Solo retrospective for Kudzanai Chiurai at Zeitz MOCAA

Kudzanai Chiurai’s solo retrospective at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa’s (Zeitz MOCAA) (22 September – 31 March), Regarding the Ease of Others , presents a survey of his expansive oeuvre since 2006, which include posters, sculpture, photography, painting, print and video. Chiurai is one of the most prominent young artists emerging from the African continent, creating work that powerfully interrogates a contemporary African notion of sacrifice, though not enquiring into its necessity. This mini-survey brings together work from Zeitz MOCAA’s own substantial collection with iconic pieces from other major African collections. These include featured drawings and films shown on dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, which formed part of Chiurai’s series titled Conflict Resolution. The series, Chiurai explains, ‘grapples with the issue of conflict in the contemporary moment in Africa. The spaces within which conflict has been taking place vary to the extent of our own understanding of what defines conflict. Our understanding of resolution is therefore also brought to the fore as we question the validity and nature of force used in our attempts at peace’.

Samson Kambalu's solo show inaugurates Centre for the Moving Image at Zeitz MOCAA

Samson Kambalu’s video works are presented in a solo exhibition Wounded Negatives, inaugurating the Centre for the Moving Image at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town (22 September – 29 November). The exhibition explores the ideas that migration and displacement are no longer an exception, but rather a universal norm. Through Kambalu’s Nyau Cinema binaries of indigenous and alien, nationalism and disaffiliation, viewers are able to negotiate their sense of self in time and place; as the artist asks, ‘[h]ow do we situate ourselves if our geographical placement is continuously in flux?’. Using video and new media for his art production, Kambalu illustrates how technology and new media can be utilised by audiences to liberate themselves from identities which are largely defined by a fixed location.

Mikhael Subotzky presents new work and collaborates with The Brother Moves On at Maitland Institute in Cape Town

For the past six years, Mikhael Subotzky has been systematically pulling images apart in an attempt to ‘get inside’ them and understand their representational function. While on residency at the Maitland Institute in Cape Town, Subotzky continues his process of dismantling and reconstituting images, working for the first time with paint and ink on canvas, as well as in collaborative performance with The Brother Moves On. Simultaneous to his residency, Subotzky hosts a ‘work in progress’ exhibition, Yellow Bile (or Work in Progress) (14 September – 31 October) at Maitland Institute. These new formal constituents are wielded around Subotzky’s personal iconography – images that he has found and made that resonate with his experiences, as well as certain texts foundational to his understanding of the world.

The collaborative performance with The Brother Moves On, Four Rehearsals in the Yellow Bile, will take place within the exhibition on the opening night (14 September). It too will ‘pull apart’ the underlying texts and images of Subotzky’s works, while also introducing the narratives and imagery of performance and collaboration synonymous with The Brother Moves On. The performance features Thantaswa May as the female protagonist stuck in the Bile, under the watchful eye of the characters’ current reality. Her story, an ode to Nina Simone’s Four Women and the Marikana widows amongst others, will be sung in counterpoint and conflict with TS Eliot’s Four Quartets (read by Subotzky) and accompanied by a percussive and musical score by Zelizwe Mthembu. The performance takes place in four parts from 17:30 – 20:30.

This ‘work in progress’ exhibition thus introduces a new stream in Subotzky’s work, a cross-medium attempt to illustrate and understand T.S. Elliot’s Four Quartets. Drawing on a long history of artists’ ‘illustration’ of classic texts, Subotzky seeks to get inside a text that has been fundamental to his aesthetic and philosophical understanding of the world. It is a project that he estimates he will be preoccupied with for many years to come.

Various artists on the Prospect.4 Triennial in New Orleans

Four Goodman artists – Alfredo Jaar, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Paulo Nazareth and Hank Willis Thomas – will participate in the Prospect.4 Triennial, titled The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, in New Orleans (18 November – 25 February). Artworks commissioned for Prospect.4 will address themes of identity, displacement and cultural hybridity. Curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, the triennial acts like a citywide exhibition and is staged at 17 venues around New Orleans, with an emphasis on the Mississippi River waterfront.

Solo show for Alfredo Jaar at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Jaar shares recent works not shown before in the United Kingdom in a major solo exhibition, titled The Garden of Eden and Evil, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (14 October – 8 April). Jaar’s installations will transform the park’s underground gallery and its open-air concourse. The exhibition takes its title from a major new commission, presented in the open air and visible through the glass façade of the gallery. On entering what appears to be a beautiful grove of trees, visitors experience elegantly fabricated steel cells referencing ‘black sites’, the secret detention facilities operated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) around the world. Carefully chosen to enhance YSP’s landscape, many of the trees will be planted into the park once the exhibition closes. A work that Jaar has wanted to realise for some years and that YSP is uniquely placed to create, The Garden of Good and Evil is a significant temporary commission for YSP and for the UK. Powerful mixed media installations transform the underground gallery, including The Sound of Silence (2005), A Hundred Times Nguyen (1994) and Shadows (2014).

Shirin Neshat is honoured by the Japan Art Association

Shirin Neshat is one of five recipients – alongside others such as fellow artist El Anatsui and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov – to receive the Japan Art Association’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale award. The Praemium Imperiale, established in 1989, is an international art prize awarded by the imperial family of Japan on behalf of the Japan Art Association in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theatre or film. Conceived as a prize to recognise areas of achievement not covered by the Nobel Prize, the award is given to artists for outstanding contributions to the development, promotion and progress of the arts. Neshat receives this award at a ceremony held in Tokyo (18 October).

Candice Breitz and Samson Kambalu at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin

Breitz and Kambalu are included on a group show, El Usman Faroqhi Here and a Yonder – On Finding Poise in Disorientation, at SAVVY Contemporary (14 September – 28 January). The programme of video art, part of Berlin Art Week, is dedicated to Harun Farocki, a Czech-born German filmmaker, video artist, and writer known for his provocative politicised ‘film-essays’.

Ghada Amer on exhibition at IVAM in Spain

Work by Amer, alongside some of her contemporaries including Mona Hatoum and Rula Halawani, features on the group exhibition, In Rebellion. Female Narratives in the Arab World, at the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern in Spain (14 September – 28 January). The exhibition explores the realities of the Arab world since the 1990s, seen through the different perspectives of female artists. In showcasing artworks by key feminist artists, in juxtaposition with works by their male contemporaries reflecting on the construction of femininity, the exhibition shows the political capacity of women as social agents for transformation.

Alfredo Jaar on museum show in Chile

Jaar has work in the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende’s annual exhibition, Utopía y Crisis. Colección MSSA (8 September – 21 January), in Santiago. Curated by Caroll Yasky, the exhibition presents works from the museum’s collections dating between 1967 and 2010. The exhibition offers challenging points of view regarding various crises in political and ideological models, as well as directing a particular gaze towards the representation of utopias. The works on display operate from multiple and diverse geographies, experiences and creative languages.

David Goldblatt and Haroon Gunn-Salie on A4 Arts Foundation’s inaugural exhibition in Cape Town

The A4 Arts Foundation’s inaugural exhibition, You & I, in Cape Town (13 September – 30 November) includes work by both David Goldblatt and Haroon Gunn-Salie. As a non-profit arts organisation dedicated to promoting and encouraging innovation within the South African arts, the exhibition uses the Buitenkant Street gallery space as a platform in which the idea of collaboration and collectivity can be explored. Curated by Ziphozenkosi Dayile and Kemang Wa Lehulere, You & I examines the multivocality of collectivity by investigating and reconsidering the social conditions, dynamics and histories of such ideas.

Hank Willis Thomas at Art Gallery of Ontario

As a short-listed candidate for the 2017 Aimia | AGO Photography Prize, Hank Willis Thomas’ work will be on exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada (6 September – 14 January). The exhibition, which celebrates the artistic talents of the nominees, looks at how the static image can be used as a vehicle not only for social change, but social cohesion.

Various artists at the College of Wooster Art Museum

Five Goodman artists – Kudzanai Chiurai, Hasan & Husain Essop, Gabrielle Goliath, Haroon Gunn-Salie and Gerald Machona – are included on the College of Wooster Art Museum’s group exhibition After the Thrill is Gone: Fashion, Politics, and Culture in Contemporary South African Art, in Ohio (12 September – 12 November). Curated by Dr. Andrew Hennlich, the exhibition features 14 artists who read the political climate of post-apartheid South Africa through fashion’s embrace of the ‘new’. The artists use fashion to shape narratives of representation, identity, memory, xenophobia, violence in the domestic sphere, and allegories of nationalism. Both individually and collectively, these artists locate fashion as a political language and reinterpret the historical terrain of South Africa after the thrill of apartheid’s end is gone

mounir fatmi at Institut Des Cultures d’Islam in Paris

mounir fatmi participates in a group exhibition, Lettres ouvertes, de la calligraphie au street-art, at the Institut Des Cultures d’Islam in Paris (1 September – 21 January). The exhibition explores the calligraphic dimensions in the contemporary arts and testifies to the universality of research around the art of writing, fueled in particular by traditional Arab and Far Eastern calligraphy. The artists exhibiting all approach letters and signs as field of graphic, aesthetic and poetic experiments.

Broomberg & Chanarin’s work on London underground

Art on the Underground, London’s largest public contemporary arts programme, has commissioned a new video work – titled The Bureaucracy of Angels – produced by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The 12-minute video will be projected within King’s Cross St. Pancras Underground (close to the Eurostar exit). Launched in 2000 to promote greater understanding of the ‘Tube’ as a cultural and social space, Art on the Underground will display the duo’s commissioned work throughout the month of September.

Shirin Neshat at Yale Art Gallery

Shirin Neshat’s 1999 work Untitled, from the series Rapture is currently on Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope, a major group exhibition at the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut (1 September – 31 December). In presenting an innovative approach to the theme of exile, the exhibition showcases artworks by artists who left their country of birth, or their adopted home, for a variety of reasons – including discrimination, war, and genocide – from the 19th century to the present day. Curated by Frauke V. Josenhans, the exhibition explores exile as not only a mental or physical state but also a catalyst for creativity.

Broomberg & Chanarin show new work on group show in Tuscany

Newly commissioned work by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin is included on the group exhibition, Forever Never Comes, at the Museo Archeologico e d’Arte della Maremma in Grosseto, Italy (26 August – 26 January). In exhibiting works by local and international artists – both established and emerging – the exhibition explores the symbolism and dialogue between the past and its heritage, as well as space, time and art. Conceptualised as part of a larger ongoing museum project, the curators intend for the exhibition to promote the multifaceted relationships and connections between history and contemporary art practice.

Tabita Rezaire at the Bury Art Museum in UK

Rezaire is one of a small group of artists on the Bury Art Museum’s summer exhibition, Foreigners, in Bury, United Kingdom (26 August – 18 November). The exhibition, curated by Tony Trehy, aims to illustrate how society is open and malleable to cultural exchange and the influence of globalisation. The exhibition comes at an important moment and time when borders are closing and cultural foreigners, divergent ideas and alternative modes of thinking are being treated as unwelcome in certain parts of the world.

Tabita Rezaire tackles digital commodification in Switzerland

Rezaire participates in an international group exhibition, Escaping the Digital Unease!, at the Kunsthaus Langenthal in Switzerland (31 August – 12 November). Since the beginning of the web 25 years ago, artists have built their own spaces and channels online. They have created artworks reacting to the commodification and restrictions of the digital medium in a critical way. The exhibition presents works from over 30 artists and collectives tackling these topics, raising awareness of the unease, and showing its causes or possibilities of an escape from it.

Broomberg & Chanarin at the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin exhibit work on a group exhibition, The Face: A Search for Clues, at the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden, Germany (19 August – 25 February). Looking at artworks that focus on the face and facial expressions in human communication, the exhibition deals with the assumptions, methods and reasons for the visual representation of individual faces.

Broomberg & Chanarin on Yokohama Triennale

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin participate, alongside a small group of selected artists who will exhibit multiple works, in the Yokohama Triennale 2017 (4 August – 5 November). Under the title Islands, Constellations & Galapagos, the 2017 edition of the triennale embarks on a multi-faceted examination of the themes of connectivity and isolation.

mounir fatmi takes 'Pavilion of Exile' to Morocco

fatmi participates in a solo exhibition, The Pavilion of Exile , at Galerie Delacroix in Tangier, Morocco (26 July – 15 October). The Pavilion of Exile is a traveling project that the artist launched in 2016, which inverts the established structures of temporary exhibitions, questioning ideas of nationhood, exile and various forms of displacement. Through the exhibition, fatmi examines both the global and specific nature of the links between the various forms of displacement, whether it be the situation of the migrant worker, the expatriate, the refugee or the exile of war, natural disasters, economic problems, political or racial persecution.

Samson Kambalu and Tracey Rose in Sydney

Kambalu and Rose are included in The Public Body .02 (28 July – 2 October) at Art Space in Sydney, Australia. It is the second in a three-part series of exhibitions over three years exploring various facets of the notion of the public body. This edition highlights a range of practices embedded in feminist, queer and anti-racist subjectivities, and concerned with revisioning certain biased histories of representation. It brings together the work of over 40 artists and collectives from the 1970s to the present, integrating the archival and the contemporary to draw connections between works across decades.

Broomberg & Chanarin at the Yale University Art Gallery

Photographs by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin form part of a large-scale group exhibition Before the Event / After the Fact: Contemporary Perspectives on War, at the Yale University Art Gallery (21 July – 31 December). Curated by Judy Ditner, the exhibition offers a wide-ranging examination of the representation of war in contemporary photographic and video art practice.

Yinka Shonibare MBE and Candice Breitz on new triennial in Cleveland

Shonibare and Breitz have been invited to participate in the inaugural FRONT International Cleveland Triennial exhibition (14 July – 30 September 2018) planned by cultural impresario Fred Bidwell, a collector, Cleveland Museum of Art trustee and co-founder of the Transformer Station in Ohio City. Organisers hope the event will draw as many as 300,000 viewers and establish Cleveland as a cultural destination along the likes of Kassel, Germany, where documenta is held.

Shonibare will create an installation in the Cleveland Public Library’s Brett Hall that will include 6,000 books covered in the artist’s signature batik cloth and embossed with the names of immigrants who have shaped American art and culture. Breitz will exhibit Love Story (2016), a seven-channel installation that interrogates the mechanics of identification and the conditions under which empathy is produced. The work evokes the global scale of the so-called ‘refugee crisis,’ evolving out of lengthy interviews conducted with the six participants in the countries where they are seeking or have been granted asylum.

Kiluanji Kia Henda holds first US solo show

A City Called Mirage (27 June – 6 October) is the first solo exhibition in the United States by current International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) resident Kiluanji Kia Henda. The artist looks at real cities and their 3D models in an immersive four-channel video installation, as well as three interconnected series of photographs. In the show, curated by Kari Conte, Henda considers the birth, life and death of modern cities.

Grada Kilomba at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto

Kilomba performs Illusions for first time in her home country and exhibits The Desire Project in Live Uncertainty: An Exhibition After the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (1 July – 1 October) at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal. The Desire Project (2015-2016) is a video installation divided into three parts: While I Speak, While I Write and While I Walk, videos whose only visual element is the written word and which indicates the emergence of a speaker who has been historically silenced by colonial narratives. Illusions (2016) employs video projections and the African tradition of storytelling. The reading introduces the myths of Narcissus and Echo as metaphors for a colonial past and politics of representation that only reflect themselves. The Serralves exhibition is conceived in relation to the museum’s unique architecture and landscape. It extends the Biennale’s reflection on the current conditions of life and the strategies offered by contemporary art to harbour or inhabit uncertainty.

mounir fatmi at Bellevue Arts Museum in US

fatmi participates in a group exhibition, Cut Up/Cut Out (30 June – 22 October), at the Bellevue Arts Museum in the Pacific Northwest state of Washington, USA. Cut Up/Cut Out is an exhibition by international artists who explore the captivating methods of decorative piercing and cutting, using a wide range of media from paper and plastic to metal and rubber.

Hank Willis Thomas in two-person show at Baltimore Museum of Art

Thomas’ And I Can’t Run is on exhibition, alongside Kara Walker’s Salvation, at the Baltimore Museum of Art (28 June – 18 March). Through contrasts of light and dark, white and black, and obscurity and revelation, the work engages in a powerful metaphorical conversation about acts of horrific violence and racial inequality in the United States

Yinka Shonibare on group show exploring royalty at the Kensington Palace

Shonibare’s Mrs Pinckney and the Emancipated Birds of South Carolina features on Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte and the Shaping of the Modern World at Kensington Palace (22 June – 12 November). The work was commissioned especially for the exhibition, which is presented by Historic Royal Palaces and the Yale Center for British Art. It explores the lives of three German princesses whose marriage into the British royal family and wide-ranging interests placed them at the very heart of the Enlightenment underway in 18th-century Britain.

Kiluanji Kia Henda wins 2017 Frieze Artist Award

Kia Henda is the first African artist to receive the prestigious 2017 Frieze Artist Award, for which he will realise a new installation at Frieze London (4 – 8 October) as part of Frieze Projects, the fair’s celebrated non-profit programme curated by Raphael Gygax. Frieze Projects and the Frieze Artist Award are supported by the LUMA Foundation. Following an open call, artist applications were received from more than 82 countries. The Luanda-based artist – who works across photography, video and performance – won on the basis of his proposal for a two-part installation, Under the Silent Eye of Lenin. Taking the cult of Marxism-Leninism after independence in Angola as its starting point, the piece will draw parallels between witchcraft practices during Angola’s civil war and science fiction narratives used by Cold War superpowers. Kia Henda’s performative installation, which will change throughout the duration of the fair, looks at how fictional fantasy and its power of manipulation become a vital weapon in situations of extreme violence.

Yinka Shonibare on summer show in Switzerland

Shonibare’s Un Ballo in Maschera and The Crowning feature on the summer group exhibition, Un Bal Masque / A Masked Ball, at Le Chateau de Nyon (9 June – 26 November). The exhibition reimagines objects, artefacts and ceremonial occasions of 18th-century Europe by including works that offer a contemporary colouring to the garments, ornate subject matter and events of the period.

Geers, Broomberg & Chanarin on EMST show at documenta 14

Works by Kendell Geers, and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin feature on a group exhibition, ANTIDORON: Works from the EMST Collection at documenta 14, in Kassel, Germany (10 June – 17 September). Presented at the Fridericianum, the birthplace of documenta, the exhibition marks the first time that part of the collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens is presented outside Greece. The exhibition explores issues of border crossings, diasporas, cultural exchange, as well as personal and collective memories.

Tracey Rose shows new video work at documenta 14 in Kassel

Following her installation at documenta in Athens, the Durban-based artist is showing a new multi-part video work in Kassel, titled WhoreMoans: An Uncivil Memoir of a Rough Ride. On show until 17 September at Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost), the work comprises three parts: Cleopatra was a Black Bitch; MEGLADONN : MUDD (2017); and Lassooing with the Postcolonial Gauchos. The work was made with support from the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires.

Large-scale survey show for Shirin Neshat at Kunsthalle Tübingen

The Kunsthalle Tübingen is devoting a major retrospective to Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat (1 July – 29 October). On exhibition are important artworks from all creative phases of the artist’s extensive oeuvre – from the famous superimposed text-based works of the 1990s, the early video installations exploring themes of life in exile and diaspora, to the new filmic productions of 2016 and 2017, including some being shown in Europe for the first time. The exhibition, funded by the German Federal Cultural Institution, will be accompanied by a catalogue as well as a wide range of events organised in cooperation with numerous partners.

Yinka Shonibare MBE on the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017

Shonibare’s The British Library installation forms part of the Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th La Biennale di Venezia. Presented by the International Curators Forum (ICF) and University of the Arts London (UAL), the exhibition takes place at the Palazzo Pisani S. Marina (13 May – 26 November). The Diaspora Pavilion is conceived as a challenge to the prevalence of national pavilions within the structure of an international biennial. By bringing together a group of 19 UK-based, ethnically diverse artists, the pavilion speaks eloquently of the infinite complexities of the very idea of nationality, whilst highlighting the continued relevance that diaspora as a lived reality holds today.

Candice Breitz represents South Africa at 57th Venice Biennale

Candice Breitz has been selected to represent South Africa at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Candice Breitz and Mohau Modisakeng will present a major exhibition in the South African pavilion during the world’s most prestigious contemporary art event, which runs from 13 May to 26 November 2017 in Venice, Italy.

The exhibition staged in the South African pavilion will invite viewers to explore the role of artists in visualising and articulating notions of selfhood within the context of global capitalism. It will ask: What is it to be visible in everyday life, yet invisible and disregarded at the level of cultural, political or economic representation? Placing new works by Breitz and Modisakeng in dialogue, the exhibition will reflect on experiences of exclusion, displacement, transience, migration and xenophobia, and explore the complex socio-political forces that shape the performance of subjectivity under such conditions.

“We are truly thrilled that Breitz and Modisakeng will be representing South Africa. Breitz’s photographs and multi-channel video installations offer nuanced studies of the structure of identity under global capitalism,” says Lucy MacGarry, curator of the pavilion with Musha Neluheni.  

Thabiso Sekgala at the Walther Collection

Sekgala features on the Walther Collection’s group exhibition, Recent Histories – New African Photography (7 May – 29 October). Forming part of the collection’s ongoing projects showcasing contemporary photography and video art from Africa, the show focuses on how African photographers are engaging with revolutionary and current photographic practices to respond to ideas and understandings of African diaspora.

William Kentridge at Cincinnati Art Museum

On loan from the LUMA Foundation, Kentridge’s More Sweetly Play the Dance will make its American premiere at the Cincinnati Art Museum (26 April – 5 November). The artist’s film installation involves seven screen projections, creating an immersive panorama, and showcases a procession of travelers crossing over a charcoal-drawn animated landscape.