March - May 2020
Read our .info newsletter issue 04
Many of the exhibitions in our latest newsletter have been closed or postponed, but there's still lots to read - notes on Deborah Poynton's monumental altarpiece; an extract from Sisipho Ngodwana's essay on Paulo Nazareth; Steven Cohen on his highlight of the year in performance, and more. Click here to view.
18 March 2020
Muholi wins 2021 photography award
Stiftung Niedersachsen's Spectrum International Prize for Photography has been awarded to Zanele Muholi. The jury recognizes images that assert 'a force and beauty rarely encountered in contemporary photography'. A solo exhibition by the activist will take place at Sprengel Museum as part of the prize.
27 February 2020 - 30 May 2021
Mokgosi at the Pérez Art Museum Miami
Viewable online while PAMM is closed, Meleko Mokgosi's Your Trip to Africa references Peter Kubelka's 1966 Unsere Afrikareise ('Our Trip to Africa'). Mokgosi adds 'a new emotional force, reversing the desensitized tone that often accompanies modernist aesthetic treatments of non-Western subjects'.
Simon Gush presents a public session with his new film series Welcome to Frontier Country during this year's SOMA Summer. The eight-week program for international artists, curators, critics, and art historians will revolve around the question, Can We Think Social Justice again?.
Kemang Wa Lehulere presents Bring Back Lost Love at Göteborgs Konsthall, his first institutional solo exhibition in Scandinavia. Through new sculptural works, installations and drawings the artist 'excavates histories, both existing and imaginative, informative and fantastical'.
Zanele Muholi's first major retrospective exhibition in the UK will open at Tate Modern in April 2020. Spanning new and early work, this exhibition aims to present the full breadth of Muholi’s photographic and activist practice.
Nicholas Hlobo, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Odili Donald Odita, Robin Rhode, Guy Tillim and Portia Zvavahera are included in Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M Pérez Collection at the Perez Art Museum Miami. 'Collapsing national borders, the artists in the exhibition ally with power, representing a kaleidoscope of voices that declare their authority'.
Nandipha Mntambo and Berni Searle are among the five artists showing in Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation. The exhibition centers figures and images that produce a new understanding of the agency of women in the Global South.
Jo Ractliffe and Guy Tillim exhibit in À toi appartient le regard et (...) la liaison infinie entre les choses at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Comprising photography, video and installation, this is the museum's first presentation of 'contemporary images in all their forms'.
Zanele Muholi and Paulo Nazareth exhibit in the 22nd Sydney Biennale, titled NIRIN, from the Wiradjuri for 'edge.' Asserting that 'artists have the power to resolve, heal, dismember and imagine futures of transformation for re-setting the world', the biennale - now closed - promises to continue online.
Viviane Sassen returns to Huis Marseille with Venus & Mercury, a solo exhibition which will occupy all fourteen galleries as well as the museum's garden. The new work, inspired by various accounts of the French royal court in the 17th and 18th centuries, weaves a 'melancholic narrative drenched in eroticism, power, intrigue, illness, decay, and death'.
Edson Chagas and Zanele Muholi form part of African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other, the central exhibition at Houston's FotoFest Biennial 2020. Curated by Mark Sealy MBE, the presentation features over 30 artists from across the continent and its diaspora, 'examining the complex relationships between contemporary life in Africa, the African diaspora, and global histories of colonialism'.
Pieter Hugo exhibits in Through an African Lens: Sub-Saharan Photography from the Museum’s Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. The exhibition features over 70 photographs by 20 artists explorering a variety of artistic styles and expression from the 1950s to the present.
Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi features in Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, a travelling exhibition showing at Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada. The show has a stated focus on migration, channelling 'the second-generation experience in a series of diverse artistic commissions exploring cross-cultural artistic realities'.
Paulo Nazareth and Kemang Wa Lehulere are among the artists showing in Beyond the Black Atlantic at Kunstverein Hannover. The exhibition 'seeks to give voice to a young generation of Black artists with their own, contemporary approach to the topic of identity beyond the focus of current museum debates'.
Portia Zvavahera presents a solo exhibition titled Walk of Life at the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean (ICAIO). Combining recent and early works, exhibition 'traces important moments in the artist’s life, beginning with love, marriage and childbirth'.
Guy Tillim exhibits in Des marches, démarches (Walking: ways of thinking, ways of moving) at Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in Marseilles. The exhibition brings together artists involved in 'artistic travel practices; artists who invent, express, practice and remain aware of the socio-political issues of their approaches'.
Portia Zvavahera features in Psychic Wounds: On Art & Trauma at The Warehouse. The exhibition features over 60 artists creating 'new kinds of artworks that marshal consciousness of traumatic events and their cultural processing'.
Zanele Muholi's Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness exhibition, first shown at Autograph ABP, opens at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard University. Curated by Renée Mussai, this iteration of the touring show includes a roundtable discussion titled Playing in the Dark.
Penny Siopis and Nicholas Hlobo are included in Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College. The exhibition explores 'the contemporary legacy of the long movement of people, things and ideas' across this body of water.
Pieter Hugo’s Gadawan Kura – The Hyena Men are on view in Five stories with a point of view, an exhibition of works from the collection of MUSAC, Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y Leon, Spain.
Kemang Wa Lehulere presents Laying bare: Studio process at the museum at Zeitz MOCAA, in which he occupies the institution as a live working space, 'revealing the inspirations and fascination in the artist’s use of material. It deals with germination, experimentation and collaboration'.
Pieter Hugo features in Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs at the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition highlights 'associations between photographs from different times and places' to 'underscore a sense of continuity and change within the history of the medium'.
Nandipha Mntambo exhibits in Ngoma: Art and Cosmology at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Curated by Musha Neluheni, Philippa van Straaten and Khwezi Gule, the selected works 'bring to the fore the entanglements of historical, physical, metaphysical and existential spheres of existence'.
Our quarterly .info newsletter features news about our programme for 2020, a welcome to new members of the Stevenson collective, extracts from Hans Ulrich Obrist's interview with Portia Zvavahera; a calendar of exhibitions and more. Pick up a copy at the gallery or click here to read it online.
Viviane Sassen exhibits in the Helmut Newton Stiftung in the Museum für Fotografie, Berlin, as part of Body Performance. With their common focus on the human body, the images have been chosen for their ability to unpack the 'close connection between photography and performance'.
Dada Khanyisa is among the artists included in Heroes: Principles of African Greatness at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. 'The exhibition invites visitors to consider the core values of leadership —justice, integrity, generosity, and empathy among them—embodied in selected art works'.
Zanele Muholi is the recipient of the 2019 Lucie Award for Humanitarian Photography. This annual event honours achievements in photography as part of the foundation's mission to celebrate 'masters of the field, discover and cultivate emerging talent, and promote the appreciation of photography worldwide'.
Pan-African Pulp, a commission by Meleko Mokgosi, is on view at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. His installation features large-scale panels inspired by African photo novels of the 1960s and 70s, a mural examining the complexity of blackness, and posters from pan-African movements around the world.
Zanele Muholi and Penny Siopis feature in I Am ... Contemporary Women Artists of Africa at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Drawing on the museum's permanent collection, the show 'explores the vital contributions of women to issues including the environment, identity, politics, race, sexuality, social activism, faith, and more'.
