Tracey Rose's Waiting For God / Bildmuseet 30 years!. Waiting for God is the South African artist's first large scale solo exhibition with a selection of works from the last 15 years. Her performance-based practice is represented through major examples of her photographs and video work, as well as in a broad archive of live performance works. For 30 years Bildmuseet has produced and shown lots of big, small, wonderful, challenging and high profile exhibitions and invited the world art to Umea. Before our re-launch on the Umea Arts Campus we will have a look in the rearview mirror.
Tracey Rose's Waiting For God
curated by Khwezi Gule and Renaud Proch
Opening September 25, at 2 pm. Tracey Rose and curators Khwezi Gule and Renaud Proch will present the exhibition. Welcome!
Tracey Rose belongs to a generation of artists charged with reinventing the artistic gesture in post-Apartheid South Africa. Within this fold, she has defined a provocative visual world whose complexities only reflect those of the task at hand. Refusing to simplify reality for the sake of clarity, the artist creates rich characters that inhabit worlds as interrelated as the many facets of one’s personality. Her reference to theatre and the carnival tradition also places her work in the realm of satire.
Working with performance, often for the lens of a camera, Tracey Rose places her body at the centre of her practice. She inhabits the roles given to Africans, to African women, and to women in a male dominated world, swallowing stereotypes whole. In her quest to understand the source of such cultural meanings and of what defines human condition, Rose is inevitably led to religious myths of creation. In the series Lucie’s Fur, version 1.1.1 (2003), human origins are explored in all directions, from Lucifer to Lucy, the first discovered hominid – with no relation to Adam’s rib; while in Ciao Bella (2001), a seminal operatic video triptych of the Last Supper, created for the 49th Venice Biennale, twelve female characters all enacted and embodied by the artist herself, provide a unique outlook on deep-seated Western notions of femininity.
In Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Children So Different, So Appealing? (2005-2007), Rose unveils the jarring realities of her own surroundings in a creative collaboration with a group of children from Johannesburg’s Riverlea Extension, dubbed Zombie Town. As its title suggests, the work plays on early Pop Art’s interest in popular experience of modernity. This vision of the modern culminates in a movie scripted and acted by the children, whose candid rendering of daily life unapologetically encompasses blatant violence, cinematic magic, and hope in a generation that confronts reality head-on.
The Cockpit (2008) tackles issues of misery very directly, intolerance and hatred that form a doomed scenario for humanity. The play, filmed in the studios of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and broadcast on national TV, is a surreal soap opera which turns into a trial of the highest possible entity to be held responsible for human destiny: God himself.
Tracey Rose: Waiting for God is jointly curated by Khwezi Gule (Johannesburg) and Renaud Proch (New York), in association with Linda Givon (Johannesburg). A publication accompanying the exhibition is forthcoming. The exhibition is a co-production with the Johannesburg Art Gallery and Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Sweden and premiered at the Johannesburg Art Gallery earlier this year. The exhibition marks the return of Tracey Rose to Bildmuseet where she participated in the exhibition Democracy's Image: Photography and Visual Art after Apartheid in 1998.
----
Bildmuseet 30 years!
For 30 years Bildmuseet has produced and shown lots of big, small, wonderful, challenging and high profile exhibitions and invited the world art to Umea. Before our re-launch on the Umeå Arts Campus we will have a look in the rearview mirror.
Do you remember the exhibition The poster and Poland with pictures from Solidarność 1981 and AIDS - the Plague of our Time from the late 1980s, or Masterpieces in Wood in 1991 with sculptures of the medieval wood-carvers from the north, the large and internationally acclaimed Mirror's Edge 1999 and South African National Gallery's visit in 2001? Since its inception, Bildmuseet has shown 410 exhibitions complemented by a rich program with lectures, artist presentations, film screenings, workshops, dance performances and concerts.
Now we have gone through the archives and found the more than 250 posters made for the museum's exhibitions. They will all be included in the commemorative presentation Bildmuseet 30 years!.
In connection to the exhibition Bildmuseet invites to a workshop where visitors of all ages can create their own posters. Please find closer information in the calendar. The workshop, supervised by an art teacher and with free entrance, will be open every weekend throughout the exhibition period. Those who wish can exhibit their own poster.
On Sunday November 20th, we end with a "finissage" – a grand closing party for Bildmuseet at Gammlia. A warm welcome to join in and celebrate a legendary period of Bildmuseet history. Free admission as always.
Then we close the old premises at Gammlia to move to the new museum building on the Umeå Arts Campus! Estimated premiere in March 18th, 2012.
----
Related events
Guided tours every weekend during the exhibition period.
Tuesday, September 27, 6.30 pm
Lecture with curator and writer Khwezi Gule: Through Rose Coloured
Glasses: An exploration of identity, violence and silence through the work
of Trace Rose
Tuesday, October 4, 6.30 pm
Lecture with Anna Rådström, ass. professor in Art history: A Now and a
Then – About Performance and Photography
Tuesday, October 11, 6.30 pm
Lecture with Rory Bester, curator, art historian, critic and filmmaker:
The making of the documentary Right Through the Arts: Tracey Rose (2008)
More information in the events calendar:
www.bildmuseet.umu.se/english/calendar
----
Contact Information:
Katarina Pierre, Director Bildmuseet
+46 90 786 52 27, katarina.pierre@bildmuseet.umu.se
www.bildmuseet.umu.se
Press preview: 23 September, 10am
Opening: Sun 25 September, 2pm
BildMuseet
Umea universitet, SE- 901 87 - Umea
Opening hours: tue - sat 12.00 - 16.00, sun 12.00 - 17.00, monday closed
Admission free