Inward-looking is one way of describing the South African art scene. The majority of gallery and museum exhibitions present artworks by South African artists. Perhaps this is a legacy of decades of cultural isolation during the apartheid era, or it could be due to our geography — positioned on the tip of the African continent. Maybe we’re just plain self-obsessed?
Fortunately, the Italian-owned Investec Cape Town Art Fair, which opens on February 16 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, has for some years now challenged our nationalistic chauvinism, with galleries from different parts of the world participating in this annual event. In confronting our parochialism, some have opted to show South African artists to appeal to locals.
However, this year’s edition will see more art from different parts of the world, offering us a glimpse into societal issues in far-flung places around the globe. Of the 12 emerging artists selected for the Tomorrow’s/Today section of the art fair, curated by Mariella Franzoni, only five are based in South Africa. The rest hail from France, Spain, Brazil, India, the US and Mexico.
Barcelona-based Rita Sala’s art is defined by suspended bodies. This recurring motif in her work, which will be presented by the Ana Mas Projects gallery from Spain, is driven by her fixation with falling.
“I’m interested in the space that occupies a fall and its support system. What happens physically when someone falls? What are the gravity forces and how does the fall [or the suspension] cause a change in perspective?” says Sala.
Her subjects tend to be naked to avoid introducing social or cultural contexts into her art, ensuring the focus is on her subjects’ physical relationship to the world.
“When you dress a body, you have to think about the clothing and, depending on the clothing, you’ll be talking about one context or another. Until now, I’ve worked from a symbolic and physical place,” she says.
Sala is also a curator, researcher and writer, who works between two different spaces: one in La Butxaca Màgica, a shared industrial space with six people, and the other, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, where she conducts research and curates exhibitions.
She considers Barcelona as a small city that has, due to its size, allowed for a tight artistic community defined by constant collaboration and exchange of ideas, which makes it an active scene.
“On the other hand, the same fact, that it’s a small town, means that the opportunities are also smaller, and people have to work hard to survive. There’s a need to go out, to other places outside the city, to other cities and towns in the territory or abroad.”
For Maria Sosa, an artist based in Mexico, and Manjot Kaur, from Chandigarh in India, their struggle to survive as artists has involved dealing with deep-seated male chauvinism in their respective countries. Sosa’s male partner is also an artist and they collaborate on performance-driven works.
“Because my work is so similar to his work, some people think I’m the one copying him,” says Sosa. Yet, fortunately, Sosa is bolstered by those in her community who don’t share these attitudes. She’s more concerned with the “violence and hate against women that sees 10 women murdered daily in Mexico”.
In her art, Sosa is interested in dealing with the legacy of colonialism, which she says is the root of a “fiction of superiority”, giving rise to racial, gender and other destructive prejudices. “History is something we carry history in our body,” says Sosa, whose artworks appear like sheaths, or skins, removed from a body — think hanging textile works with glove-like protrusions.
The textiles she works with, which will be presented in a booth at the fair by the Dutch No Man’s Art Gallery, are pertinent to her expression and interests.
In some textile pieces, it’s the origin of the dyes for the Batik print that carry significance. In the piece, “Los Monstruos no vivían aquí”, she selected dyes from two specific plants — Haematoxylum campechianum and Haematoxylum brasiletto — that had motivated the English to colonise Belize.
“These trees were exploited almost to extinction with the use of African and native slaves,” says Sosa.
The natural world, in its most splendid and ideal form, colonises Kaur's works, which are being presented at the fair by Galerie Caroline O'Breen from Amsterdam.
The fauna and flora that surround her subjects are not aesthetic props. “I think of nature as a protagonist. It’s a way of giving agency and power to the beings who can’t speak for themselves,” says Kaur.
Ironically, while Kaur grew up in an agricultural state of India, she was born in an industrial city, where access to a park was a luxury. She’d never spent time in a forest until she lived in Canada.
From this perspective, her art could be viewed as a way to reconnect to nature, reposition its value in society, and chart a more idealistic future in a post-industrialisation age. The detail in her works, which require deep concentration and time to create, hold her in a meditative space, which, like her art, presents a “happy space” to exist in.
Having grown up in a patriarchal community, where she had little exposure to women who chartered their own paths in life, her art also reflects a reorientation of traditional female roles.
She accesses this dialogue through an appropriation and subversion of iconography from Indian myths and traditional illustration, where women’s existence relied on the existence of male partners.
“I’m interested in making [new] stories for women, where they’re free to make their own choices. They don’t have to choose to love a person. Why can’t they choose to love a tree instead?”
• Investec Cape Town Art Fair runs at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from February 16 to 18.
