EXHIBITIONS 2019
Democrazy: A Demonstration of Craziness is the result of work that Seshabela spent most of 2019 developing. Seshabela feels that it is important to reflect on the progress of South Africa’s post-apartheid democratic system, and how it has impacted people and spaces.
This is an exhibition that reflects and zooms in on the economic and structural construction of the lives of people living in the townships, informal settlements and rural areas of the country. Seshabela’s work visually represents the co-existence of parallel worlds of society and power. The work is loaded with questions and speaks to the concerns that many continue to wonder, as repercussions and legacies continue to impact the lived realities of everyone in South Africa.
Open 6 February 2020
Borders are critical and complex entities, concepts and constructs. Many artists have engaged with notions of permeability, transience and constraints in relation to borders but few have dealt with the impressions of borders and their bureaucratic ephemera as tangibly as Onyis Martin. Before Tomorrow Comes is a presentation of his latest body of work. The works are reminiscent of wheat-pasted advertisements, posters on walls, backdrops to busy intersections – the traces left behind of information that is posted, pasted, changed and updated.
The title of the exhibition is lyrical but also somber by reminding us the pace of time and the urgency of how things shift, are replaced, pasted over, changed and left behind. The work speaks to a kind of visual vocabulary that is accustomed to the arrival of a tomorrow but leaves its trace through torn papers, stencil outlines and the residue of activity and dirt. It asks us to remember that through removal, traces are always left and that surfaces hold onto what has past through. Borders that are set up, be they physical or financial, remain in the landscape of our consciousness with the remnants of who and what might have passed by, before tomorrow begins to arrive.
Open 6 February 2020
Eclectica Contemporary is situated in the heart of Cape Town’s CBD. It hosts an impressive, carefully chosen, group of Artists. The Gallery, with it multiple levels set in an historical heritage building, attempts to question old traditions with new voices in Contemporary Art.
In our ‘Fusion Vol 3.’ exhibition, we have selected a group of esteemed South African Artists. Each Artist has been chosen for their preferred medium, allowing us to showcase the variety of skills, styles and concepts we have on offer
It’s the beginning of a new year and an opportunity to show some new talent as well as remind you of some of our regular artists. Fusion Vol 3 – putting the ‘eclectic’ in ‘Eclectica Contemporary’
Open from 6 February 2020
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The possibility of understanding, of cultures, societies, communities and places, rises from the framework and perspective from which we begin. The possibility of whether that comes from an individual or communal interaction. Darkness Rising is |
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Many of us receive information about the happenings in The Congo through the media. The information is received with the understanding that there is implied bias that often misses nuance and personal impact. The artists – residents of the country or of Congolese backgrounds, gathered in this exhibition – add shape and perspective to the magnitude of the context and lived experiences of the country. Darkness Rising, as a curated group exhibition, along with each individual artists voice, opens the opportunity for different narratives to be heard and to alter current understandings and assumptions. |
Open from 5 December 2019
In our ‘Fusion Vol 2.’ exhibition, we have selected a group of esteemed South African Artists. Each Artist has been chosen for their preferred medium, allowing us to showcase the variety of skills, styles and concepts we have on offer
We are reaching the end of another year. It is a time of celebration and also reflection. We are going on a journey with our artists, taking the opportunity to look back over this year and unpack various social issues we have faced.
Open from 6 December 2019
Through an inclusion of new modes of working, this exhibition proposes options for engaging differently, flowing with new considerations and allowing for the incompleteness of processes that remain ongoing. Counter Current invites new and familiar artists into the gallery while interrogating and challenging our own habits and conventions. Through plurality, we invite broader engagement and lateral interactions. The works extend off and away from gallery walls, resisting the confines of genre, medium or material expectations. They expand and augment, activating different spaces, subjects and formats by creating new visual conversations. What exists within this exhibition has been gathered by acknowledging an open-ended thought, with the hope of encompassing and encouraging wider integration and interaction.
Open from 3 October 2019
Following a successful solo exhibition at Eclectica Contemporary earlier this year, an installation and workshops and the Zeitz MOCAA and many high profile international commissions, Loyiso Mkize (South Africa) presents an installation wall at Eclectica Contemporary’s booth for Art Joburg’s Gallery Lab.
Accompanying this installation, Hussein Salim (Sudan) and Ibrahim Kharab’s (Egypt) evocative and vibrant paintings will add to the overall exuberance of the booth – bursting with colour, concept and content, from different reaches of the African continent. The presentation for Art Joburg’s Gallery Lab aims to reflect and extend a strongly afro-centric narrative, that focuses on commonalities of experience, the vast richness of different contexts and the representations necessary by and for people on this continent.
The Art Fair opens to the public 13-15 September @ Booth: D
TICKETS HERE
Nina Holmes returns to Eclectica Contemporary this August with her second solo exhibition at our gallery titled ‘it is not what i see”. This show was largely informed by a landscape painting workshop in Karatara, near Knysna, that Holmes attended earlier this year. Working instinctively and through a process of reflecting on all her senses, the pieces reflect an urge to make visual what is heard, smelled, touched and emotionally experienced while working in a new and alive environment.
On returning to her studio in Cape Town, a process of reflection and translation began. Attempting to recapture and re-experience the forest, the shouting of hens, the whistle of wind in the trees, the sun in her eyes – all tangled together with the experience of working ‘en plain air’ – Holmes filled her studio with the studies she’d created and brought back with her. Colours and textures spread across her canvases, around the space, and across vision in abstraction that invoke the dualities of nature, occupying space, and interacting, within it.
The exhibition opens Thursday, 1 August, 18h00 – 21h00
@ 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
To tell our stories is an offering of love, a chance to meet and connect and most of all to share. To acknowledge, honour, celebrate and bask in womxn’s month, Eclectica Contemporary hosts a womxn’s group show in our womxn-run gallery. Entangling and intertwining the complexities and simplicities of identity, environments are created and explored. Recognising power and representation, this exhibition hopes to welcome conversation, warmth, community and interaction through the work, the artists, the space and the context of history and present time, as we share and create our stories together.
The exhibitions open Thursday, 1 August, 18h00 – 21h00
@ 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
“For the People of Sudan, the pain of gathering what little hope remains to muster a ‘final’ attempt at overthrowing any form of oppression is regularly met with bitter disappointment. As the world grows more connected, so do they also grow more numb to the atrocities against humanity, the international community seemingly nonplussed at the plight of the Sudanese. Again and again they rise as a united people against oppressors who were once brothers and sisters but are now no more than murderers, thieves and rapists. But they will rise, as they always have done and no matter the pain and loss, they will one day triumph. This is why my People of Sudan are the Phoenix People.”
– Hussein Salim
The exhibition opens Thursday, 04 July 2019, 18h00 – 21h00 @ 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Despite the negative connotations that the words ‘coloured identity’ conjure, the artists exhibiting at Eclectica have chosen to celebrate this culture with the intent of creating a positive awareness of its diversity. This exhibition hopes to instil and reinforce positivity towards change in our coloured community.
We wish to highlight the rich contributions of coloured people, both culturally and politically. The contributions to culture have been diverse and unique across language, music, theatre, literature, the arts and food! In terms of politics, especially in the Western and Eastern Cape, the legacy is long and impactful with many heroes, luminaries, leaders and movements. ‘Coloureds’ have and continue to make an enormous contribution to South Africa.
The exhibition opens Thursday, 06 June 2019, 18h00 – 21h00 @ 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
The winter has arrived once more. Another summer gone and the sighs of the dams, as they feel the rain once more, echo the relief felt by us all. Twenty-five years have now come and passed since the first election of democratic South Africa in 1994 and we have once more cast our votes. Around the world and in South Africa, we become collective in expression through our shared experiences. There is a converse danger, however, of the delusion that comes through sharing in today’s world of social media and our constant ‘online’ status. Filtered, we can present an illusory existence that sets up veiled truths and untruths. In this way, we are in danger of becoming embroiled in a collective delusion of falsehood and living up to unrealistic expectations. To counteract this, there is a need to step away, get out, walk onward. Is there a middle ground that can embrace the productivity of networked associations that allow for strangers to become lifelong friends, the opportunity to learn and challenge through visibility and expressions of difference, and the sinister flipside of disillusionment and isolation?
The exhibition opens Thursday, 06 June 2019, 18h00 – 21h00 @ 69 Burg Street, Cape Town.
Loyiso’s current exhibition at Eclectica Contemporary has come at a time in the artist’s life when his own mortality has been mirrored and etched by very close personal experiences. This has automatically created a deep impulse to reflect philosophically and spiritually on the nature of reality, and more profoundly, his flux between emotional challenges and his attempt at rationalizing what it may mean.
Within Loyiso’s work, there are always layers of interpretation and references, drawing lines between contexts and subjects. This exhibition shows that the artist is not just thinking in binaries or compartmentalized identities, rather he speaks of a “universal exodus”. A process of release, of breathing out and opening. #EXDS serves as a platform where he moves beyond templates and attempts to unravel and unveil reality, to pierce his and our notions of what we perceive as real.
Exhibition opened 07/02/2019
“acetone veil”, a solo exhibition by Sue Greeff, draws inspiration from art historical references (‘Parting at Morning’ 1891 – Sir William Rothenstein *) and iconography borrowed from the recent TV series that won a Golden Globe entitled ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, her visual language confronts the audience with questions around the silenced voice and anonymity of women in a world predicated on patriarchy
Exhibition opens 4 April 2019, 18h00 @ 69 Burg Street, Cape Town
“Breathe” is a group exhibition showcasing artworks by Desrae Chimes Saacks, Nina Holmes, Natasha Barnes, Ben Coutouvidis, Mary Visser and Albert Courtse. In the midst of the rat race we live in, art is a breath of fresh air, reminding us of the the essential things in life that we often overlook. This exhibition offers its audience a space to be present. It’s a space of quiet contemplation and meditation in which we can allow ourselves to simply breathe.
Exhibition opened 04/04/2019
Ley Mboramwe’s life experience in the Congo, its suffering, beauty, politics, culture and economic circumstances is evident in his work. Through his work he has tried to convey rhythm, emotion and freedom of the human spirit. His silhouetted figures are not only a representation of the physical self, but rather an amalgamation of flesh and spirit. The spirit as something in search of a tangible tether to land
Exhibition Opened: 07/02/2019
Aimee Lindeque’s art can be concisely summarised as intricate and imaginative works created in an eclectic style. She describes her creative process as a form of intuitive auto-pilot wherein she allows images, textures and ideas from her imagination and subconscious to flow into works which have a dense doodle-like quality. Her work is partly inspired by the onslaught of imagery individuals experience in the information age.
Exhibition Opened: 07/02/2019
“My work makes use of satire and allegorical storytelling to air out the psychological remnants of personal, social and political disillusionment through artistic practice. I will intentionally reclaim the power of self-representation, celebrate the multiplicity of identity and the innate presence of the metaphysical in the Black Body through a sui generis of secrecy, intertexuality, and sensory abstraction.” – Legakwana Leo Makgekgenene
Exhibition Opened: 07/02/2019
Exploring contrasting tensions and liminal spaces with interest in notions of the ‘authentic self’, the necessity for disillusion in order for transformation and processes pertaining to the acceptance of the shadow, the work goes on a journey of deconstruction and reintegration. Fragments of canvas sewn and pinned together play with the layering and revealing of varying explorations of repetitive mark making. This seeks to highlight the cyclical and fragmented nature in which we conceive and understand ourselves and the world.
Exhibition Opened: 07/02/2019
“As a Sudanese, my past and present are marred with memories of loss, isolation, migration, exile, and forgotten heritage,” Salim explains. His paintings are a physical manifestation of a dialogue between different cultures. Behind his work lies a strong feeling that art is not merely something to look at, but also a tool that should be used to help facilitate this dialogue. Salim’s work represents an appreciation for his dual African and Islamic identity, and consequently, celebrates diversity in general.
Exhibition Opens: 07/02/2019
