For Africa Day we profile a work by David Koloane titled Baggage (2001).
David Koloane’s Baggage is one of the works featured in the ‘Abstraction’ section of Handle With Care, an exhibition of selected works from the SOUTH32 Collection on loan to us for a period of 10 years.
The work Baggage can be read as, in one hand, a comment and an observation on the polarizing debates centred around the packaging of art from the continent of Africa in Western art institutions and, in another hand, the rejection Koloane faced when, in the late 1970’s, he began working in collage and exploring abstract forms. Dated 1991 Baggage corresponds with global exhibitions that were starting to proliferate in the West beginning with the infamous ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ held at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 1989 as well as the aftermath of the Thupelo Workshops that he co-founded – a space for experimentation in which many black artists worked in abstract forms for the first time.
The dark stained hessian canvas surface of the work is tied up in string, and incorporates found objects including packages and envelopes, magazine pages, exhibition invitation cards from local galleries including the Thupelo Gallery at Fuba and Johannesburg’s Newtown Galleries – institutions that helped to profile local artists leading to the establishment of the Bag Factory artist studios in the early 1990’s. By including magazine clippings that highlight the uneasy problematics of highlighting black artists within events framed under “Black History Month” as well as those that treat Africa as if it were one country (such as an article titled “The Land and Peoples of Africa”) Koloane ingeniously refutes the Western gaze and language often used to study and write about works created by artists from Africa.
What is Africa to you?
For Africa Day, Javett-UP entrance fee is free, and everybody is welcome!
25 May 2021