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Peripheral Centres – New initiatives in the SA visual arts

by Hermann — last modified 2008-08-18 16:58

The issue of space, be it personal or public, will always be a contested area in South Africa. Given the history of the country moreover, physical space is always scrutinised, valued, devalued and re-valued.

Creative space, be it in the area of the visual arts at large or one’s own personal, physical space is a thorny issue for many artists in the country who struggle to get a foothold in the South African visual arts Centre generally, and also specific spaces to work on a daily basis. The few artists’ studios in the country can hardly hold a small percentage of the artists who require space to work and interact with other artists and stakeholders. With the demise of apartheid and the subsequent drying-up of funding from international sources, Black community art and cultural spaces have struggled to obtain funds for the basic running of their facilities and programmes, even from local and national government. It is a struggle for young visual artists to get opportunities or the finances needed to exhibit in group shows, let alone solo shows around South Africa. In fact, many feel that the visual arts field in South Africa still mimics the modus operandi of apartheid and that the few public spaces, like public galleries and museums that are available, remain as inaccessible as ever.

But not all is doom and gloom at the moment either. In the face of a realisation of ‘things changing the same’, a growing number of alternative initiatives have arisen on the margins of the South African arts sector. Realising that there are many more people situated on the periphery, these groups of cultural producers have decided to challenge its audience and make it an exciting space for engagement.

 

It is thus fitting to begin with the renewal of one the historic Newtown’s Afrika Cultural Centre (ACC), which since the 80s, has been instrumental in engaging black communities through a variety of interdisciplinary workshops in everything from education to therapy to children’s rights. Under the leadership of veteran theatre educator Benjy Francis, the ACC weathered the turbulent 80s and early 90s with remarkable energy and dedication by its various participants, to finally welcome the ‘new’ South Africa, turning its attention and resources to South Africa’s children and the youth (among its successes were the Children’s Museum and Parliament and the yearly Children’s Street Carnival).

 

Sadly, like many other black community centres have experienced since 1994, it became increasingly difficult to source funding. With absolutely no sponsorship, Benjy has had to fight extensively to keep the ACC space ‘open’. Challenges to the ACC space should be no surprise as, after all, this is prime property space in the Newtown precinct that would fetch huge prices on the market. But while Benjy Francis is still there, this space remains largely free for artists to engage and work with. Youth from different communities still come to get the unique – yet free – training that is on offer from the ACC’s Centre for Research and Training in African Theatre. Tired of years of struggle to get local funding, he is now concentrating on just producing work with his group of dedicated youth, who recently performed their production ‘Freedom’s Children’ for the First Lady Zanele Mbeki. The ACC has also recently launched its website (www.afrikaculturalcentre.com) and you can glimpse some of their forthcoming activities online which include a World Theatre Day and a Culture Club which will engage various Joburg communities through the medium of film.

 

In complete contrast to the Newtown cultural space, a Cape Town-based artists’ collective have used their home-space of Gugulethu township to stage their ground-breaking exhibition “Titled/Untitled” in November 2006. It is unusual to look at contemporary art while bopping your head to live hip-hop in a shebeen in Gugs, or looking at a video inside a space between the backyard shack and the fence that was converted into a projection room, or experiencing a sound installation inside an outdoor toilet that is also being used by the shebeen patrons.

 

Invading the Blank Gallery in Bo Kaap and kwaMlamli (the ‘joint’ where the exhibition in Gugs was hosted), the Gugulective group were able to make these disparate spaces temporarily speak to each other and in doing so, managed to debase ‘normal’ aesthetic pretensions and knowledge and reveal how apartheid’s spatial design still conditions the lives of Black people even today. On the floor of Blank Projects for example they laid out a map of Gugulethu showing numbered street names that bore the prefix NY, which stands for native yard. Gugulective artist Kemang wa Lehulere’s installation Black People Don’t Read contradicts its title by showing in the space evidence in the form of various reading material, like Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, that Black people not only read but write as well. Such works as presented at this Gugulective initiative not only challenged the physical space of production and exhibition, but that of creativity and representation.

 

So, while the battle for artistic space continues between local government, the private sector, art institutions, art organisations and artists, the battlefields are providing both younger artists and veteran activists with material and incentive to produce work that not only contests and challenges accessibility into physical space, but also the boundaries that govern conventional intellectual and creative space.

 

By Dead Revolutionaries Club (DRC)

 

A Joburg-based collective that is hoping to make a difference in the visual arts and cultural sectors. DRC runs free Saturday art classes, a monthly “conversation” series and exhibitions. They will be launching their webzine soon on www.deadrevolutionariesclub.co.za.