South African Art: Exhibition highlights history of African power, global inclusion
Updated 20:00, 16-Aug-2019
The innovative digital art gallery, TMRW, has opened an exhibition which fuses virtual and augmented environments to create a multi-sensory digital art installation. The exhibit reimagines histories of African power, representation, and global inclusion. CGTN's Yolisa Njamela has more.
The Magolide Collective presents The Counterspace of Pop Culture in Zaire. This collected body of work aims to re-imagine African art histories. The exhibition captures one's imagination and delight your senses.
It's a multi-sensory digital art installation combining video art with performance. This body of work seeks to address the intersections found between spectacle, pop-culture and black identity.
In fact - the art consumer becomes the art - all in the process of consuming this body of work. The spectator is encouraged to move around the space, taking in the landscapes and portraits before them.
MZOXOLO MAYONGO ARTIST "So the collective exists in a way that we use the visual language and visual material to speak about ideas most specifically about marginalised, omitted histories of African bodies and marginalised bodies. People are taken through an experience however that experience unfolds in their mind and hopefully an experience is something that you remember."
The collaborative effort is paying off, as art consumers are in awe of the new kind of art.
YOLISA NJAMELA JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA "Technology has not only changed how we consume art, it has also changed how artists create, critique, and share the art."
ADILSON DE OLIVEIRA ARTIST "I mean families that come in or people that weren't interested in art beforehand but who are now interested in art, they're coming in and kind of saying oh well there is room for me practice even if I'm just a technician or if I am just doing this or there is space now for me to exist in this round."
GABRIEL BAARD ARTIST "They end up feeling quite of femoral in a sense that they are fleeting. The moments are there. But then they are gone and that is something that is interesting to speak about when you're talking about histories that are both being forgotten and erased and overturned."
Overall, this collaborative exhibition is also intended to break down Western modes of consuming art. Welcoming technology into the gallery space.
HAFIZA ASMAL ARTIST "The western mode is definitely the play ground that we in right now. And the more we see how the toys can be used differently we start to play around a little differently with how we make up our games. Ultimately the imagination is the sag way into everything that we understand."
Vincent Baloyi is a traditional sculpture artist who has joined these young digital artists.
VINCENT BALOYI ARTIST "I mean it's good because they are young and I'm old and I learn from them and they learn from me. It's very important to work with young people because you get to learn new things."
These artists believe that their kind of art is the future. Yolisa Njamela, CGTN, Johannesburg, South Africa.