Press Release
November 29, 2011

We formally invite you to:
CAS Gallery Exhibition
Opening Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 6:30PM
CAS Gallery
Harry Oppenheimer Institute
Engineering Mall
UCT Upper Campus
For more information contact: [email][email protected]
http://www.facebook.com/events/269289633118725/

Khanyisile Mbongwa &
Zanele Muholi
Present:
‘NGAPHAKATHI ESIPHAKATHINI’

Zanele Muholi and Khanyisile Mbongwa put together a collaborative show around the idea of interstices, of spaces in between/in-between spaces – literal, metonymic, metaphorical. “Ngaphakathi esiphakathini” is directly translated as “inside the in-between”, writes Khanyisile. The artists respond to the economies of violence of the everyday, a reality of bodies marked and inscribed in particular ways.

Zanele writes: “At one level, my project deals with my own menstrual blood, with that secretive, feminine time of the month that has been reduced within Western patriarchal culture as dirty.” The work is about two artists/activists who respond to the quiet violence of heteronormative gendering, sexing, as well as to the racialising and naming of bodies and what it means for our lives in the everyday. It is about the conversation that happens among these two individuals and their work when their methods, ways of seeing and creating coincide, share space and collide. It is about the unspoken, the silences in between and how these non-verbal whispers speak. The artists move beyond “bearing witness” and respond to these violent foreclosures and planned obsolescences with alternative imaginaries – plotting new ways of seeing, of being and of articulating interiorities.

The exhibition that opens Thursday, December 8, at 18h30 brings together photography, sculpture and video installation(s) put together by Zanele Muholi and Khanyisile Mbongwa, in collaboration with other artists and students. A performance curated by Khanyisile will take place on the evening of the opening, asking visitors, students, activists, workers, professors to respond, react and engage with the ephemerality of her performance, with its traces and textures.

Finally, the exhibition has been put together as part of the workshop “Thinking Africa and the African Diaspora Differently: Theories, Practices, Imaginaries”, that involves the Centre for African Studies at UCT, ‘the names we give’ at Michaelis, Chimurenga, The University of the West Indies, Brown University Africana Studies and the University of Addis Ababa. Supporters of the exhibition include the abovementioned workshop and the non-profit gallery Blank Projects.

Nicole Sarmiento
CAS Gallery Curator