Artists Statement

Artists: Aline Xavier, Ana Hupe, Clara Ianni, Daniel Lima, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Gabrielle Goliath, Haroon Gunn-Salie, Ismail Farouk, Marcelo Moscheta, Mikhael Subotzky, Paulo Nimer PJ & Siwa Mgoboza

Fracture Zone conjures artists from Brazil and South Africa to dialogue as duos over shared subjects. The exhibition is part of the project Conversations in Gondwana, that evokes the common genealogies between Africa and South America as it seeks to instigate a virtual and at times physical correspondence among artists in order to experience perspectives, poetics, aesthetics and common or dissonant processes that will eventually trigger a series of events, works and conversations on both sides of the tectonic plates. Post-colonial displacements, enlaced hidden histories, decolonial imaginaries, the friction between human and natural processes through abusive resource exploitation, representations of symbolic cultural expressions, urban dynamics of exclusion, political and social reflections are some of the themes present at the exhibition. Documenting a dialogue in process, we evidence some common fractures, affects, languages, epistemologies, from both sides of this geological accident.  conversationsingondwana.tumblr.com

• Aline Xavier (b.1984, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) is an artist engaged in transdisciplinary, collaborative, process-led research, currently based between Brazil and South Africa. Most of her projects are based on real situations and not enduring social practices, documenting cultural traits to create absurd and dreamlike situations in works that relate to memory, the mystic and the technological. So far she has created videos, photographs and installations, alone or in collaborative processes with other filmmakers.
• Ana Hupe (b. 1983, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) lives between Berlin and Rio de Janeiro. Her research consists of negotiating the borders between literature and visual arts, collecting a contra-memory of the colonial archive. She experiments with analog and digital modes of reading and writing addresses, geopolitical borders, decolonization practices, utopic territories and citizenship laws. Ana interweaves real, virtual and fiction in works that pass through what is intuited and not reported; that is, the invisibility of stories.
• Clara Ianni (b.1987, São Paulo, Brazil) is based in São Paulo. Her work explores the relationship between art and politics. Her practice relies on the use of different medias such as videos, sculpture, installation and texts. Her research is based on the relationship between economical processes and cultural forms, having as focus the dinamics of dependency between modernization and colonization.
• Daniel Lima (b. 1973, Natal, Brazil) is based in São Paulo. He holds a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from the School of Communication and Arts at São Paulo University-USP and a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from the Subjectivity Studies Center at PUC-São Paulo. Since 2001, he creates interventions and interferences in urban spaces. In addition to collective work, he develops research related to media, racial issues and educational processes. He is founding member of “The revolution will not be televised”, “Politics of the impossible”, “Frente 3 de Fevereiro” and also director of Invisibles Produções.
• Dineo Seshee Bopape (b. 1981, Polokwane, South Africa) is a South African multimedia artist. Using experimental video montages, sound, found objects, photographs and dense sculputural installations, her artwork explores the performative aspects of culture and engages with socio-political notions of memory, narration and representation. Increasingly focusing her practice on time-based mediums, Bopape has explored virtual space in order to question, as she says, “If there is space within the virtual, how deep does it go? How far can a sound or an image recede?” Her more recent video works often comprise surreal mashups of both abstract and representational imagery, combined with animation, found footage and sounds.
• Gabrielle Goliath (b. 1983, Kimberley, South Africa) is a multidisciplinary artist known for her conceptually distilled and sensitive negotiations of complex social concerns, particularly in relation to situations of gendered and sexualised violence. Drawing on music’s capacity to both commemorate and evoke nostalgic memory, her current research aims to explore the possibilities and ethical demands of ‘performing’ and making ‘shareable’ traumatic recall, specifically the lived and perpetually relived trauma of rape survivors in South Africa.
• Haroon Gunn-Salie (b. 1989, Cape Town, South Africa) currently based between Johannesburg and Belo Horizonte. His multidisciplinary practice draws focus to forms of collaboration in contemporary art based on socially engaged dialogue and exchange. Gunn-Salie’s exhibition titled Witness presented a site-specific body of work focusing on still unresolved issues of forced removals under apartheid, working with veteran residents of District Six, translating community oral histories into artistic interventions and installations.
• Ismail Farouk is a multidisciplinary artist and art teacher at Durban University of Technology. Interrogating intersecting modalities and technologies of power that reproduce colonial legacies in the everyday, Farouk works towards carving out spaces for playing with, looking at, discussing, speaking alongside/performing alternative and hidden archives. The way in which questions of gender, race, sexuality, class and the body/embodied intersect with food, eating and foodways, can reveal a great deal about the ways in which coloniality is reproduced as well as resisted, reimagined and unsettled in the present. Ismail wants to delve into these spaces of the intimate, the visceral, the eaten, the edible and practices of consumption in order to unsettle his own sensory and epistemic geographies of meaning, towards imagining alternate possibilities.
• Marcelo Moscheta (b. 1976, São José do Rio Preto, Brazil) The common thread running through Moscheta’s work is a great fascination for nature, together with his willingness to travel and experience the landscape. This experience of traveling and living in difficult environments stimulated his interest in depicting the memory of a place in his works, developing a classification procedure like that of an archaeologist questioning the boundaries of territory, geography and physics through art.
• Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981, Cape Town, South Africa) His works are the results of his fractured attempts to place himself in relation to the social, historical, and political narratives that surround him both at home in South Africa and on his frequent travels. As an artist working in film, video installation, and photography, as well as more recently in collage and painting, Subotzky engages critically with contemporary politics of representation. Subotzky’s works are at once highly introspective and revelatory of the systemic injustices wrought by South Africa’s colonialist legacy.
• Paulo Nimer Pjota (b. 1988, São José do Rio Preto, Brazil) is based in São Paulo. His work focuses on an in-depth study of popular iconography. His interest is mainly in the mechanisms and processes that produce, edit and diffuse human manifestations in an era of the internet and electronic communication. His works carry a selection of images, colors, symbols and supports that dialogue with emerging sociocultural principles peculiar to peripheral regions. Through small objects, architectural and symbolic, customary to these localities, he investigates the close relationship between culture and survival and how these permeate aesthetics and life.
• Siwa Mgoboza (b. 1993, Cape Town, South Africa) is currently based in Cape Town. Having been raised abroad for most of his life, Mgoboza’s work deals with a globalized African sense of self, a Western upbringing, and the liminal spaces in which these identities exist. From the deconstruction of stereotypes, Mgoboza investigates the conflicts that arise from the encounter between cultures and their respective histories and questions the meaning of identity models and labels.