kagablog

March 17 iLLUSEUM 19:00 - 21:00

The strange & surreal case of Riina Hanninen drew our attention … Are we caught in a time warp that brought us straight into pre-2nd-war era, when the Nazis decided which art had to be forbidden and the makers criminalized OR are we thrown back even further in history…back to the dark days of the inquisition where people, mostly women could be accused and condemned for … whatever really …..?

….Come and see the work and meet the person who recently was Persona non Grata … on trial for her art in … 2009!

The Abyss

Riina Hänninen`s death, destruction and resurrection. Riina Hänninen was an artist who lived in 21`st century. Hänninen was raised in the middle of recession in Finland, in a small town full of alcoholism, unemployment and social exclusion. This young girl had many names, and she could not write or count properly. She had an appointment reserved for social welfare officer, but by mistake she was accepted to a favoured art institution. In this institution, she first flourished until the increased control over the people resulted in everyone to search potentially dangerous people among those who were different, weird and abnormal. Her paintings became objects of fear and deranged personality. The girl was given more names; the mass murderer, the school murderer, attention seeker, fake artist, insane, monster. Place that was used to be considered free, became a prison. Art became conservative, corrupted business institution. She didn’t belong there anymore; she belonged only among the mentally insane and forgotten. The girl saw people’s hypocrisy, weakness and she opened her eyes again in isolation and worthlessness. She saw the Abyss and how the Abyss was infinite. She realized how her paintings had been trying to express it, but she always thought it as just the darkness of mind. The Abyss had been a constant presence. We could fall to it, lose the borders or search it with carefulness. It is within each one of us, the fight between the restrictions of society, morality and humanity. The Abyss has been with us since the beginning of consciousness, the question of reality, life and its purpose. In Abyss live all the dreaded words, monsters, and visions. Her expression was restricted, the fear was planted on her, the fear that you shouldn’t speak about the Abyss because society needs people to work as machines, not realize their true nature. But Hänninen wanted to know the answers to all the questions that people were afraid to ask.

These paintings are made in isolation process by Hänninen in small dark room of the attic in the border of Amsterdam’s winter sky.

This exhibition in sponsored by Finnish government to keep people silent and happy with antidepressant pills.

In 1997 UNESCO included in its Memory of the World Register an archive best known as the Bleek Collection and described thusly:

The Bleek Collection consists of papers of Dr W.H.I. Bleek (1827-1875), his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd (1834-1914), his daughter Dorothea Bleek (1873-1948) and G.W. Stow (1822-1882) relating to their researches into the San (Bushman) language and folklore, as well as albums of photographs. Bleek developed a phonetic script for transcribing the characteristic clicks and sounds of the !Xam language which is used by linguists to this day. Although some of the material was published by Lucy Lloyd and Dorothea Bleek, a great deal remains unpublished. The material provides an invaluable and unique insight into the language, life, religion, mythology, folklore and stories of this late Stone Age people.1

The Bleek Collection does indeed offer many invaluable lessons, chief among them being how Western constructions of modernity are imbedded in tropes of prehistory and indigeneity and wedded to proclamations of science and salvage. Robert Gordon has suggested the archive be seen in the context of South Africa’s “incipient scientific nationalism.”2 The Bleek Collection was recently published in a lavish volume and accompanying CD ROM, edited by scholar and artist Pippa Skotnes. This publication, Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek (2007), continues Skotnes’s scholarly and artistic inquiry into the lives of the Lloyd and Bleek family and their informants and was preceded by Skotnes’s Sound of the Thinking Strings (1991) and the controversial exhibition (with catalogue) Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushman (1996). Skotnes’s latest exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s History Paintings of the San, launched in November 2008 at Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town, centers on Lucy Lloyd and the geologist/ethnographer George Stow in connection to Stow’s rock painting studies. Sustained and legitimized by exhibitions, publications, and national museums, universities, and archives, these projects have provided privileged reinscriptions of archival materials gathered during an era of cultural plunder of South Africa’s indigenous heritage by colonial forces. Skotnes’s scholarly and artistic contributions to contemporary conceptualizations of South Africa’s earliest inhabitants are immensely valuable. Her appropriation of San heritage is deeply inflected by her scholarship on the San and most particularly Bleek, Lloyd, and Stow’s interpolations of the San and early rock art painting. Her publications and exhibitions offer rich and at times competing layers of analyses that seem to position her as a keen, insightful and detached observer-scholar and then again as a romanticizing dramaturgist and scenographer. To this end, there are parallels with the endeavors of Bleek and Lloyd and renewed courtship with the constructions of Western modernity through and against African indigeneity.

Can artistic “appropriations” of indigenous
cultural forms deconstruct or at the very least
interrogate the constructed modernities imposed
upon the term “indigenous”? This essay considers
a single artist’s — Garth Erasmus — relationship
to contemporary conceptions of indigeneity in
South Africa (Figure 1). It is guided by two key
questions: How are contemporary understandings
and perceptions of indigeneity bound up in
the “what” and the “when” of South African
modernity; and Is indigeneity a trope of modernity,
and if so, whose modernity? Historicizing the
naming and appropriation of indigenous cultures
in South Africa offers critical insight into the
larger interrogation of African modernity. Two
observations are set forth herein; firstly, that in
terms of “indigenous,” modernity and prehistory
(or the premodern) are codependent; and second,
that those artists who appropriate indigenous
cultures through a lens of “critical extinction”
risk reproducing a paradigm of Eurocentric
modernity.
While South Africa is the self-proclaimed
cradle of humankind,3 the indigenous people of
southern Africa have long been imagined as living
examples of prehistory.4 The continued display of
the dioramas of non-Eurocentric
South African tribal [sic] groups that include
life casts situated in historicized environments at
the Iziko South African Museum perpetuates this
view.
The prehistory has and continues to play a
seminal role in South African national identity.5
Indeed, in South Africa, constructions of
modernity are contingent upon prehistory
narratives as much as they are on the premodern.
According to Robert Gordon, “While [South
Africa’s first peoples] have been socially marginal,
symbolically they were [and are] central to a
number of different ideological constellations.”6
In the European “age of discovery,” assumed links
between “modern savages” and stone-age peoples
of Europe were common. “Modern savages” were
“found” at the “uttermost ends of the earth” and
the South African Cape represented just such a
place.7 Voyages to these distant parts represented
a kind of time travel for which Europeans “made
the crucial substitution of space for time.”8
But for European settlers living in proximity
to the indigenous peoples of South Africa, the
mythologized temporal distance became a critical
replacement for spatial distancing. European
modernity was produced by the collapse and
distortion of time such that simultaneous presents
were rendered chronologically distant and through
such reductive exercises, a process of “othering”
was begun.
South Africa’s earliest inhabitants are
commonly called the Khoikhoi (KhoiKhoi) and the
San, the former cast as pastoralists and the latter
as hunter-gathers. Although movement among
the early inhabitants and between these modes
of living took place, modernist narratives created
separate myths and derogatory names — the
Hottentots and the Bushmen — for the Khoi
and the San, respectively.9 Distinguishing huntergatherers
from pastoralists served the ideological,
unilinear trajectory of cultural evolution, and
secured the San’s place as first primitives. The
clicks that dominate the languages spoken by
the Khoi and the San were the subject of early
European derogation and marked them as a
lesser race, between human and beast.10 European
illustrations of Cape inhabitants rendered them
variously as savage, wild, exotic, and indolent.11
Khoisan is a blended term that, in its contemporary
use, acknowledges the mutual fates of the Khoi
and San peoples of South Africa, displaced and
greatly decimated by European colonization.
As with “Bushmen,” revived popular and civic
usage has not dispelled debates about proper
nomenclature and land right claims, nor eased, in
Skotnes’ words, the “tangled lines of inheritance
that characterize Khoisan identity today.”12
Artist and San scholar Pippa Skotnes suggests
that, “The final dispossession of the Khoisan
came with their assimilation into Afrikaner life
and their classification along with others of (as
the state perceived it) ‘mixed blood’ as ‘Cape
Coloured.’”13
The dispossession of these indigenous
peoples by European settlers suggests that the
Khoisan problematic is not easily positioned under
the themes of Africa and modernity although
both are critically present. Notwithstanding
their long history of social, political, and cultural
engagement with Bantu peoples, the indigenous
peoples of southern Africa are and have been
repeatedly situated apart from black Africans
for ideological, economic and political gain .14
The indigenous people are treated very much
like the “discovered” hominid fossils used to
support claims that South Africa is the “cradle
of humankind.” They are located within “Africa”
but as relics of “prehistory” are considered not
per se “African” i.e. “black African.” The issue in
question here is specifically the African identity
and modernity of white South Africans, which
was contemporaneous yet deemed superior rather
than parallel to other modernities within the same
location.15 To quote one noted South African
archaeologist, “All people who populate the world
today are descended from people who originated
in Africa […] The San or ‘Bushmen’ of southern
Africa are descended from those individuals who
stayed at home and did not emigrate to seek their
fortunes elsewhere.”16
South African archeological studies long
served two mythic constructs. First, that the
prehistory evident in southern Africa could be
sequenced back to Europe and second, that South
Africa’s prehistory was indelibly linked to the San,
a modern/contemporary ethnically designated
group who were seen as living relics of southern
Africa’s prehistory.17 As archaeologist Nick
Shepherd poignantly argued, colonial archeology
was practiced “without knowing or wanting
to know anything about African people, per
se — least of all the African present — [and] doing
archeology involved looking through a present
landscape […] to find the traces of an imagined
past lying below.”18
Artistically speaking, South African-born
Walter Battiss (1906-1982) is a good example of
this trajectory. Acknowledged today for looking
to South African rock art for source material at
a time when most white artists were looking to
Europe for inspiration, Battiss claimed to not
understand the black man and to find in Bushmen
a vestigial Adam.19
I was trying to find out what came
before the Europeans came, take what I
could from it, change it and build on it.
This was something that was completely
misunderstood. People thought that all
I was doing was imitating the Bushman
or just extending Bushman art or
prehistoric art, but that is not what I
was getting at at all. I think it is really
necessary to make it quite clear now
that what I had recognized was that
in all of us there is still some aspect
of primitivism — the vestigial Adam.
There is still some of the primitive
man in all of us, and we as Europeans
were perfectly justified in taking what
we wanted from our ancestors, and I
looked upon the Bushman as rather a
minor form of this big background,
because the white people had ancestors
who had lived in caves, and [there are]
white people within civilization living
primitive and simple lives today and they
still retain something of that outlook
which the artist admires. I am going into
some detail about this but I think there
is a complete misunderstanding in South
Africa over what a South African artist
should use. I think he should use what is
about him, what he finds there, that he
should use it as a European.20
South African discourses on indigenous
culture that center temporal distance are laden
with modernist conceptions of extinction and
acculturation and often preclude contemporary
exigencies. However, artist Garth Erasmus, whose
performance, soundscapes, and visual art have for
some years focused on South African indigenous
history and culture, revises an interest in
indigenous narratives in South Africa that presents
a dialectical challenge to such assumptions (Figure
2). Erasmus’ work represents an inversion or
refutation of modernity’s constructed relationship
to a “primitive” indigenous past. His concept of
the indigenous is neither temporally nor spatially
distant; rather it suggests that the social temporality
that matters most is the present condition.
In many ways, South Africa’s present is
symbolically conditioned by the success of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a
comprehensive process of social healing relative
to apartheid-era atrocities. Yet South African

(in other words: getting a degree at any institute teaching contemporary art)

this interview first appeared on kopenhagen.dk

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 11:39 PM, Aryan Kaganof wrote:

hi julia
sean asked me to write a review of sing into my mouth for artsouthafrica
would you be able to answer a couple of questions for me?
best wishes
aryan kaganof

julia rosa clark wrote:
> Hello
>
> Of course I would be happy to answer your questions. Would you like to meet? Or email?
>

> Julia

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 10:55 PM, Aryan Kaganof wrote:

hi julia
sorry i have taken so long to respond, mad busy here

first question

you mentioned that you don’t think hierarchically - “I like to think rhizomatically”

do you mean in the deleuzian sense?

and if so, how has mille plateaux impacted on your curating practice?

best wishes
aryan

julia rosa clark wrote:
> Hi
>
> oi sorry been marking Michaelis exams, bit snowed under.
>
> Of course I DO think hierarchically (probably more often than I realise, or care to admit)!

hi julia
this came in at the perfect moment! thanks!!
so
does this mean that deleuze has NOT been influential in your thinking about curating?

julia rosa clark wrote:
> god sorry sent as i was meant to save!
> i am REALLY tired: was with students til 7 tonight. aaaw.
>
> I have not read A Thousand Plateaus (do want to) but have read around both Deleuze and Guattari, and have been influence by the trickle down effect of their ideas on other writings, artworks and projects that have interested me over the past seven years or so.
>
> I am interested in analogous ways of understanding process, and I spose I used the word “rhizome” intuitvly to offer an alternate way of describing an A to B approach. A “net” or other woven image didn’t seem quite right, where as a rhizome offers the idea of paralell threads or many a to b’s from a unified base.
>
> So I would say that there is an important but oblique Deleuzian undertow to the way I work, but I am not responding to his work directly.
>
> Let me know if you have more questions or need images. I haven’t had a moment to process them yet, but we did manage to document it quite thoroughly before taking the show down.
>
> apologise about the lag…
>
> ciao
> J

you mentioned that it was morrissey’s birthday

were/are the smiths important for you?

and you spoke about the nepotistic tendency being one of the subjects of the show - was this a conscious foregrounding of nepotism as a thematic? or was it an unconscious byproduct of the nepotism itself?

Aryan Kaganof occupies a unique position on the South African art landscape. A prolific producer of poetry, novels, films and fine art, he is certainly capable of producing moments of profound intensity and transcendent beauty. Kaganof’s real artistic product is not his work but his self: the notion of Kaganof as the artist, the writer, the performer, the grand entertainer, always bending into the arc of fiction. I see him as raconteur-as-artist, and on occasion, also as ringmaster, for he certainly does like a circus; he has exactly that kind of slightly dark charisma. Kaganof’s utter refusal to rein things in – to exercise intellectual control – might be the key to his art. Much of his work exists as a critique of the offensiveness of the real world and all its vile imbalances.

Peter Machen
Artthrob

http://joburgfringe09.blogspot.com/