LOIS ANGURIAHANIEN CONRADIESUZANNE DUNCAN

MBALI DHLAMINIQUANTA GAULD

SHEEKHA KALANALEXANDRA KARAKASHIAN

FRANCOIS KNOETZETATENDA MAGAISAMAURICE MBIKAYI

SEPIDEH MEHRABANSHOGAN NAIDOONATALIE PAYNE

PULENG PLESSIEOLIVIA SHIHAMBE

JULIA SUDYKADANIELLE WEPENER

O NPARTS

L Y

Only Parts is a group exhibition of works by current Masters students from the Wits School of Arts and the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Coordinated collaboratively through an annual exchange, emerging artists from each institution present pieces from a mid-point in their practical and academic processes. Only Parts presents a sampling of works from diverse media from sculptural and mixed media pieces, to photography, video or text based contributions, as well as an educational supplement and workshop. In 2014, the exhibition is hosted by Wits in Johannesburg, at the Wits School of Arts dedicated exhibition space, the Substation.

Only Parts, Substation, University of the Witwatersrand1 Jan Smuts, BraamfonteinJohannesburg.Exhibit ion 13 23 August 2014

LOIS ANGURIAHANIEN CONRADIESUZANNE DUNCANMBALI DHLAMINIQUANTA GAULDSHEEKHA KALANALEXANDRA KARAKASHIANFRANCOIS KNOETZETATENDA MAGAISAMAURICE MBIKAYISEPIDEH MEHRABANSHOGAN NAIDOONATALIE PAYNEPULENG PLESSIEOLIVIA SHIHAMBEJULIA SUDYKADANIELLE WEPENER

SEVEN PIECES OF A WHOLE, COMPLETE WITH MISSING PARTS

- Anna Stielau

I

The critic Jennifer Allan calls catalogue essays a kind of a science fiction. A work of fiction, in that even the most well-intentioned writer cannot hope to access an artists practice in its entirety, and SciFi in that the exhibition in question does not cannot exist at the time of publication. One finds oneself, then, not only anticipating the future, but also treating what is to come as if it has already taken place.1 Thats a tenuous and unstable position from which to adopt critical authority.

More so really in the case of student shows like Only Parts. After all, framing these exhibitions is as much an exercise in quotation as science fiction. And I dont mean that in the smug, garden variety if-I-cite-some-eminently-quotable-public-intellectual-my-views -hold-water kind of way. A postgraduate show is by definition a sampling; an excerpt of artworks untethered from their moorings. No matter how carefully realised, no matter how intact the internal aphoristic logic of each piece, there are risks implicit in this process. Something is gained when you set a work free and plot a new course for it, but something is lost too, in the widening distance from an original anchorage.

So because it matters, I will say thisthe works represented in Only Parts are not just neat extracts from broader practices, a best of art-in-progress. Each work stands for an event in the course of a learning experience that extends far beyond the walls of the gallery space. To have a project, someone once said, is to be responsible for creating a whole world.

An idea is always the suggestion of new spaces.

This exhibition is a constellation of fragments.

Of parts.

P(art)s, apart.

II

Part. To separate. To relinquish possession or control. To leave behind. To offer some, but not all, of something. An essential portion or integral element. A manufactured object, awaiting assemblage. Something that, when combined with other components, can produce a new whole.

III

In 1949 Samuel Beckett published a series of conversations between himself and his friend George Duthuit, in which they discuss contemporary art. His Three Dialogues begins as follows:

Beckett: Total object, complete with missing parts, instead of partial object. A question of degree.2

Hes talking about the work of the painter Tal Coat.

Beckett continues almost as if talking to himself: All I wish to suggest is that the tendency and accomplishment of this painting are fundamentally those of previous painting, straining to enlarge the statement of a compromise.

Dunhuit thinks his friend an unrelenting pessimist. To be a part or to lose parts is not always to be incomplete, he points out. To be an iteration is not always to be a re-iteration.

Art can be the product of its past, and the sum of its parts.

The first dialogue ends with Becketts silence, the second with his tears. By the third, he retracts everything: I am mistaken, he says, I am mistaken.

1 Allan, J. 2009. Future Trading in Frieze. Issue 126. October.2 Beckett, S. 1965. Proust and the Three Dialogues with George Duthuit. London: Calder and Sayers.

Quanta Gauld ONLY PARTS

1m x 4,8m (to tear vertically)Paper, thread, electronics

IV

in a way, the fragment combines completion and incompletion within itself, or one may say, in an even more complex manner, it both completes and incompletes the dialectic of completion and incompletion

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in The Literary Absolute3

V

The French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard was partial to parts. His lifes work, a project equally a psychology of science and a philosophy of the imagination, was devoted to monumentalising easily overlooked elements of material life.

In his final work Fragments on a Poetics of Fire, he wonders at the power of isolated units of meaning:

I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young.

And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company4

Parts are untethered, uninhibited, singular, free to be otherwise, oscillating between the relative and the absolute.

VI

Parts without a whole can be dangerous, too. Richard Shaver (1907-1975), the reclusive contributor to the cult American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, developed a mythology so comprehensive he convinced himself of its veracity. Shaver maintained that certain rocks were actually artificial, the remnants of the library of an ancient race whose civilization has perished when the moon bounced off the earth aeons ago. He collected and archived thousands upon thousands of these stones in his lifetime. The images in Shavers rocks, he told anyone who would listen, were so complex pictures within pictures, words that changed according to angle of view that he believed them to be designed for projection, like film. They were waiting for the discovery of some long-forgotten device to become stories once more. To become whole.

He died in 1975, his collection incomplete and unreadable.

VII

Only parts is not a whole nor is it only parts.

An oil spill, dust, a vertical tear, a photograph of people boarding a plane or a meditation on the construction of community These works are unified, if unified is indeed the right word, by the vast spaces they hold within themselves. By their lateral and vertical extension.

A part of a whole must be whole

- Ann Oakley, Fractured: Adventures of a Broken Body5

***

3 Lacoue-Labarthe, P and Nancy, J. 1988. The Literary Absolute: The work of fiction in German Romanticism. New York: The State University of New York Press.

4 Bachelard, G. 1997. Fragments on a Poetics of Fire. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture5 Oakley, A. 2007. Fractured: Adventures of a Broken Body. London: Policy Press.

Alexandra Karakashian ONLY PARTS

Passing #21Oil on Paper289 x 180 cm2013

Passing #21Oil on Paper289 x 180 cm2013

Olivia ShihambeONLY PARTS

Washing LineInkjet Print48 x 32 cm

Die klank van as [The sound of ash] 49 Squares of Ash on board

1050x1050mm

Hanien Conradie ONLY PARTS

Natalie PayneONLY PARTS

Zoe TearsInkjet Print

Francois Knoetze ONLY PARTS

Passing #21. 2013. Oil on Paper. 289 x 180 cm

Sheekha KalanONLY PARTS

Work in Progress Plastic and Cotton Thread100cm x 150cm

Natalie Payne -I find I am drawn to photographing people who occupy a transitional phase in life, children becoming adolescents or adolescents becoming young adults. Youth is a transformative moment filled with potential and the possibility of social change yet it is also a moment filled with immense challenges as the young person attempts to negotiate the transition from childhood to adulthood.

Lois Anguria -On the flag of Uganda the crown crane rests.

Alexandra Karakashian -As close as Ill get

Quanta Gauld -Excerpt from Milan Kunderas The Unbearable Lightness of Beingfor there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even ones own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

Sheekha Kalan -My work has often been directed at creating reflective spaces that enhance ones self-awareness ( about ones beliefs, emotions , thoughts etc) through the means of painting and installation. This particular work will be directed at understanding the layers of ourselves and also the intriguing journey of passing through the layers and reaching a place of understanding or peace

Francois Knoetze -This (a garbage dump) is where we should start feeling at home. Part of our daily perception of reality is that this disappears from our world... But the problem is that trash doesnt disappearThe difficult thing is to find poetry, spirituality, in this dimension. To recreate, if not beauty, then aesthetic dimension in things like this, in trash itself. Thats the true love of the world. - Slavoj Zizek

Olivia Shihambe -The ephemeral home space. I look at the relationships between people and their living spaces.

Hanien Conradie -Speldekussing

ONLY PARTS

Tatenda Magaisa -Products of mass media, images from television, advertisement, film and the imagery that is presented on the internet can perpetuate the manifestation of a colour system that renders value and perpetuates social hierarchies that is , a system of ordering the world, a discourse of differences which institutes a regime of looking. These mediums can be said to be tools or mechanisms of looking that sustain the system of chromatism a system that continuously encourages visual difference.

Shogan Ganas Naidoo -Between places.

Maurice Mbikayi -It is an interpretation of online mobility and displacement; my displacement as a migrant. Their ambiguity allows additional meanings, which distort expectations of their familiar usage. But they also infer a permanent movement, reminiscent of my impermanency as a foreigner between two homes between two spaces or me being a netizen between an online and offline spaces.

Sepideh Mehraban -The painting is based on a photograph that depicts demonstrations against compulsory wearing of the hijab in Iran. The difficulty of finding any photograph related to my subject matter is a part of my process.

There is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses we mingle the thousand details out of our past experience. (Henri Bergson)

Suzanne Duncan -All things move toward their end

Julia Sudyka -I am looking at the notion of suicide in film. This is explored in a few different ways with my sources being: stills of a completed suicide, ending lines of films and text. I have created a list documenting every film I have ever seen, as well as its ending line. From there I have fastidiously created and cut out stencils of ending lines and monoprinted through them. These prints resemble as memorial wall because of the grey oil I have used and due to the sentimental nature of the unique fonts I have chosen for each stencil. Onto each print I have drawn with pen a still of a character from a film who has committed suicide.

Mbali DhlaminiI am intrigued by the way the garments inhabit a certain power within them and how once personified the wearer is transformed into another being. I am interested in the persona of the wearers once they put on their church robe, how they transform from the earthly being to the spiritual being once embodied in the garments.

Danielle Wepener -a painting to walk into

ONLY PARTS

ONLY PARTS

Crowned Crane in Flight III Charcoal and poster paint on paper74.5cm x 105cm2014

Lois Anguira

Sepideh Mehraban ONLY PARTS

Tehran 1983Mixed media on board100 x 120cm2014

Tatenda Magaisa ONLY PARTS

Untitled, Video/Gif still, 9 seconds

Suzanne DuncanONLY PARTS

Untitled / BorderMatted hair and lint from vacuum cleaner70x90cm

Mbali Dhlamini ONLY PARTS

Untitled12 Wax dresses suspended Each Dress 100cm x 40 cm

Maurice MbikayiONLY PARTS

Digital Bags20 handmade cotton bags

Julia SudykaONLY PARTSWork in progressStencil Drawings on Paper

Shogan Ganas NaidooONLY PARTS

Work in progressInkjet Print

2014

Danielle Wepener ONLY PARTS

Sketch-hinge-sketchPencil on paper; double hinge2014

ONLY PARTS

Special Thanks:

Coordinators: Francis Burger, Suzanne Duncan, Josephine Higgins, Sheekha Kalan and Tatenda Magaisa

Design: Alexandra Karakashian and Shogan Naidoo

Participating artists, lecturers and coordinators of Michaelis School of Fine Art and Wits School of Arts

Travel Funds sponsored by Jules Kramer Musicand Michaelis Fine Art Departmental Awards

Text by: Anna Stielau

2014

Printed in Johannesburg, Wits University