Artist Victor Gordon in significant Art Exhibition in South Africa
HOME AND AWAY: A Return To The South
Curated by: Carol Brown (an independent curator and former Director of the Durban Art Gallery in South Africa)
An group exhibition curated for the Ifa Lethu Foundation, Constitution Hill, Johannesburg South Africa, June-July 2010
Promoted as the premier art event to coincide with the World Cup Soccer being hosted in South Africa next month.
[click here] To listen to ABC Radio interview with Victor Gordon in Johannesberg, South Africa
South African born artist Victor Gordon currently living in Australia, has been honoured to have five major works represented in this exhibition. The large scale works (most are 2.25 m x 1.8m) from Gordon’s installation “ Behold the Land where Satan reigns” were last exhibited in Sydney in 1990 at the time of Mandela’s release and the ground breaking shift towards a Democratic South Africa. The exhibition was unequivocally political and cuttingly critical of the South African Apartheid regime. Gordon had grown up and had personally experienced much of what he vividly portrayed in his art. The works are explicit and disturbingly evocative. The exhibition attracted attention at the time and SBS made an eight minute documentary of the installation. Gordon will be in South Africa at the launch of the exhibition and has been invited to be a guest speaker at a number of venues.
Of current topical interest is the photograph that Gordon personally took in early 1987 of the (recently murdered) extreme right wing white activist Eugene Terreblanche. Just prior to leaving South Africa Gordon attended a meeting of the Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging (AWB) in Johannesburg posing as a reporter. Gordon observed that, “they had turned my town hall where I had been taken to numerous pantomimes and cultural events as a child into a Nazi meeting place”. The image is sensational in capturing the powerful Nazi-like symbolism of that historically significant time as well as its messianic leader.
The show HOME AND AWAY: A Return To The South examines the similarities and differences between works produced by South African artists experiencing the oppression of apartheid and those from beyond SA’s shores who created works in support of the struggle. These are from the Art against Apartheid collection. Although produced from different perspectives, the two collections are united in their focus on human rights.
South African Artists represented include now famous Dumile Feni, Ezrom Legae and Lucky Sibiya whilst the collection also includes previously marginalised artists whose work will astonish.
International artists represented include Roy Lichtenstein (USA), Robert Rauschenberg (USA), Iba Ndiaye (Senegal), Christian Boltanski (France) and Richard Hamilton (UK).
The exhibition will be first shown at Constitutional Hill in Johannesburg where the historic nature of the space – once a prison holding amongst others, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi, now the supreme symbol of justice in South Africa – will provide a highly appropriate context for the two collections. The exhibition will later travel to the National Art Museum in Cape Town, then Durban before going on international tour to the USA and Canada.
For the last five years the Ifa Lethu Foundation has been instrumental in repatriating South African art that was produced during the apartheid years.
View photos from the opening night
For further information contact Victor Gordon
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