Definitely not what I studied at school,” not your expected graffiti and type artist, looking out over Joburg.