EXHIBITIONS

ZEITZ MOCAA - HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS

Cape Town, Oct 2020 - Oct 2021

ANON POP UP ART SHOW - RISE - 05 December 2019

EXTENDED UNTIL 18 Feb 2020!

Sarah Jane Fell has curated an incredible body of work.

The show has not only travelled but grown! Now with more than 60 artists, photographers, poets and activists, we have popped up at 44 on Long, a new beautiful venue and theatre space (entrance 44 Long Street upstairs from Tiger's Milk).

Expect profound and compelling visual art by notable South African artists and photographers alongside emerging voices and pop-up performers – each of whom contribute to the important conversation on gender violence that has reached a tipping point in South Africa this year.

All art and prints on the show are available for sale. Original artworks are on silent auction on Thursday night until 10 December. A selection from the show is also available online on anonpopup.com. If you would like to bid on the auction but cannot make it to the show, email me with your offer.

Proceeds of art sales go to Nonceba Family Counselling Centre in Khayelitsha, shelter and counselling centre for abused women and children.

Anchor 1

UNFORESEEN LANDSCAPES - JUNE 2019

VIEW GALLERY - OPENING NIGHT

UNFORESEEN LANDSCAPES

We are at a point in time where the human relationship with the natural world is overly strained, close to breaking point. We are in an age of ‘unforeseen landscapes,’ where the human impact on the planet, and its delicate but incredibly designed ecosystems, is entering unchartered and dangerous territory.

Far removed from the natural world, the grave sound of silent forests, the sights of dying oceans, where little life remains but green slime, the more than 400 dead zones awaits our comprehesion. Yet disconnection from technology is currently our greatest fear. The average person spends six hours a day investing their emotions into virtual, rather than actual outcomes. We have replaced the instinctual, primal, sights, sounds, smells, feelings, the acoustic and the ether with sheer fantasy. Fantasy is our daily redefined reality. In this exhibition we feature 24 photographers, and their response to the complicated relationship mankind has with the natural world – and the idea that, we do not inherit the world from our ancestors, instead we borrow it from our children. The show is made up of works by both emerging and well-established photographic artists.

Despite the continuous hype in politics, we have become increasingly passive, much of our activities are automated or remote controlled, requiring minimal physical interaction with our environment. In the last 40 - 50 years we have slipped into a tech-pampered trance, where human consciousness of the physical and natural environment has all but faded. Within this stupor, we exist in self-granted impunity. According to a recent study released by the United Nations, a million species face imminent extinction, due to the unseen and cumulative effects of hundreds of everyday technologies, single use plastics, the industrial waste of multinational corporations whose industrial surplus is polluting the land, air, water and oceans. We are fast extinguishing nature, the very thing to which we owe our existence; the complex natural world from which we evolved, and which helped humanity survive for millions of years before civilization. In favoring technology, fantasy and convenience, our wide-ranging skills for survival in the wild are lost.

It’s an interesting, distressing time. We are seemingly at a point of unparalleled innovation and technological advancement. We have the ability to solve many problems. All the warning signs are there – imminent extinction of species, destruction of natural habitat, the climate crisis - but what remains to be seen is whether we’ll choose to act in time or continue with our current lifestyle, political, and economic choices that are altering life on earth as we know it.

Curated by Simone Tredoux

Text co-writer: Brendon Bosworth - Human Element Communications

NO ORDINARY WOMEN - AUG - OCT 2018

NO ord woman anchor

VIEW FEATURE IN DAILY MAVERICK

VIEW GALLERY - OPENING NIGHT

VIEW OPENING NIGHT VIDEO

ZEISS PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD 2017 - SHORTLISTED

ZEISS ANCHOR

Some of Nicky’s work, alongside the winner and other shortlisted photographers of the

#ZEISSPhotoAward

will be exhibited as part of a Guest Exhibition at the

Sony World Photography Awards & Martin Parr - 2017 Exhibition

Somerset House, London, from 21 April - 7 May.

Click on the photo for full story

ZEISS BLOG - 23 March 2017

Click on the photo for full story

SINGLE SHOT ANCHOR

SINGLE SHOT - May 2017

PRESS - BUSINESS DAY

VIEW PHOTO GALLERY OF OPENING NIGHT

Single Shot celebrates the working lives of photographers who in contrast with those who live to photograph their experience, instead, live for the experience of making photographs.

Intercepting the path of the professional photographer, be it personal expression in the gallery space or a combination of private, social and commercial photography, participants were asked to submit what they see as either a career defining or favourite image - a solitary work reflecting their personal aesthetic and photographic standard.

Contemplating the idea of allowing a single frame to stand as a true testament of the person behind the lens, regardless of the subject, Single Shot, seeks to discover if the image maker, the artist, transcends the boundless nature of current visual culture surpassing the confusion with an offer of photographic expression that is uncompromisingly unique and self-defining.

The electronic age has had a profound impact on how we share reality, to the point where creating photographic evidence of minute- to-minute experiences, takes up a sizable chunk of what it means to live-in and be part of the modern world. If we didn’t photograph breakfast did we even eat it?

Photographs, have become captions around which we live our lives. Personalized branding and perception management is no longer the reserve of marketing companies, but instead, is a dominant concern for the general populace.

With this much information feeding into our daily consciousness perhaps the ‘selfi-fi-cation’ of our lives is a flght or flee response to our ‘storyboard existence.’ A way to re-materialize moments that are too easily flushed by in a constant stream of image hungry social media sites, sites who have turned our interests and our realities into sellable commodities - the irony is that, as we consume so we are being consumed.

What is the cost of the constant slideshow of our virtual world, and how does this impact, our actions, our identity, our ability to relate to something other than a highly-edited history of personalized events?

In this show, we see the value of information contained in an individual photograph, and perhaps ask ourselves, what we would be doing with our time if we all only ever shared - a single shot.

Simone Tredoux, Curator, PH GALLERY, Cape Town, South Africa

INappropriate anchor

[in]appropriate - August 2017

VIEW PHOTO GALLERY OF OPENING NIGHT

[In]appropriate, is a photographic exhibition in which women photographers take aim at societal and cultural norms in South Africa - exposing social structures whose framework impose unrealistic restraints on how women engage and experience the world.

Examining how women are expected to modify and control their attitudes and behaviors to suit the patriarchal scripts that police their bodies, in a society which teaches its daughters to accept misogyny as normal

Confronting the commodification of women’s bodies as seen through the male gaze, and the pressure to be alluring. By breaking with convention in comportment, finding room for reflection, this exhibition offers context, which is defined by the contributors and how they communicate their experience of the society in which they live. Shining a hard light on urgent realities and in some instances, their own complicity and self-betrayal – counting the cost of being the women that their environments necessitate, where conditions require that the essential self is ignored.

Some, challenge the idea of photography offering only an actual recorded moment in time, and instead, use the medium to express an inner world, a response to what occurs reframed, and in some instances, recalled, through older images, exhuming the past, counteracting the obscurity of what went before - in our not so distant history.

In light of the escalated incidents of violence against women in 2017, [in]appropriate, provides a visual jolt, by interrogating normative conventions leading to toxic masculinity and the entrenchment of attitudes of what is considered acceptable and safe behavior for women.

Questioning the sub-text too often in the media, where the onus is on women to avoid situations that will endanger them. The idea that women should be acting differently to avoid being abused sexually and physically, by upholding patriarchal mandates, such as wearing what is deemed to be ‘lady-like clothing’– not being intoxicated, not exploring and expressing their sexuality, not being open about same gender love. Exposing how these insinuations shifts the responsibility away from men.

Considering that 75% of all crimes committed in recent times in South Africa, were crimes committed against women – it is clear that the existence of all women in this country is moulded in varying degrees, by a psychological violence, which is constant and widely prevalent.

Holding up a multi-dimensional mirror, [In]appropriate peers at the cost of living in a fragmented society, whose mindset perpetuates violence, and is failing to address the brutality and conflict residing within.

Simone Tredoux, Curator, PH GALLERY, Cape Town, South Africa

WOMEN AT WORK

WORLD REFUGEE DAY - 2015

HOLOCAUST CENTRE OF CAPE TOWN

World Refugee Day Event Highlights the Economic Contributions of Migrants and Refugees

On Monday, 15 June, at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, women migrants and refugees will shared their personal stories of resilience in the face of tremendous barriers to success.

The participants were part of The Women’s Platform, a new initiative of the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town. The Women’s Platform is a network of refugee and immigrant women’s community groups that provides mutual support, training, and opportunities for small business development.

This World Refugee Day commemoration was hosted by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Cape Town Holocaust Centre and Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town.

This World Refugee Day commemoration not only highlighted the gripping life stories of migrants; it also presented a new model for cross-national collaboration among immigrants and South Africans.

The evening also marks the opening of a new photo exhibition by Cape Town filmmaker and photographer Nicky Newman, titled Women At Work. Newman, well known for her powerful video documentaries graduated from Rhodes University with degrees in Journalism and Psychology in 1989. She has been making documentary films ever since and trains women in developing countries to tell stories through filmmaking.