This group exhibition curated by Neil Nieuwoudt and Ann-Marie Tully gathers together a group of established and emerging artists whose artwork relates in theme/manner/medium to Lauren Beukes’ Arthur C Clarke award-winning novel, Zoo City (2011), which frames Johannesburg as the seedy science fiction setting for a long tale (tail) where a criminal underclass and their animal companions live in a magical and hellish reality.
The exhibition is at NIROX projects gallery, in the Arts on Main complex, Maboneng Precinct, Johannesburg. It opens on December 5, 2013 at 6pm, and runs through the festive season (with the exception of the Christmas and New Year period) and closes on January 15, 2014.
In Zoo City Beukes has mobilised to great effect the entwined literal and metaphoric understanding of the English word ‘Zoo’ A park-like area where live animals are kept in cages and enclosures, studied, bred, and exhibited to the public. Formal term zoological garden.
A place, activity, or group marked by chaos, strange, or unrestrained behaviour. Beukes’ text also draws on the ‘touristy’ association of Johannesburg with wild animals (as a gateway to game farms etc.); and one of the largest vibrant and complex cities in Africa and the Southern Hemisphere.
This group exhibition extends on the dualism of the word ‘zoo’, drawing together artworks that respond to urban and wild animals; the ‘human zoo’ of identity, activity and discourse; human interactions with nature and animals; spaces and sites of control, coercion and contravention; urbanity and nature binaries; human and animal dialectics and amalgams; technology/reason and instinct juxtapositions; the historical context of the zoo as a colonial invention and ‘benign’ theme park that instrumentalises the imperial project of control, and display is also of interest.
ARTISTS: Wayne Barker, Hannelie Coetzee, Carole Desbois, Bevan de Wet, Germaine de Larch, Gordon Froud, Georgina Gratrix, Sikhumbuzo Makandula, Senzeni Maresela, Rosemarie Marriott, Michele Mathison, Jurgen Meekel, Neil Nieuwoudt, Phumulani Ntuli, Andrea Rolfes, Lauren Schlachter, Hannalie Taute, Ann-Marie Tully, Jessica Webster, Ed Young and Isaac Zevale.
