Stevenson’s premises within the leafy suburb of Parktown North make for a welcome respite from the enterprise of the town: the gallery is located in a superb previous Johannesburg residence, all pressed ceilings and wraparound verandas. On my most up-to-date go to, the constructing’s sedate white exterior was playfully offset by a handful of vibrant struts and arches — not architectural gildings, however a continuation of the strains capturing throughout the rooms and thru the partitions of the gallery.
These are a part of an set up by Mauritian artist Salim Currimjee, complementing the work in his Tula sequence. The title comes from the Sanskrit phrase for “stability” and, whereas Currimjee makes use of this to specific “concord between his architectural and creative practices”, the works exhibited even have the pleasing impact of making a sort of disturbance or imbalance.
They obtain this partly by adapting Mughal portray methods to summary compositions. The Mughal custom, which employs a number of strains of sight or views in representing a scene or panorama — and even in portraiture — is usually contrasted with the usual Western artwork historic evaluation of the “vanishing level”.
Italian Renaissance painters experimented with geometrically based mostly strategies of representing depth and three-dimensionality on a flat canvas. By making each express and implicit strains of their pictures converge at a given level, giving the impression of a single observational place wanting “into” the world of the portray, these artists established what would turn into a conference amongst European painters till the late nineteenth century (albeit with numerous rebels alongside the way in which, just like the Mannerists, who embraced distortion, exaggeration and asymmetry). It was solely with Modernism within the early twentieth century — borrowing from, you guessed it, non-Western aesthetic traditions — that the vanishing level started to fade once more.
Currimjee’s work appears to suit into this Modernist paradigm: Picasso and Braque, Matisse and Kandinsky, Miro and Mondrian. But to view it with these “forebears” in thoughts is to stay caught inside a Eurocentric framework. Currimjee’s work and installations encourage us, as a substitute, to interrupt the body. They achieve this fairly actually with lengths of Plexiglas which might be imposed on or integrated into the painted surfaces, extending in every case past the neat borders of rectangle and sq., “disrupting the phantasm of a flat visible plain”.
Showing together with Tula is Mahube Diseko’s Thank You For Bearing Witness, which is the most recent in Stevenson’s Stage programme of exhibitions making a platform for younger or unrepresented artists. Diseko, too, goals to disrupt — in her case, by “rigorously and emphatically” partaking with a topic which will appear infra dig for a lot of up to date artists: love.
The medium that Diseko has chosen is her message. She works with girls’s underwear, a selection paying homage to Kresiah Mukwazhi’s use of bra straps in her 2024 exhibition Physique Rely. Whereas Mukwazhi’s intention is a protest towards gender-based violence, Diseko seeks to convey into public discourse the non-public, intimate and often-unspoken ideas and emotions of ladies uncovered to the dangers and rewards of affection and intercourse. Her medium additionally carries particular messages, embroidered into the underwear as a sequence of confessions, pleas and assertions.
A few of these aren’t essentially gendered statements and might be recommendation for anybody — whether or not within the vulnerability of sexual encounters or in human interplay extra typically: “All the time have one thing tender to present”; “Attempt softer, not more durable”; “Sincerity is frightening”. But the materiality of the underwear, in numerous sizes and styles, insists on a sex-positive feminism that’s not “naive or fanciful” however reasonably assertive, as within the declaration: “My physique is not any dwelling for disgrace”.
A number of the works are displayed so messages might be learn on the entrance and the rear, such because the pairing of want with doubt in “I wish to be seen” / “However I’m scared”. Whereas this is without doubt one of the items that Diseko has positioned in easy picket frames — maybe paradoxically invoking that conceptual artwork conference by which the acquainted, on a regular basis object is reworked into an paintings — she (like Currimjee) resists and even mocks “the body”, with a few of her underwear sculptures mounted cosily on a luxurious white fur-lined wall.
• ‘Tula’ and ‘Thank You For Bearing Witness’ are at Stevenson Johannesburg (46 seventh Avenue, Parktown North) till Could 9.
