Teresa Kutala Firmino, on the occassion of Manifestation Oku Yongola  | Manifestation of Wanting at Everard Read London, is interviewed by Bob Chaundy on an episode of the podcast Considering Art.

Click here to read the hear the full interview

Artists Teresa Kutala Firmino and Blessing Ngobeni draw on their personal experiences to create powerful political work.

Read the full article here: https://www.ft.com/content/65928d5d-b36d-40fa-a238-8156041cc70c 

For Brett Charles Seiler’s latest offering, Everard Read’s walls were painted black to host the frames and chalked afterthoughts, which along with the dimension-defining wooden sculptures, complete the collection that is ‘Timber’.

There’s a certainty to the introspective musings which hyphenate the works; they read like epiphanies, or tail-ends of conversations, or journal entries. These short stories such as, “after making love to a man he asked me if I believed in god” and “a homosexual with bad teeth” are part of what makes Seiler the dynamic artist he is. These intimate anecdotes seem both symptomatic of our symbiosis with social media, while feeling like a distinct, narrating voice emerging to guide the audience through the experience of the exhibition. More specifically, the experience of Seiler’s perspectives. From his bold linework, both in the ‘text’ and in the formation of his subjects, to his choice of canvas size and accompanying materials, to his use of space – Seiler is steadily extruding moments, and memories, and meanings to fulfil his vision as he enhances his style with each new work. ‘Timber’ is made up of building materials such as roof paint, bitumen, screws, and wood all accented by a familiar school-board shade of green to create room in which to ponder the institutionalisation of masculinity as you navigate Seiler’s themes and thinking.

Standing in front of any of Elize Vossgatter’s paintings, you feel your hand reaching out at once. The vast and intricate microcosm to be found in each valley and plateau draw you in even further. Suddenly, you find yourself so close that you start to merge with the painting.

Each carving motion reveals topographies wholly charged with layers of time. Sediments of our history as humans within this increasingly non-organic, non-natural, non-Earth divulge in every crevice of the painting’s surface. The deeper one peers into these valleys, the more monumental everything starts to feel.

Abstraction is a misnomer that assumes one is dealing with ideas and not things or events. It is all three – mindful, palpable, eventful. If abstraction has been divorced from the Real, this is because we’ve maintained a hoax that existence precedes essence – or vice versa, depending on one’s point of view – when in fact all of life, all art, fudges more commonly than it is parsed. The Real is an ideology, as is Abstraction. If the former now dominates – it has since Plato, who loathed artists – it is because now, most fervently, we ascribe to narrative, story, imputed-expected-received outcomes. Ours is a material age, an age of palpable Ideas, of people as representative of Ideas. It is no accident that we find ourselves avidly and blinkerdly preoccupied with indices such as race-age-gender-sexual persuasion, at the expense of all else that makes up a life. We subtract rather than abstract, shut out and shut in, the better to solidify what differentiates rather than connects us. Balkanised, separatist, we are fast abandoning the synthetic and synergetic power of abstraction.

We speak to Mark Read, chairman of the Everard Read group of galleries and also a passionate botanist and conservationist.

When poet and scholar Gabeba Baderoon was a graduate assistant at the University of Cape Town in 1988, there was a conference on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. As she looked at the programme, her gaze paused, fixing its attention on the cover image. It was something “meant to be glanced at briefly before one went into the substance of the programme”. But she looked intently, instead, and saw that it was a “picturesque image of an enslaved figure”, caught in a “play of visibility and invisibility”. 

‘To contaminate, to keep things intertwined in a transformative mutualism is to be sticky with the trouble on terra, now. How else does one envision these speculative futures, if not to look through and think with the earth, with every non-human thing and being in and on earth to create terra visions.’

What’s in a name? In the case of Io Makandal much that deserves our attention. Given the artist’s concern with the imbalance built into binary systems, be they technological, ecological, social, or political, her first name, Io – pronounced I/O – is a striking moniker. The definitions vary: input/output, industrial/organisational, instead of, in out, interoperability, insertion order, instrument operator (land surveying), idiot operator (as in an I/O error). Makandal delights in the acronym, then tells me that Io also Jupiter’s largest moon, the most volcanically active in our solar system. Makandal keeps all these readings in play, but what most compels the artist is how we absorb the imbalances within perceived order and alter an inherited Western Enlightenment project which has come to define the way we see and experience the world.

A couple of years ago, I was working as an assistant at a gallery. We were hosting a group show in which one of the works was to be a giant bird’s nest, sewn together out of hay from the artist’s farm, complete with several dozen handmade ceramic eggs. When the crated artwork arrived,we were somewhat irritated by its contents. The nest was dirty. It shed clumps of straw each time it was touched and left streaks of dirt on the floor and our clothes. Worst of all, though, were the bugs: muggies buzzing in our ears, fleas chowing our legs. After three days, our director had had enough. The nest was to be sent back, the eggs placed on a plinth like any normal sculpture. 

After a deluge, one of many in a sodden Cape Town winter, light pours through the studio window in Woodstock, Cape Town. The mountain and highway are blotted out, concrete buildings soaked, a turquoise blue garage-roof the only bright thing in a blur. On the windowsill a plate of rusty lemons, a pot plant, rusty too, though life still lingers green. On a wooden desk the stricken plant casts its shadow. Two lamps are angled about drying sunflowers in a sparkling blue vase, near ovoid, an upended eye. Lapis Lazuli. Madonna blue.

 Swain Hoogervorst, Deconstruction of a Vase of Flowers (3), 2020. Oil on Belgian linen, 40 x 30cm

In this painting of a vase of limp sunflowers, Hoogervorst has sketched the rudimentary coordinates and concordances that allow one to take hold of the world, see it. A line, fleck, squab of colour, runnel of paint, a shape, then another. Because nothing quite holds the eye, directs attention, looseness prevails. A sketch is not the beginning of something, it is everything, and nothing, or, nothing quite, because what binds the eye’s saccadic flickering grasp is the realisation that forms, shapes, the things we espy, take hold barely.  Forms quaver, things judder, a featureful yet featureless soup. Morphogenetic, things – paintings – self-organise. A feedback loop, the eye, brain, imagination, seeks structure inside the unpredictable, but what it cannot countenance, pull together, is the void.