FEDE’s third exhibition, PROCESS, engages a curatorial ethic best reflected in curator Adriano Pedrosa’s 2012 text, What is the process? That is to say, a curatorial approach that moves “in short and successive intervals, yet maintaining a slow, reflexive and concentrated focus — at once open, critical and generous.”
Bringing together artists — Andile Dyalvane, Abdon Studio, Katlego Phetlhe, Keith Virgo, Kyle Strydom, Luyanda Zindela, Nkhensani Mkhari, Ntokozo Zwane, Reef Sithole, Shakil Solanki, Talia Ramkiliwan, Tony Gum, Xhanti Zwelendaba and yarn makers cowgirl blues and Keith Virgo — PROCESS contemplates the intersections between art and design and space and place.
The nexus of exploration is how disciplines and practices converge, diverge and possibly explode into new forms, procedures, undertakings, and activities. Through photography, drawing, ceramics, installation and textiles, PROCESS proposes ways to illuminate subtexts of where artists situate their efforts. The exhibition is a gesture towards visualising ways of making and allowing audiences to enter into the act of creation.
The exhibition orbits around the concept of the “hive”, which is assembled as a visual collage in the form of a mindmap. Through its intersecting vertical and diagonal lines, the mindmap reflects the hive as a tool whose logic is supported by an extensive framework of formats that cut across and through each other. Processes of making and processes of display intermingle.
Solanki, Sithole, Zwelendaba and Zindela focus on intricate depictions of bodies in motion and at rest. Ramkilawani creates warps and wefts of wool and cloth that speak to personal freedoms. In Dyalvane’s work, coded symbols are scratched onto the surface of sculptures. Gum and Phetle master light and capture an eeriness through space. Strydom unifies elements of earth and soil and transforms them by fire through time. Mkhari assembles a mélange of people and places filled with quiet tension. While cowgirl blues and Keith Virgo reflect a rich and captivating yarn-making process.
The hive can be thought of as a place where we “approve of the fact that there is a lot of activity there or that people are busy working there”, open to a kind of reformist vision of non-scripted performance where hands, minds and tools are “busy working.”
Final theses:
a) A PROCESS is sometimes formulaic and technical. And at other times fluid. b) A PROCESS drags time, presses it and sometimes weighs time.
c) A PROCESS conveys senses and emotions through a set of gestures. d) A PROCESS is organised chaos.
Text by Nkgopoleng Moloi
