Let freedom reign

Nine South African artists take a critical and creative look at their native country with sculptures, paintings and installations shown in the newest HangART-7 exhibition.

A frail 88-year-old symbolises the contradictions of a country many consider to be the most beautiful in the world: after half a lifetime spent as a political prisoner, Nelson Mandela – as its president – led South Africa to a better future under the motto “Let freedom reign”. But the winner of the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize knew that even after Apartheid had been defeated, many problems would still remain unresolved: “After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.” The gap between poor and rich, black and white, the high crime and AIDS rates are today’s hills – and simultaneously the subject approached in different ways by the nine South African artists in the HangART-7 exhibition “Turbulence”.

Turbulent times

 

Sculptures and objects, installations and paintings act as vehicles for their mixed feelings about their homeland. Curator Roger van Wyk collected the works by Sanell Aggenbach, Conrad Botes, Nicholas Hlobo, Ledelle Moe, Samson Mudzunga, Brett Murray, Johannes Phokela, Lyndi Sales and Joachim Schönfeldt under a single motto: “Turbulence”. The title of the exhibition is both the name of a typical weather phenomenon over the dry South African plain and an expression “of the intense emotional roller-coaster to which South Africans have been subjected in the past“, explains van Wyk.

New perspectives

 

The topics chosen by the protagonists of the exhibition – young artists from Cape Town and Johannesburg, born into a time of revolutionary upheaval – are appropriately eclectic. Ledelle Moe, for example, shows huge fallen heads: reminders of ruthless power systems that misinterpreted themselves as “built for eternity”. Johannes Phokela manipulates works of European art history, changing the skin colour of its players – and so challenges claims to cultural power. And Lyndi Sales approaches the 1987 Helderberg plane crash with a montage of paper and fabric shreds, playing cards and banknotes – her way of coming to terms with an occurrence in recent history that not only shocked the South African public but also represented a turning point in Sales’ own life: her father was one of the victims of the catastrophe.

Visitors to Salzburg

 

“Turbulence – Art from South Africa” is the sixth exhibition within the scope of the two-year-old HangART-7 art programme. The Hangar-7 gallery in Austria’s Salzburg Airport is open to visitors from 9 a.m. until 10 p.m. every day until April 11.