Furniture: a sculpture exhibition

FURNITURE

To whom does the lamp communicate itself? The mountain? The fox? What if things could speak? What would they tell us? Or are they speaking already and we just don’t hear them? And who is going to translate them?

– Walter Benjamin

This exhibition developed collaboratively out of conversations with and between the participating artists, leading, in turn, to new and reimagined works. It is primarily a sculpture exhibition, and many of the works – whilst speaking independently to other subjects – look and perform like furniture, or function as architectural elements.
What is the relationship between sculpture and furniture, art objects and non-art objects? And how is the difference communicated to us? How do we receive that information? What is the language of things? Furniture seeks to explore and destabilise our understanding of art’s relationship with the everyday.

Igshaan Adams (b. 1982, Cape Town) lives and works in Cape Town. His most recent solo shows are Parda at blank projects (2015) and Please Remember as part of his residency at Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam (2015). Adams’ work investigates hybrid identity, particularly in relation to race and sexuality. It also draws upon the psychological and physical elements of his domestic environment. An observant but liberal Muslim raised by Christian grandparents, Adams uses the material and formal iconographies of Islam and ‘coloured’ culture to develop a more equivocal, phenomenological approach towards these concerns.

Dirk Bell (b. 1969, Munich) lives and works in Berlin. He is represented by Gavin Brown, New York; Sadie Coles, London; and BQ, Berlin and has held solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Braunschweig and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. His contribution to the exhibition is a grey wooden sculpture/ shelving unit that spells out the words ‘THIS IS IT’. It is a continuation of Bell’s concrete alphabet made up of geometric shapes that he uses to create linguistic grid structures.

Jared Ginsburg (b. 1985, Cape Town) lives and works in Cape Town, and graduated with a BFA from the University of Cape Town in 2010. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, locally and internationally, and has had three solo exhibitions at blank. Ginsburg’s practice encompasses a range of sculptural, conceptual, and formal concerns. One of his artworks included in this exhibition, A line in three parts (part 2) (2015), is a line drawn on cardboard, rolled up and mounted, that demarcates the length of the interior of his studio. This work is a continuation of Ginsburg’s experimentation with the artefacts and remnants of the studio space and the artistic process, allowing these usually implicit elements, to be seen in the finished work.

Bonolo Kavula (b. 1992, Bloemfontein) lives and works in Cape Town. In 2014, she graduated with a BFA at the University of Cape Town. Her video work You must be exhausted (2014) was a finalist in the Sasol New Signatures Art Competition in 2014. The artwork included in Furniture displays her concern with the artistic process, through her intricate, detailed, and repetitive mark-making on pieces of canvas, which she cuts up and reconstructs into large wall-based objects.

Turiya Magadlela (b. 1978, Johannesburg) lives and works in Soweto. She has had two solo exhibitions at blank, as well one at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2015, when she also won the 2015 FNB Art Prize. She uses loaded, yet common, fabrics, like pantyhose and correctional service sheeting to create formally stringent abstract compositions. Included in the exhibition is a work made out of ‘kaffersheet’, a material worn by Xhosa traditional leaders, and prison sheeting.

Tatenda Magaisa (b. 1990, Masvingo) lives and works in Johannesburg. She is a recent MFA- graduate at Wits University. Her contribution to Furniture is a large wall-based painting that simultaneously employs the visual language of abstract colour-field paintings and paint sample strips consisting entirely of ‘skin-colours’, forming “an analysis of who is included and excluded in the global colour spectrum”. Her art is a critique of globalisation, popular culture, representation in mass media, and the ever-changing definitions of race and gender.

Kyle Morland (b. 1986, Johannesburg) lives and works in Cape Town. He graduated with a BFA at the University of Cape Town in 2009. He has participated in several group exhibitions, both locally and internationally, and has held three solo exhibitions at blank. Included in Furniture is a large- scale primed mild steel sculpture, a recreation of an armature that he uses in the production of other sculptures, which has been rendered functionless through its designation as an art object.

Zoë Paul (b. 1987, London) lives and works between London and Athens. She grew up between the remote Greek island of Kithira and Oxford, having South African origins, and is represented by the Breeder (Athens). Included in Furniture is her artwork, The Lotus-Eater (2015), a hanging sculpture reminiscent of a string curtain consisting of beads made from clay that Paul gathers from the beaches of Kithira and fires herself. Its form is inspired by imagery of an African mask. Her art examines the character of domestic spaces and the threshold between interior and exterior spaces, as well as our perception, treatment, and presentation of historical periods and objects.

Cinga Samson (b. 1986, Cape Town) is a painter based in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. He recently presented a solo exhibition, Thirty Pieces of Silver, at blank and has participated in group exhibitions at numerous Cape Town galleries. His art addresses themes of masculinity, spirituality and race against the backdrop of Post-colonialism. Painting personal visions together with imagery culled and pieced together from art history books, his style is reminiscent of formal traditions of European art. These vanitas-like still lives – bouquets of flowers, peeled fruit and animal skulls – are anachronistic and surreal; like visions or dreams, figures and objects emerge, strangely illuminated, from cold and murky interiors.

Gerda Scheepers (b. 1979, Tzaneen) lives and works between Cape Town and Berlin. She is represented by Spruth Magers, Berlin/London; Mary Mary, Glasgow; and Micky Schubert, Berlin. She has exhibited extensively in Europe and America and has held three solo exhibitions at blank. For the Furniture exhibition, she has grouped three works in a careful orchestration; a large work on canvas employs the visual elements of a room plan, a deconstructed chair, a small painting and a room-dividing wall deliberately fail to deliver the complete and self-contained result that they seem to promise.