Afterlife

22 March - 28 April 2007

‘When you’re standing at the crossroads that you cannot comprehend
Just remember that death is not the end’
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Death is Not the End, 1996 (words and music by Bob Dylan, 1988)

Michael Stevenson presents Afterlife, an exhibition curated by Sophie Perryer that explores the nebulous zones where the material and spiritual realms intersect, and where the past and future reveal themselves in the present moment. The works on show approach the subject from different angles, tangentially at times, in media that include painting, video, photography, sculpture, printmaking, sound and installation.

Transformation is a theme that recurs in different guises. It takes place before our eyes in Ângela Ferreira's video A Woman like Polley, in which the artist inhabits the persona of the founder of the Cape Town Film Festival. She credits him with profoundly influencing her cultural consciousness through the screening of films. In her tribute, Ferreira turns herself into the older man by showing, in stages, the lengthening and whitening of her hair, a physical transformation that mirrors both that of her own consciousness and the course of Polley's life.

Communication with the spirits, rebirth and past lives are all present in the works on exhibition. Samson Mudzunga performs his own burial and rebirth in a symbolic act of regeneration and self-transformation. James Webb's Autohagiography invokes the voices of his past selves, retrieved from his subconscious mind during hypnotherapy. In Vigil, Minnette Vári conjures up a host of characters, real and imagined, from across the historical and geographical breadth of southern Africa, and envisions them consorting together. The ape-women who appear in Vigil resemble the 'wild people' whose stories Penny Siopis draws on in her series, Feral Fables. Existing on the margins of society, these characters evoke a state of liminality, and Siopis finds material form for this slippage between the physical and the ethereal. In Moshekwa Langa's portrait paintings awareness of mortality hovers ever-present at the edges of our consciousness.

Transition comes to the fore in Zineb Sedira's poetic video projection, Saphir. Set in the port of Algiers, the film is a meditation on arrivals and departures, movement and stasis, past and present, home and away. Its two protagonists traverse, respectively, the city and an old colonial-style hotel, stopping to gaze out at the sea which separates and connects Algeria to France; despite their restlessness they appear trapped in limbo.

Nandipha Mntambo also finds traces of the colonial past in the present. Her extraordinary Iqaba lami is a representation of a Herero dress made from hide including cows' faces. Its simultaneously beautiful and tragic form evokes the genocide of the Herero people at the same time as it embodies their creative powers of regeneration.

Claudette Schreuders' Public Figure references the practice of memorialising people through public sculpture. The figure of a woman becomes a perch for birds, suggesting she is doubly removed from herself - the sculpture of a statue - and hinting at the divide between public and private personas. Wim Botha's Rorschach (After Velázquez) translates a 17th-century Spanish painting into a mirrored linoprint depicting Mars, God of War, subjected to the forces of destruction. Both Schreuders' work, which borrows its pose from a Greek kouros statue, and Botha's, exemplify the power of artworks to outlive their creators, giving rise to new interpretations by subsequent generations. They, like the other works on exhibition, make us aware that the afterlife is to be found all around us.

   Click on image titles to view full size. Click on the artist's 'name > text' to read about the work.




Afterlife
Installation view



Afterlife
Installation view


Moshekwa Langa > text


Moshekwa Langa
Mamgobozi

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Moshekwa Langa
Goldie

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Moshekwa Langa
Gods of Small Things

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Moshekwa Langa
The Last Sigh

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Moshekwa Langa
Angelic

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Ângela Ferreira > text


Ângela Ferreira
Cape Town Film Festival



Ângela Ferreira
Cape Town Film Festival: Cabinets



Ângela Ferreira
Cape Town Film Festival: Cabinets



Ângela Ferreira
Cape Town Film Festival: A Woman like Polley



Ângela Ferreira
Cape Town Film Festival: A Woman like Polley



Ângela Ferreira
Cape Town Film Festival: A Woman like Polley


James Webb > text


James Webb
Autohagiography



James Webb
Autohagiography


Wim Botha > text


Wim Botha
Rorschach (After Velázquez)



Wim Botha
Rorschach (After Velázquez)


Nandipha Mntambo > text


Nandipha Mntambo
Iqaba lami



Nandipha Mntambo
Iqaba lami



Nandipha Mntambo
Iqaba lami


Samson Mudzunga > text


Samson Mudzunga
Vivho Venda



Samson Mudzunga
Vivho Venda


Claudette Schreuders > text


Claudette Schreuders
Public Figure

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Claudette Schreuders
Public Figure

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Claudette Schreuders
Public Figure

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Penny Siopis > text


Penny Siopis
Feral Fables (installation view)



Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: In the Deep

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Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Mother and Child Embalmed



Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Caul



Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Snare

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Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Pet



Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Suckling

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Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Pining Jungle Girl

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Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Prey

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Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Fetter

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Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: In the Cold

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Penny Siopis
Feral Fables:
Out of the Wilderness

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Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Changeling



Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Trance

unavailable



Penny Siopis
Feral Fables: Throb

unavailable


Minnette Vári > text


Minnette Vári
Vigil



Minnette Vári
Vigil



Minnette Vári
Vigil


Zineb Sedira > text


Zineb Sedira
Saphir



Zineb Sedira
Transitional Landscape

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Zineb Sedira
Transitional Landscape

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Zineb Sedira
Haunted House

NFS


For more information contact +27 (0)21 421 2575 or fax +27 (0)21 421 2578 or email info@michaelstevenson.com.

© 2007 Michael Stevenson. All rights reserved.