28 June 2007
The featured artists at the 2007 National Arts Festival, starting in Grahamstown on Thursday, reflect on South Africa's journey towards a new hybrid national identity. Photography dominates, with three major collections featured and photography contributing to several mixed-media shows.
Pieter Hugo's Messina/Musina comprises photographic studies of a border town where transition and transience are a way of life. Hunters and smugglers, illegal immigrants and adventurers, sex workers and law enforcers all bear the wounds and scars of race, class and nationality.
David Goldblatt's Some Afrikaners Revisited takes viewers back 40 years to the time when he made a study of the life and values among working and farming people. The resulting book (published in 1975)
confirmed Goldblatt as a master of the lens. All the photographs from the book, with 20 additional photographs taken at the same time, will be on show at the festival.
The Caring Namibian Man is another remarkable documentary. The photographs were taken on 100 disposable cameras by young men in more than half a dozen regions of Namibia as part of a project to re-position men in relationship to women and children.
The new Creation Altarpiece from the Keiskamma Art Project features photographic effects along with stitchery and beading. The historic Ghent Altarpiece was the starting point for this awesome work, which celebrates the miracle of creation and the beauty of the natural environment.
More photographs are to be seen in Positive 2007, a multi-media exhibition curated by Carol Brown. Engaging with issues around health, sex and memorialisation, the subtext of the collection is that there is a new understanding of the HIV/Aids epidemic. Work by artists such as David Goldblatt, Churchill Madikida, Berni Searle and Clive van der Berg are included.
Christine Dixie's exhibition Parturient Prospects (Mother/Land) and Leora Farber's installation Dis-location/Re-location invite discussion about identity from a female starting point.
James Webb's installation Beau Diable employs sound, light and architectural space to create the illusion of a spiritual storm where personal interpretations are inevitable.
Webb's other site-specific projects for the festival include a series of electric lights tuned to flash in Morse code and the broadcast of calls of foreign birds out of speakers concealed in local trees. These untitled text pieces, hidden throughout the city, remain the secret of the artist, and could appear anywhere, at any time.
In What Lies Beneath, Marklyn Govender and Clint Singh, masters of the art of mendhi (henna designs drawn on the skin), superimpose translucent layers of painted patternwork to create decorative effects with deeper meaning.
The exhibition Imbumba springs from a collaboration of another kind. In a project facilitated by the Eastern Cape's Department of Arts and Culture, a diverse group of artists from different generations, cultures and regions of the province were brought together for creative exchange. The results are exciting and engaging.
The cream of Eastern Cape craft artists will also display their work - including beadwork, wearables, wirework, grass weaving and ceramics - in a dedicated tent at the Village Green.
In addition to the exhibitions on the main festival programme, there are more than 40 visual art shows on the Fringe.
For more information, see the related articles on the right - and visit the National Arts Festival website.
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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