Sunday, August 30, 2009

Participants


Wednesday 7 October - Francisca Sanchéz (Chili)

My cascading life in Irma Stern's room OR you will be making waterfalls inside houses - an installation of waterfalls.



Thursday 8 October - Lien Botha

African Grey: Botha will have the company of an African Grey Parrot while stepping out a dado gray scale on the wall of the allocated residency space.

In other spaces throughout the gallery will be hidden ten colour strips and the first ten visitors to spot and produce these strips will each win a catalogue of Botha's latest show Parrot Jungle which coincides with Grobler's show. The only requirement is that catalogues must be collected from the Photographer's gallery in Cape Town.

Friday 9 October – Abri de Swardt

“During the years spent in Europe studying there was always the one idea in my mind – back to Africa, the country of my birth, the land of sunshine, of radiant colours, where the fruit grows so plentifully and the flowers seem to reach the summit of all joy” - Irma Stern, The Cape Argus, 3 April 1926.

“What a joy, when after a week I was allowed to enter the class of living models!... From the very first moment I took the greatest delight in this work. The human body appeared to me to be an instrument for expressing the emotions of the soul. What sorrow lay in a bowed head, in a curved back; what joy and force in a figure standing upright! This was new land and I set out to conquer it with keenest intensity” - Irma Stern, The Cape Argus 19 June 1926.

Given Stern’s well-known primitivist sentiments, Abrie de Swardt intends to utilize The water carrier (1937) as a starting point for a body collage that will be produced during the residency and subsequently worn as a performance at Grobler’s walkabout on the following day. In the performance, Visitation, he will be present within Stern’s house as a poltergeist haunting her, an exorcism of the very ‘primitive’ she delineated as paradise, albeit in a manner that reinforced the eurocentrist paradigms of the time. The collage will be a curation of images onto his body that catalogues Stern’s journeys into Africa, referencing her extensive collection of ethnographic objects – it is a Pan-Africanist tapestry of travel and the ‘exotic’.

Saturday 10 October – Adrienne van Eeden-Wharton & Barend de Wet

Double Knit - Barend de Wet & Adrienne van Eeden Wharton

A continuous, collaborative knitting session in all the colours of the rainbow...


Tuesday 13 October – Lynette Bester

Bester arrives back from Cape Cornwall (England) in Cape Town on Tuesday 8am, 13 October 2009, and will make her way, not home, but to visit a friend, to participate in VISITOR. She will unpack her bags and keep-sakes collected during her travel. She will only be communicating to Grobler and others in the gallery space on post-its, as well as via sms text to others outside the gallery. Communication in this manner, apart from being a wonderful tool, is also a handicap, smokescreen or mask and a results in compromised friendship

of true communication, albeit traditional communication.

Wednesday 14 October – Johan Thom

Incantation: In all there are five main INCANTATIONS of 100 words each. Each word of the individual INCANTATION is engraved on an ordinary steel razorblade (1 word per blade). These words are ‘read’ aloud in order during the various INCANTATIONS. That is, each blade is physically handled as its is removed from the pack of blades, read aloud or perhaps rather ‘intoned’ in this context (decoded and understood by the brain), spoken (verbally re-encoded) and finally thrown to the floor, falling where it may. Thus each word becomes a compound term, denoting a set of interrelated actions, objects and meanings. The residency's incantation is in memory of poet Ingrid Jonker...

Thursday 15 October – Niklas Zimmer

Niklas intends to have tea with as many (un)usually dressed/behaving friends as care to visit him: "I'd like to take this as an opportunity to create an interesting photographic essay on the sur-face of Cape Town's creatives. So: This is an open invitation to all with goodness and friendliness somewhere in their hearts to visit me for tea. Please bring cookies etc., and dress and behave (un)usually, and be prepared to be photographed at least once, or perhaps 214 times."


Friday 16 October – Seth Harper

Seth will create one of his signature characters from start to finish and showcase 'the family' in a series of portraits.




Saturday 17 October - Jacques Coetzer

Jacques Coetzer is currently involved in a project with friends to extablish a permanent coffee shop at the foot of mount Kilimanjaro. During his residency, he will offer visitors fresh coffee, ground from coffee plantations at the foot of this mountain.

Tuesday 20 October – Michael Taylor

Michael plays the role of visiting 'portrait artist' for one day, creating rapid sketches in response to each of Stern's portrait paintings in the downstairs drawing room. These reactionary drawings confront Stern's subjects as would a ghost, an unexpected visitor, or an imaginary friend. The A6 journal pad drawings will then form the content for a special edition of Michael's online publication 'The Book of Immediate Nonsense'.



Wednesday 21 October – Ruben Gutiérrez

Rendering theoretical commitments visible...




Thursday 22 October – Sonya Rademeyer

Documenting eye-movements. This flows from her research which explores whether innate empathy affects the way that art is seen. Rademeyer subdivides the day by selecting 10 individuals to participate.The eye movement made during the scanning of the on-screen imagery, will be recorded via the computer’s in-built camera.


Friday 23 October - Katherine Bull

Bull wil draw a digital portrait of Grobler sitting in Irma Stern's Big chair and then a subsequent picture of the empty chair in situ in the museum.