Installations, videos, drawings
and music are all included in the first solo exhibition of the
South African Kemang Wa Lehulere in the Italian capital.
The works will be exhibited from Wednesday until November 26
in Rome's MAXXI, a national museum of contemporary art and
architecture.
The young, emerging artist was the winner of a prestigious
award given every year by Deutsche Bank. The award-winning work
is included in the exhibition.
Illustrated to the press by Britta Farber, chief curator of
Deutsche Bank's Art, Culture and Sport department, the
exhibition is entitled 'Bird Song' and was first shown in March
at Berlin's Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle and will later travel to
Switzerland.
"Every year we choose artists that, though emerging, have
already proved their importance," Farbar said, who curated the
Italian edition in collaboration with Anne Palopoli. "Thus, the
selection looks out towards the entire world."
Wa Lehlere was born in Cape Town in 1984 and his work is
known for its sensitivity and attention to civil issues.
"Bird Song," its curator said, is "a show that is a sort of
personal composition in itself, made up of many different voices
and rooted in the artist's homeland, South Africa."
And so both in the works themselves and in the in-depth
research that preceded them, Lehulere attempts to bear witness
to apartheid society and the reality of the segregation that the
young man and his family lived through.
The show is a project centered on the dialogue between his
work and that of Gladys Mgudlandlu(1917-1979), a self-taught
artist and among the first black artists to be exhibited in
South African galleries in the 1960s.
Mgudlandlu painted mostly landscapes and birds and was for
this both nicknamed 'Bird Lady' and criticized for not taking
sides politically, and she was mostly forgotten after her death.
Lehulere, raised in Cape Town in the same township as the
painter, found out that his aunt had visited Mgudlandlu's home
and remembered her murals.
He then began doing research alongside her into those
paintings, bringing some to light some that inspired 'Bird
Song'.
The exhibition thus includes a series of works entitled 'Does
This Mirror Have Memory', made up of paintings by Mgudlandlu and
chalk elaborations on blackboards made by the artist and his
aunt.
The dialogue is reminiscent of jazz improvisation. The aim,
however, is to re-establish a link between South Africa's past
and present and not simply to bring back the memory of a
forgotten artist.
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