WORKSHOP A MARRAKECH REPORTAGE GEOGRAFICO

AL RIAD SAHARA NOUR DI MARRAKECH

Stage a cura di Stefano PENSOTTI dal 5 al 8 Dicembre 2009
Raccontare un’esperienza di viaggio con le immagini non si esaurisce nella semplice scelta
della tecnica da usare, dell’inquadratura, della luce o dell’obiettivo adatti, ma nell’esprimere
di volta in volta un personale modo di vedere il mondo, un particolare stile attraverso il quale
il fotografo rappresenta l’esperienza vissuta.
Programma di lavoro e didattica proposti sono strutturati in modo di massimizzare l’esperienza di lavoro sul campo ed ottenere il migliore risultato. Il programma prevede 16 ore di lezioni teoriche, 14 ore di esercitazioni pratiche guidate e 6 ore di esercitazioni individuali.

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KILUANJI KIA HENDA at blank projects

"Expired Trading Products" is a mixed media exhibition that deals with refugees. The title refers to the fact that, like products that have passed their sell-by date, refugees are discarded or destroyed after their period of usefulness has expired. South Africa is currently undergoing its worst human rights abuses since the fall of Apartheid and this timely exhibition, presented by an Angolan national currently on a two month residency here, promises to present a unique perspective on the issue. Significantly this project was conceived prior to Kia Henda's arrival and before the recent crisis escalated to its current levels.

"Nuclear garden of Mr Young", which opens on the same night, is a reflection on Cape Town's status as the only city in Africa to have a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power offers the promise of cheap, clean energy whilst threatening the dangers of radiation, environment chaos and the spectre of the Bomb. For this exhibition the artist plans to create a nuclear braai and garden as a monument, photographs of which will be on display. Like atomic energy commission inspectors, only a privileged few will be permitted direct access to the actual event, the results of which will be able to be seen at the exhibition.

Kiluanji Kia Henda Angolan photographer, Kiluanji Kia Henda spends three months in Cape Town on residency at blank projects.

Born in 1979, Kiluanji lives and works in Luanda. His photographs have been exhibited at the 1 Trienal of Luanda, 2005, at “Art InVisible”, ARCO, Madrid, 2006, at “SD Observatory” IVAM (Valecian Institute of Modern Art) Valencia, 2006 and at 52nd Edition of Venice Bienal, Africa Pavillion “Check List Luanda Pop”, 2007.

Not only a photographer, Kiluanji has also been involved in theatre productions as a performer, musician and lending his hand as a lighting technician. Now he visits Cape Town for three months to work and network with local artists.

pro Helvetia Cape Town

PIETER HUGO WORKS 2002 - 2007

Two years after his first solo show in Switzerland, Galerie bertrand & gruner is pleased once again to present the work of Pieter Hugo. Born in 1976 in South Africa, Hugo was awarded the World Press Photo prize for portraiture in 2006. He was also named the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2007. In the past year, Hugo has held solo shows in New York (Yossi Milo Gallery), Los Angeles (Stephen Cohen Gallery) and Rome (Extraspazio). Recent group shows he has taken part in include Reality Check: Contemporary Art Photography from South Africa 2007 (Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz), AnAtlas of Events (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon) and Faccia a Faccia: Il nuovo ritratto fotografico (FORMA, Centro Internazionale di Fotografia, Milan). In 2008, he will take part in Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography mounted by Tate Modern (London), in collaboration with the Folkwang Museum (Essen). 

Three monographs of Hugo’s work have been published: Looking Aside (2006), Messina/Musina (2007) and The Hyena & Other Men (2007). “Works 2002-2007” offers an extensive overview of each of these series. ‘Gadawan Kura’ - The Hyena & Other Men continues the work Hugo began in 2005. Once again the photographer crisscrosses Nigeria following a traveling group of men, baboons, hyenas and pythons. From town to town the troupe parades its animals before a stunned audience, taking the opportunity to sell them amulets and traditional medicines. It’s a profitable business, all the more so when the men occasionally step out of their role as public entertainers to take advantage of the ferocity of their hyenas and extort money from people. Produced in 2006, the series Messina/Musina focuses on the small town of Musina, located in the far north of South Africa on the border with Zimbabwe. The town was formerly known as Messina, and in 2002 its name was changed to correct a colonial misspelling of the name of the Musina people who previously lived in the region. In the heart of the bush, on the major trucking route north, Musina is inhabited by a diverse population drawn there by the possibility of earning money working on the mines or on farms. Hugo’s photographic series, which is made up of family portraits, interiors and landscapes, offers a sensitive examination of a community in transition. The same sensitivity and respect for the photographed subject characterizes Looking Aside (2004-2006), a series of close-up portraits of people with albinism and others, including the blind and elderly, whose appearance makes them the victims of embarrassed looks or even societal rejection. 

Shown together for the first time, these three series reveal a photographer who is fully committed to his subjects. 

AVANT CAR GUARD

Avant Car Guard are Zander Blom, Jan-Henri Booyens and Michael MacGarry - a three member visual art collective from Johannesburg (recently featured in Frieze Magazine Issue 112). They have exhibited at a national and international level over the past 18 months, including an extended exhibition at The Pure Project in New York City. They have published two books on their production entitled Volume I, and Volume II. Their approach to art production, the art world and their own collective role as a singular artist is characterized by a strong sense of humour and punk sensibility. Their approach focuses on conceptual art manifested through photography and performance. “A sincere act to invent something insincere,” is probably the most succinct definition of their method.

WHATIFTHEWORLD / GALLERY

GUY TILLIM AT HAUNCH OF VENISON, ZURICH

GUY TILLIM

Guy Tillim (born 1962) has been acclaimed in recent years for extraordinary images taken in Africa, in the fractured territories of Sierra Leone, Eritrea, the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Angola and the urban centres of Johannesburg and Kinshasa. While Tillim trained as a photojournalist his work transcends the documentary impulse to offer profound insights into the contemporary African condition, finding revelatory beauty in the mundane (and often terrible) actuality of life there. Tillim says: 'Of course, there is always this: to change what is ugly and brutal into something sublime and redemptive: So I have photographs I like for reasons I have come to distrust. I learned my trade as a photojournalist but feelings of impotence in the face of other's despair led me to look away, as if catching only obliquely their reflected light.’ His images are, in the artist's formulation, of 'another nature: disquiet, introspection, wonder'.

Renate Wiehager has written: 'It can be said of Guy Tillim that his artistic approach is formulated on the tricky border between empathy and distancing. His travels through the countries of southern Africa are not dictated by pre-arranged goals. They seem to be guided by a quality of attention, unprejudiced at first, to the conditions and environments that people have brought about themselves, and that equally, they are placed in [..] Tillim's images derive from a disciplined avoidance of everything that has always been believed before, and any form of painting things in black and white.'

Tillim was born in Johannesburg in 1962.(MORE...)

HAUNCH OF VENISON

CCA,Lagos presents: Paradise Lost by George Osodi

29th March - 3rd May 2008

The third and final exhibition of the 4 part curatorial project Democrazy features emerging Nigerian photographer George Osodi who brings a complex, multifaceted perspective of the Niger Delta to a Lagos and international audience. His powerful documentary images highlights the daily lives of Niger Deltans, the civil unrest, the environmental degradation as a result of oil and gas exploration and the lost dreams of millions of people in one of the richest regions in Nigeria if not in Africa. (MORE...)curator/ author Bisi Silva

George Osodi at DOCUMENTA KASSEL 07

The Obudu Plateau through the lens of George Osodi