Thomas Hirschhorn: Black & White Hemisphere

Michael Stevenson is pleased to present an installation by Thomas Hirschhorn in Cape Town as part of the gallery's FOREX series, a programme of projects by artists from elsewhere in the world, including Marc Bijl, Glenn Ligon, Walid Raad, Zineb Sedira, and Akram Zaatari.

Black & White Hemisphere was conceived by Hirschhorn for a travelling exhibition, German Angst, in which filmmakers, writers and artists were invited to respond to the 'normalisation' of Germany's history after its reunification of 1990. The parallels with South Africa, which achieved its own 'reunification' in 1994, are abundant, and because the sculpture eschews German subject matter in favour of universal issues of inequality and divisions among people, its changing context enriches rather than displaces the work.

Themes prevalent in South African art - history, politics, marginality and, more broadly, the human condition - appear to differ starkly from the dominant concerns of international contemporary art. However, artists exist whose concerns parallel our own. By bringing work like Hirschhorn's to South Africa, the FOREX series at Michael Stevenson aims to seek out affinities, illustrate shared frames of reference and explore intellectual kinship.

Hirschhorn was born in 1957 in Bern, Switzerland, and lives in Paris. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at, among others, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Kunsthaus Zurich; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Secession, Vienna; and, most recently, at La Casa Encendida, Madrid. In 2003 he founded the Musée Précaire Albinet, a temporary art and community space in Aubervilliers, France. Hirschhorn was the recipient of the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2000 and the Joseph Beuys-Preis in 2004.

Hirshhorn exhibits concurrently with Steven Cohen and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Thomas Hirschhorn
Black & White Hemisphere