BIENALSUR ARRIVES AT JOHANNESBURG WITH NEW EXHIBITIONS
For the first time, the world’s most far-reaching contemporary art biennial lands in South Africa. Four projects —by Jasmina Cibic, Marcela Cabutti, Sally Gutiérrez Dewar, and Diego Masera— explore memory, history, and the notion of home from diverse perspectives.
BIENALSUR’s global program continues to expand, reaching Johannesburg for the first time with a series of exhibitions that opened in October across the city.
At the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (Km 8087), Slovenian artist Jasmina Cibic presents Beacons, a film voiced by eight women that revisits speeches by artists, curators, and politicians delivered at the first conference of cultural workers from the Non-Aligned Movement, held in Yugoslavia in 1985. Shot in symbolic locations such as monuments and presidential balconies, the piece reexamines the recent past to question the role of culture in building emancipatory futures, through a feminist lens that challenges traditionally patriarchal power structures.
At the Origins Centre of the University of the Witwatersrand (Km 8086), Marcela Cabutti presents Nuestros continentes errantes (Our Wandering Continents), the result of a BIENALSUR-promoted residency. The Argentine artist investigates early 20th-century geological surveys that supported the theory of continental drift. Focusing on the possible contact between the Río de la Plata and Kalahari cratons, Cabutti draws inspiration from that encounter to create organic sculptural pieces and a perfume made from native plants from Argentina and South Africa.
This Friday, Spanish artist and filmmaker Sally Gutiérrez Dewar inaugurates To the Registrar, Conflicting Pasts and Presents at Constitution Hill (Km 8088).
On November 1, Diego Masera (ARG/MEX) unveils Home / Ikhaya, a site-specific installation at the NIROX Sculpture Park (Km 8077). Inspired by the architecture of informal settlements, the work reflects on the socioeconomic inequalities that lead millions to inhabit such structures, while celebrating resilience and questioning the very notions of “house” and “home.”
The program in Johannesburg will close on November 4 with a public talk by BIENALSUR’s artistic director, Diana Wechsler, at 6 p.m., marking the culmination of a month of intense activity in Africa.
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