TRANSMIGRATIONS EXHIBITIONS

1999

• Johannesburg Civic Gallery, South Africa: March/April 1999

• ArtShare, Los Angeles (ASLA), USA: June/July 1999

• University of Baja, California, Tijuana, Mexico: August/October 1999 under the auspices of the Tijuana Cultural Centre.

2000

• The Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, Los Angeles, USA: March/April 2000

2002

• Pretoria Art Museum, South Africa: April 7 - July 21, 2002

• Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein, South Africa: Sept 17 - Nov 3, 2002

• Ann Bryant Art Gallery, East London, South Africa: Nov 15 - Jan, 2003

SPONSORS

Dasart wishes to thank all those whose time and effort have made this exhibition possible, including (but not limited to): Saflink : donation of a container | Samancor Foundation : container refurbishment | Intermodal : transport and forwarding | Portnet : waiving port charges | P&O Nedlloyd : shipping to USA | PriceForbes : insurance during sea voyage | Business and Arts, South Africa (BASA) : Catalogue printing.

ARTISTS

Wim Botha | Bob Cnoops | Hugo Crosthwaite (Mexico) | James de Villiers | Sasha Fabris | Gordon Froud | Rookeya Gardee | David Hlynsky (Canada) | Ashley Johnson | Nkosinathi Khanyile | Ania Krajewski | Michael Matthews | Nhlanhla Mbatha | Rankadi Mosako | Margi Scharff (USA) | Diane Victor

PRESS

Exhibition produces powerful pieces that aim to comment, not make money, writes Daniel Thöle

TRANSMIGRATIONS:  Pretoria Art Museum

IT CANNOT be easy to produce art with a social conscience that people will still want to look at. Dasart's Transmigrations exhibition, currently running at the Pretoria Art Museum, achieves this with drawings, video installations, sculptures, collages and paintings as diverse as they are fascinating. The Dasart group of artists started in 1992, and its Transmigrations exhibition, put together in 1996, added and lost artists while touring the US and Mexico in the intervening period. Dasart founder Ashley Johnson's the Death of Lucas, a walkin situational painting made up of four panels, is typical of the message behind the group: social commentary is more important than commercial gain.

Exploring an incident of mob justice Johnson felt powerless to prevent, the Death of Lucas impresses not only with its sheer scale, but its ability to capture the confused kineticism of a vengeful mob. James de Villiers offers a more peaceful but no less stirring work: his fascination with clouds has produced a work called The Architecture of Air. With backgrounds of sheer, simmering black, the clouds their forms generated randomly by computer and painted in oil stand out like ruffles on a Dutch master's rendering of a noblewoman. A strange soundtrack envelops the four panels, intended to give them a primal feel. The Architecture of Air, updated post September 11, now includes a pentagonal shape to represent the US military headquarters. De Villiers says the addition was made because the attacks came from the air. His strange blend of old styles and new technology, the stark pentagon contrasting with the peace of clouds, is unbelievably powerful.

Diane Victor's harrowing triptych of charcoal drawings, Vastrap (long-arm foxtrot), is also immensely powerful. Her three giant portraits a black man with his eyes closed, a skull, and a sneering older man dominate the exhibition. In the middle panel, the visage of the gaping skull is overlaid with the bright yellow and red outlines of men dancing naked with each other part of Victor's exploration of the uncomfortable marriage between victims and perpetrators brought about by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She also adds a subtle, even more disturbing twist to this depiction of dance, which she says came to represent "ritualised nationalism". On a triangular block under the middle panel are three meat cleavers, presenting a seemingly unrelated challenge to the viewer. Only those who crouch down for a closer look will notice the engraved forms of two dancing skeletons on the outer cleavers, a delicate pair of ballet shoes adorning the middle one. Those who cannot deal with the stronger stuff will appreciate Rookeya Gardee's seed, sequin, spice, bead and eggshell carpets, which make their point while looking beautiful. The exhibition is at the Pretoria Art Museum until July 21, then moves to the Oliwenhuis Art Museum in Bloemfontein, and East London's Ann Bryant Gallery.

Apr 09 2002 12:00:00:000AM  Business Day 1st Edition

Art pick of the week: Transmigrations. Pretoria art museum,  April 6 to July 21

Having returned from exhibitions in Los Angeles and Tijuana to tour the country of its origins, this cross-cultural exhibition by 13 South African artists is concerned with the social and environmental aspects of creative production. Initiated by artists' collective Dasart, the show revolves around storytelling to communicate ideas of identity, which are at once individual and communicable across cultural differences. The works on exhibition are mostly object-based – sculptural, installation-based or two-dimensional – and focus on art and craft practices, mythologies, ritual, history (both political and geo-environmental) and broader social concerns.

As the exhibition travels, it "picks up" invited artists from other regions and so grows its network of artistic exchange. Artists include Sasha Fabris, whose works double as artistic psychotherapy; Rookeya Gardee, who uses seeds and spices to create new versions of Muslim prayer mats; Gordon Froud, who deals with the politics of the domestic; Nkosinathi Khanyile, who works with techniques of rural Zulu women; and Nhlanhla Mbatha, whose three-dimensional soil paintings act as metaphors for plate tectonics and reference the histories of ancient Gondwanaland. Canadian artist David Hlynski and United States artist Margi Scharff join the South African leg of the show, which opens on April 6 at noon. After showing in Pretoria the exhibition will travel to Bloemfontein, East London and KwaZulu-Natal. Website: www.geocities.com/dasart. –Kathryn Smith

Weekly Mail & Guardian

UnDo.Net - Contemporary Arts and Culture.  Arte a Cultura Contemporanea. 8/4/2002

At the Pretoria Art Museum DASART will be exhibiting Transmigrations from 8 April. This cross-cultural exhibition combines the art and ideas of thirteen contemporary South African artists with a Canadian and an American artist. Transmigrations has returned from exhibitions in Los Angeles and Tijuana, where it was nominated for the Premios Cultura 1999 award. After Pretoria the exhibition will travel to the Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein (Sept - Nov 2002), the Ann Bryant Art Gallery, East London (Nov - Jan 2003), the Durban Art Gallery and the Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg (dates to be confirmed).

Dasart is an artist's collective concerned with reinvigorating the social dimension of art to counter the degradation of the environment and nurture a universal sense of identity. The artists use their art to communicate aspects of South African life that range from religious to political and sexual expressions. Artists from other countries and regions are invited to participate, thus gaining a personal stake and enriching the joint communiqué. Each exhibition therefore has different work.

The concept relates to story-telling in the belief that the many levels within myth and enchantment are vital to our well-being. Western ways of seeing accept the culturally familiar and reject as superstitious that which is culturally 'divergent'. In South Africa, it is necessary to understand and respect one another before we can project a mutual state of being. The works on show all express the authority of the object since we experience things through the medium of the body. Objects are delimited energies that stand still long enough for us to take an emotional impression off them. The exhibition offers a unique perspective on the diversity of South African art experience, ranging from psychotherapy to intermingling of cultures, art derived from rural craft, myth and enchantment, the legacy of Colonialism and Apartheid.

Sasha Fabris' Games Ubiquitous are wood carvings of corn cob penises and rituals of grinding. She uses the woodcarving technique therapeutically to cope with sexual experiences that are extrapolated to gender power struggles. The Musallah by Rookeya Gardee consists of seven prayer mats constructed out of seeds, spices, rice and other items originating from a domestic environment. A cross-cultural mix of Muslims collaborated with her and the finished piece hints at their diverse origins. Reliquary for an Eggbeater is a quirky work by Gordon Froud which sees the eggbeater as a domestic symbol, both cage and liberator. A large wire eggbeater is suspended within a polycarbonate vitrine. Plastic Barbiedoll parts are caught within the splines, reminiscent of sexual bondage. Eight smaller eggbeaters fashioned out of beercans flutter around the perimeters while multi-coloured plastic plates filled with spices and legumes, displayed like hawkers' wares on South African pavements, possess the floor. Other plates attached to the sides of the vitrine have universal symbols cut into them that provide tantalising glimpses of the contents within.

The shifting power and gender relations in South Africa provoke Nkosinathi Khanyile, who is concerned with the social predicament of rural Zulu women. His installation, entitled Isintu, is a collaboration between the artist and craftswomen. The woven grass pillars he makes, daubed with mud and dung, are not intended as phallic symbols but are derived from traditional African dolls and reaffirm feminine spiritual power. He seeks to re-establish the myth of womanhood as the epitome of the Earth Mother by the use of certain shapes and the emphasis on feminine crafts like weaving and beadwork.

Bob Cnoops is a photographer who composes with ritual imagery derived from African tribal customs. He uses the cyanotype photographic process and exposes onto handmade paper. His interest in this theme stems from a course he attended on African Divination techniques. Such shamanic intentions also inform Ania Krajewski's kites in the The Mediators. The kites are seen as mythological intermediaries between the Gods and Earth. Their function is to take imprints of the Earth and thus they are visceral with allusions to animal hides; tortured and burned in reference to the abuse of world resources.

The 3-D soil paintings of Nhlanhla Mbatha are about cracks and the documentation thereof, particularly related to plate tectonics and ancient Gondwanaland. James De Villiers' Architecture of Air, combines traditional oil paintings of clouds with computer generated air sounds. Wim Botha's sculptures are carved out of prison release papers and other documents that regulate human movement. A suspended, androgynous figure, hovering between growth and decay, confronts a Sable head mounted like a trophy, thus contrasting ideas of freedom and classification and evoking the spectre of death.

Several artists are concerned with the legacy of Apartheid and Colonialism. Diane Victor's charcoal drawings deal with the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Rankadi Mosako paints industrial landscapes that contrast first and third world experience of technology. His paintings suggest a barbed-wire barrier to social advancement. Ashley Johnson's piece, The Bullet, symbolises the ongoing intercourse between Western Civilisation and Africa. The kinetic aspect of a huge bullet striking an earthy, primitive torso, which opens to allow a tree with a head to fall forward, is a jarring image of modern experience.

Michael Matthews' videos deal with violence in Kwazulu-Natal as in Jazzcows (Part III:Weapon) which uses rough drawings of the emergency symbols in a telephone directory alongside an insidious soundtrack. Another video, Women thru Women thru Men, explores media rituals of how women are represented in magazines. His three paintings called Cultural Symbols: Afterimage I, II, and III, are of a softer, more sensual nature and deal with the transposition of ethnic cultural symbols into fine art. David Hlynsky is a Canadian artist who will be showing digital prints. The images were taken on a recent visit to South Africa and represent David's response to the experience. Margi Scharff is an American artist who travels to and lives in Third World countries. She documents her experiences in book form and makes art out of any debris she finds. At present she is in Asia and her collages are from this journey.

Saturday Star. April 6 2002. LightStrider Albertus van Dijk.

Take some time to reflect

We entered the Third Quarter Moon Phase on April 4 at 7:28pm. This carries us directly into the Dark Moon of April12, a time of gathering and withdrawing into personal, private places. It's an excellent time for considering the way your past connects and shapes your present life.

This waning Moon energy does not mean we must become social hermits. We must just make time for reflection, a little personal space to take an overview forwards and backwards to see what connections of cause and effect we can observe. In every culture throughout history this Moon Phase has been prosperous for meditation and achieving spiritual readiness and equilibrium. It's associated with creativity and exploration, whether that expresses itself as art, personal exploration or assisted therapy. It's about the exploration of the recurring patterns and symbols in our lives. "Game Crossing Time" by Canadian artist David Hlynsky from an exhibition called "Transmigrations" symbolises the energy of this time to perfection. This dazzling sense of continuity from an ancient shamanic rock painting to a modern road sign reflects the Saturn-Pluto opposition I've been writing about so often because it is so crucial in the world around us right now. It's a heavy energy but its total meaning is about transformation. Our challenge is to accomplish that evolutionary change within ourselves by understanding its primal roots, but also recognising its modern energy."Transmigrations" is the name of this exhibition by Dasart whose aim they describe thus: "We are concerned with reinvigorating the social dimension of art to counter the degradation of the environment and nurture a universal sense of identity."

That describes their exhibition beautifully but it is also a shrewd summary of what the Saturn-Pluto energy is asking us to do. I keep reminding readers that Saturn is about order and Pluto is about changing that order. That can happen by evolution, without violence and with a creative, positive energy; or by revolution, which can be hostile and destructive. It must happen within us, as we reconsider the past, our faith and our moral values, but it must be expressed in action.

Change must happen with us as we consider the past.

We must be alert to our environment and this exhibition offers visions and images that can provide tools and examples for those seeking the direction and nature of change. One of the artist, Nhlanhla Mbatha, has done a fascinating series of sand sculptures that use the cracks in the dried soil of Africa as the design concept. He says: "I am interested in cracks.  To me they evoke a sense of the human condition and experience. In this case, the ritualistic use of the African soil speaks about issues of social transformation, reconstruction and liberation in the South African context" I can't imagine a better explanation of the Saturn-Pluto energy. Ania Karjewski has created a series of amazing kites called " The Mediators" about which she says: "The kites are seen as mythological intermediaries between the gods and Earth." These works are full of powerful spiritual stimuli and with the astro-energy brimming with the desire to seek and explore. This exhibition is a must. 

ARTISTS' STATEMENT

Synopsis by Ashley Johnson

The euphoria at the birth of the Rainbow Nation has long since subsided and the reality of the lack of communication between South Africans has reasserted itself. Diverse cultures and ideas sorely need a point of convergence where an exchange can take place. DASART is an artist's collective which strives to express social meaning through a variety of artistic forms. We believe that contemporary art has to engage the broader social organism through presenting ideas and forms that stimulate. We are against an exclusive art for art's sake approach.

The theme of this proposed exhibition is transmigration. This term has an interpretative range that extends from physical immigration to reincarnation. We wish to project the concept of ideas being seeded and cross-pollinated in an exchange between artists and their audience.

To accomplish this, DASART invited a diverse group of 14 artists to collaborate within the broad rubric of rituals and items. The works could take any form, from sculpture through installation to digital. Thematically the works deal with rituals which include domestic, gender, Christian, pagan, historical and any other chosen. Artists have both collaborated with others and worked singly. All ideas are documented and presented along with images of artists' work.

Ritual is a universal activity that indicates a human method of interpreting and affecting so-called reality. There is an underlying similarity of procedure that is timeless and can be observed in both pagan customs and orthodox religion. For instance, the idea of sacrifice permeates both, as does the idea of transmutation, whether this is shamanic entry of the spirit world or Eucharist conversion of bread and wine into body and blood.

James Frazer, in his book, THE GOLDEN BOUGH, notes two differing attitudes1 linked with ritual. Firstly, there is the king who is inspired by divinity in order to become the oracle and bodily form of that divinity. In Maya custom, this obliged the king and queen to let their own blood regularly so as to propitiate the favour of the gods. Secondly, there is what he terms sympathetic magic, wherein the ways of the natural world can be influenced by imitating their effects. Thus elaborate rituals evolve to coax nature to rain. Frazer (circa 1890) notes the Zulu custom2 of killing a "heaven-bird" and throwing it into a pool. Then heaven would bring forth tears of remorse.

Rituals permeate both modern and ancient cultures and have a living function within the human psyche. On a more mundane level, the hierarchical structure of the family and by extension, government, still express the ritual principle of vested authority. Many customs persist to help sweep the spirits of the dead into a position where they will not trouble the living. Christian burial rites like sprinkling sand into the grave also symbolize the release between life and death. Our Western way of seeing causes us to accept what is culturally familiar and reject as superstitious that which is culturally other. In the South African context, we need to learn about one another and project our state of being. Ultimately, one would hope that a culture of learning about one another could help us over the divide.

At present, Western cultural perceptions are paramount but gradually Western science is demonstrating the power of subjectivity upon observable reality. The 1997 convention on quantum physics in Copenhagen3, concluded that at a sub-atomic level, the movement of electrons was affected by the observer's subjectivity. This implies that the actions and reactions of the natural world may be affected at a very deep level by human subjectivity. Thus, what we deride as superstitious may have a basis in experience. It is time that Western cultural perception opened itself to the multiplicity of experience that other cultures present.

It is interesting to read books about folklore written at the beginning of the 20th century, not so much for the enumerated rituals of so-called 'rude' peoples but for what these books imply about our Western culture. We are a century further down the line and it is bizarre that we are now actually closer to the beginning. Science and technology were supposed to prove the hypothesis that the world could be comprehended as a mechanistic phenomenon. Instead, the most recent scientific findings suggest that humanity needs to develop a new paradigm - a new perception of reality.

Philosophical explorations by such notables as Sartre and Wittgenstein have shaped perceptions of how the human mind works. Sartre emphasizes the consciousness of imaging rather than the immanence of the image4. Wittgenstein draws distinctions between imagining and seeing, denying that imagining calls forth mental pictures in the mind5. Recent neurological experiments6 contradict their ideas. Imaging does indeed take place and a remarkable similarity exists between stimulus and brain image as registered by neural activity. New philosophies are needed for the 21st century, not least to bind humans within the matrix of nature and to refute the concept that we are in any sense alienated. We need to get the whole picture.

Art is very close to ritual in that it is a re-enactment of reality. On a neurological level the human pattern of registering information and resurrecting it later also has much in common with art. An exhibition of rituals and items thus promises to explore a variety of issues both visually and intellectually. As we prepare for the next century, the environment depends on us to develop a new manner of coexistence. To this end , we have recourse to ideas that have gone before, derided perhaps as 'primitive' or 'unscientific'.

DASART has been concerned with developing a new perception of reality since its inception in 1992. We see this issue as more important than the posturing of the latest art-world trend. However, we are not opposed to technology or art-world manifestations but rather use any means convenient to express a message. We anticipate that this exhibition, TRANSMIGRATION: RITUALS AND ITEMS, will be an exciting and valuable experience.

End Notes
1. FRAZER,J.G. The Golden Bough, Macmillan,1890, Reprint, 1981, p8-9
2. FRAZER,J.G. The Golden Bough, Macmillan,1890, Reprint, 1981, p19
3. STAPP, H. Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, Springer Verlag, 1993
4. WHITE, A.R. The Language of Imagination, Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1990, p54
5. WHITE, A.R. The Language of Imagination, Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1990, p70
6. DAMASIO,A.R. Descartes' Error, Picador, 1995, p103-4