FROM THE ARCHIVE 1: February 2016:
Thuli Gamedze – a middle class Black person, as she calls herself – observes the art world in South Africa, specifically in Cape Town, in an attempt to reconcile personal encounters in various art spaces that seem to present multiple tensions between viewer, artist, art object, and gallery structure- due to the latter’s implied neutrality.
To gaze at the artist’s work is to encounter the vagaries of history, to be fixed in a time mitigated by the whims of the clock, an arbitrary sequence that fails to account for how Black femininity exists both within and without modernist time.
Shonibare created an exhibition where he wanted to show the spiritual and universal function of the African aesthetic. He created a stylised collection of works that he sought to find an historic discourse for without losing the trace of the abstract and literal interaction with western influences.
We aim to give our audiences a glimpse of the glamour and the politics of the African fashion scene. We hope that people come away with the view that African fashions are undefinable, always changing, always refusing to be pigeon-holed. We want audiences to come away inspired by the magnificence of African creativity and to want to find out more.
It is remarkable how snugly Rose’s work fits into a museum or gallery. In spite of the unsettling manner she attacks most of her topics- racism, white supremacy, female empowerment, occluded colored identity- they are frequently layered with a veneer of artistic respectability. They are also marked by a pliability that attracts considerable commercial possibilities.