Project 007: Lerato Shadi

6 May - 4 June 2010

Brodie/Stevenson is pleased to present Selogilwe, a film by Lerato Shadi which documents a 7 hour performance undertaken by the artist in early 2010.

Selogilwe is Setswana for ‘woven’, and this term has both a literal and metaphoric significance in the artist’s work. It refers to the repetitive action undertaken by Shadi over the course of the 7 hours, as she sits on pedestal knitting a red woolen ‘umbilical chord’. The physical act is also a symbolic gesture – what is actually being ‘knitted’ is a physical rendering of Time itself, and in this sense the act of weaving is an attempt by the artist to make manifest her sense of the inextricable quality of being – where consciousness and embodiment help to mark one’s awareness of existing within the briefest of moments within space and time. The performance is also a call to self-awareness: as the maker of her own umbilical chord, the artist declares her own agency, claiming her body as a generative  and self-reliant space.

Shadi comments, “Life is an act of creation. Every moment leaves behind a memory or trace, something tangible or ethereal that marks time’s passage, either for the self, the other, or the space within which the former two exist.”

Produced in partnership with the Goethe-Institut South Africa.

The exhibition opens on Thursday 6 May, 6-8pm. The gallery is open from Tuesday to Friday, 10.30am to 5.30pm, and Saturday from 9.30am to 3pm.