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Email PageThe New Spell
June 5, 2008- July 30, 2008
Reception: June 5, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Themba Shibase, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Maja Maljevic, Nina Barnett, Robyn Nesbitt
David Krut Projects
526 W 26th StDavid Krut Projects, New York is pleased to present The New Spell, an exhibition of contemporary South African art curated by Lucy Rayner, with artists Themba Shibase, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Maja Maljevic, Nina Barnett, and Robyn Nesbitt.
With a certain shift in tone, an equivocal and satirical vocabulary has developed within the language of recent South African art. Artists are teasingly subverting contemporary politics and societal norms with a liberated sense of detachment and satiric self-reflexivity. Works are consciously current, sometimes self-consciously hip, and self-consciously oppositional. Bringing together the work of six artists who share an affinity for a particularly vulgar aesthetic, The New Spell aims to consider one of the many enlivening tendencies within this socially aware and outspoken approach.
The exhibition explores how the grotesque is exercised through works of art to reveal the fetish in African social and political relations of power. The term ‘fetish’ has become somewhat voguish and hackneyed of late. Essentially, it is the attribution of value or power to an object or way of thinking, but it is used here as an ironic comment on the ‘rational’ mindset of state-sanctioned culture in Africa.
By contemplating the grotesque in works by Shibase, MacGarry, Mntambo, Maljevic, Barnett and Nesbitt, The New Spell hopes to invite viewers to consider such relations of power with a greater sense of intimacy – and perhaps even humor – by moving beyond the binary categories of autonomy versus subjection or resistance versus passivity. The works kidnap instances of the fetish and force them to examine their own vulgarity, exposing ways in which official culture in South Africa is characterized by a distinctive style of improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion.
Curator Lucy Rayner and three of the artists, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo and Robyn Nesbitt, will be present at the opening.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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