A Different Now... featured in Art Review’s 10 Ways to kickstart your January in the Art world
This group show in three parts (at both South African Goodman Galleries with a satellite show of photographs at Umhlabathi Collective in Johannesburg) – curated by incoming director of Berlin’s HKW, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung – can scarcely be accused of narrow scope or miserly ambition, with dozens of artists on display across two cities and exhibition notes listing broadly-outlined themes of ‘power, extraction and exploitation… resilience, defiance and communion’. Transition, though, is its unifying force: apartheid lives almost thirty years in the memory while bearing a spectral – and tangible – presence in the country; the image of South Africans’ struggles as a kind of proxy movement for many other African nations is morphing into something harder to parse; colliding forces of oppression by conquest and the ever-mounting climate emergency pile new challenges and ruptures upon the preexisting, across multiple nations. Sabelo Mlangeni’s by turns convivial and radical photographs, Danielle McKinney’s subtly enigmatic portraits, and Keli Safia Maksud’s musical topographies are but a few to take up these conceptual challenges – and should not be missed. Written by Alexander Leissle
