Goodman Gallery Cape Town presents ‘A Slow Succession with Many Interruptions’, a group exhibition that contemplates artists’ responses to the changing landscape of the 21st century. The exhibition’s title draws inspiration from American art historian George Kubler’s influential 1962 work, ‘The Shape of Time’, which presents a framework for understanding cultural artefacts as interconnected concepts evolving over centuries, punctuated by deviations and pauses. The artworks in this exhibition therefore embody this concept of time and fragmentation, reflecting the era in which they were created while simultaneously connecting to past and future influences integral to their making.
An articulation of this concept begins with Laura Lima, whose practice intimately engages with materiality, often inviting organic matter, degradation and the passage of time as agents in the formation and long-term existence of her works. Her latest series of large-scale textile pieces explore Brazilian mythology, nature and the transformation of materials over time. The work invites temporal fluidity, allowing the textiles final form to exist in the future as time enables a shift in colour and shape, while the mythological past persists in thematic weight.
Ghada Amer’s REFUSE also draws on textile histories as she reinterprets a textile appliqué tradition associated with male tentmakers in her birth country of Egypt. In this work, Amer skillfully navigates cultural binaries such as feminine and masculine, craft and art, abstraction and figuration, as well as East and West.
William Kentridge’s tapestries produced in collaboration with Marguerite Stephens’ Tapestry Studio translate the artist’s drawings, collages and films into large-scale woven structures. This introduces a level of intimacy and precision that is specific to threaded materiality. With this, there is a partnership that forms between amplification and refinement, while supporting an exploration of philosophical, political and speculative narratives. South African artists Sam Nhlengethwa and the late David Koloane extend this by centering the urban dweller within the dynamism of their metropolis of birth the greater Johannesburg. In this way, the cityscape is layered with the heaviness of the city’s origin, its migratory nature and its collective anxieties, highlighting the ways in which people continue to produce their own para conditions of survival.
Other featured artists include Israel-born Naama Tsabar’s Work On Felt (Variation 8), Grey, a piece from her ongoing series where she employs raw industrial felt that is transformed into modifiable stringed instruments. The work recalls the Post-minimalist art of the 1970s extending its application by merging minimal aesthetics with performativity. Jeremy Wafer, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Carlos Garaicoa, and Leonardo Drew consider the ways in which sociopolitical and cultural contexts are mapped on urban landscapes. By interrogating how colonial legacies, forms of infrastructure and decay interplay over time, their work speaks to the evolution of urban imaginaries. This exhibition opens at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa on the 23rd of May and will run until the 6th of July 2024.
