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12/1/2012

Two Exhibitons

Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen

Santu Mofokeng
Chasing Shadows
Thirty Years of Photographic Essays
Santu Mofokeng’s first international retrospective, curated by Corinne Diserens in collaboration with Jeu de Paume (Paris), Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen, Kunsthalle Bern and Bergen Kunsthall.

A leading South African photographer, Mofokeng consistently subverts the alleged certainties of cultural and racial histories, questioning photography’s politics of representation and its objectivity, in works dealing with a variety of issues; photographs of religious rituals, memorials or desolate landscapes. Mofokeng’s black-and-white photographs are lasting images of humanity, recording not just adversity and oppression, but also happy moments and the indomitable human spirit.

Santu Mofokeng was born in 1956 in Johannesburg and started his career as a street photographer in Soweto during Apartheid. He was a member of the Afrapix collective, which fought Apartheid by presenting documentary photographs on the resistance movement and the desolate social conditions in 1980s South Africa. Over the course of ten years, Mofokeng worked as a research- and documentary-photographer at the Institute for Advanced Social Research (formerly the African Studies Institute) at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1989 he decided to no longer photograph for journalistic purposes, but rather to document everyday life in South Africa’s townships. He asked black families for permission to copy their old family pictures from the years between 1890 and 1950, in order to counter the representation of black people as backward and rural in publications that were financed by the Apartheid- state (e. g. the tourist’s brochure Native Life in South Africa, 1936). By showcasing the diversity of black family life, with his Black Photo Album, Mofokeng created an invaluable cultural archive.

Mofokeng’s photographs have been shown all over the world in landmark exhibitions: for instance, at documenta 11 in Kassel, and in the touring exhibition The Short Century, Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa: 1945-1994. His works were also represented at the Sarjah Biennial, the Gwangju Biennial, as well as at Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la photographie. Santu Mofokeng lives in Johannesburg, South Africa

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Magnhild Øen Nordahl
Statics
The artist opens this year’s exhibition programme in NO.5 with a series of new sculptural works.

Øen Nordahl works with sculpture and installation where painted wood, concrete and industrial materials are used in precision-built structures based on architectural construction principles, geometry and physics. Visually, she often uses sculptural form for a phenomenological staging of the exhibition space. In several earlier projects Øen Nordahl has combined the physical, material forms with dramatic lighting that balances the solidity of the sculptures with a more intangible definition of the space by means of light and shade.

Nevertheless, Øen Nordahl’s works are not mere formal experiments. The sculptures are often based on site studies where specific buildings form a background – often quite concrete – for the works, both in form and content. In the exhibition there are references to half-timbered houses, Japanese construction legislation, log cabins and industrial architecture.

Timber-based structures form the basis of most of the works, in a spectrum ranging from the Middle Ages to early industrial architecture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Within this historical interval huge social changes have taken place. Materials, tools, machinery and construction principles have radically transformed the role of the craftsman in the execution of these buildings. Øen Nordahl’s sculptures make deliberate use of a painstaking craftbased production process, thus commenting on the role of craftsmanship in contemporary art.

The series Riegelbau is based on the half-timbered house. In these houses the distinctive framework is often visible in the facade, both as decoration and as the structure of the building made visible. Øen Nordahl abstracts the principles of the framework in a series of highly colourful wall works situated somewhere between painterly geometrical abstraction and the sculpture associated with minimalism, which similarly occupies an ambivalent position between painting and object. Another central work in the exhibition is a major sculpture based on a derrick crane in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. This work can be viewed in relation to earlier works where Nordahl has also referred to the politically sensitive coal mining industry on Svalbard. In an unsentimental way, the sculpture is soberly registrative, and at the same time is an active comment on a site-specific problem complex in Norwegian industry today.

Image: Santu Mofokeng

Information Officer:
Stein-Inge Århus Tel. +47 55 55 93 10, +47 95 20 17 91 stein-inge@kunsthall.no

Bergen Kunsthall
Rasmus Meyers alle 5 - Bergen
Opening hours: Tues-Fri: 12pm-6pm / Thurdays also: 12pm-8pm / Sat & Sun 12pm - 5pm

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