Exhibition: Third Worlds: Model Cities
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Opening 18 February 2010 at the Michaelis Gallery at 6pm.
Closes 19.03.2010
Third Worlds: Model Cites is a collaborative exhibition focussing on the theme of architectures of urban South African landscapes. The exhibition is built around a large model of an abstracted city of Cape Town, saturated colour photographs and a number of other connected artworks that all investigate how the urban land is constructed. While many contemporary artists have engaged with the city of Johannesburg few have investigated the Cape Town urban landscape.
The ideas behind Third World; Model Cities have emerged through an interplay between two previously completed bodies of work exploring the aspects of the South African built landscape by collaborators. The first is photographer Svea Josephy’s work Twin Town’ which provocatively sets images of sites found in South Africa against their named metropolitan ‘others’, while the second is from the collection of essays published in 2007 ‘Desire Lines, Space, Memory and Identity in the Post apartheid City’ which interrogated the multiple manifestations of heritage in South African cities to which Noëleen Murray, Harry Garuba and Carson Smuts contributed.
Third Worlds is positioned in a new space, a type of ‘third space’ somewhere between these two bodies of intellectual work and sets out to take further critiques of the making of built landscapes and to set these against their associated archives – of landscape painting and photography; aerial photography; architects and planner’s imaginaries through drawings, models and actual buildings; different publics’ responses to cities and places; and through the more performative medium of creative writing, novels, poetry and actual language. For example Tessa Dowling has developed detailed studies of languages and words relating to ‘cityness’ in Cape Town.
The naming of the project Third Worlds is also a comment on the persistence of the term set against global conditions that have increasingly been questioned, yet bizarrely persist in metropolitan understandings of postcolonial Africa. Yet strangely the term survives perched precariously between the binaries of centre and periphery, somehow accommodating fourth, fifth, sixth and other multiples of worlds. The exhibition of architectural models and photographs of ‘Third Cities’ based in which local settlements are combined with those after which they are named to create a new landscape which is somewhere between the two. The model investigates apartheid modernities of Cape Town on the one hand on the other the curious naming practices of so called ‘informal’ and ‘semi formal’ settlements in the Western Cape.
The exhibition may change the way individuals think about the land, and promote greater understanding of the issues inherent in how land is settled, used and constructed by different groups. We hope it will contribute to city- wide debates in the context of events such as the 2010 World Cup and the current proliferation of developer driven initiatives in Cape Town.
The collaborative nature of the project erodes the boundaries between the disciplines of fine art and architecture, language and literature. The collaborators on this project include: Svea Josephy who is an artist and Senior Lecturer at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT, Harry Garuba is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Centre for African Studies and the Department of English at UCT and Tessa Dowling is Adjunct Professor in the Southern African Languages section of the School of Languages at UCT, Noëleen Murray is an architect affiliated with the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC and a PhD student in the Centre for African Studies at UCT and Carson Smuts is a recently qualified architect. Justin Brett, an artist and part time teacher at Michealis and Lorenzo Nassembeni, who is an architect and designer have also contributed substantially to the collaborative process. Shafiek Mathhews and John Coetzee of UCT’s School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics have contributed to the design and realisation of the project.
Michaelis Gallery
Hiddingh Campus
31-37 Orange Street
Cape Town
Enquires: 021 4807156 or 021 4807111
Niek.degreef@uct.ac.za
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