South African work showcased at National Arts Festival
Three showcases of important South African work are on offer at this year’s National Arts Festival, 27 June to 7 July 2013: a spotlight on the work of playwright Mike van Graan, acclaimed work from the Market Theatre, and new work produced by the PE Opera House and funded by the Eastern Cape Provincial Arts and Culture Council. The Market Theatre partners with the National Arts Festival in presenting key historical works.
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Life of Forms: Project Space opens to the public
Friday 28 June at 18H30. Performance by El Warsha Troupe (Cairo) at 19H00.
The GoetheonMain project space becomes a satellite venue for hosting exhibitions, stagings and interventions related to JWTC, conceptualised by Zen Marie. Participants of the workshop are invited to extend their theoretical work space, through visual, audial, performed and spatial dimensions. The JWTC Project Space at Goethe on Main, will be an experimental contemporary art space, a vehicle for curating theory. Somewhere between exhibition and symposium, the project space at the 2013 JWTC aims to explore the correspondence and discontinuities between theory and practice, in ways that interrogate the categories of form and content.
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In Conversation With...
Antony Gormley: The Body as Shelter
by Karlyn De Jongh
Antony Gormley (1950, UK) makes 3-dimensional works that deal directly with the presence of his own body. Gormley’s own body is the point of departure to discuss the human body in general, which he understands as a place of memory and transformation. Most of his early works are based on the process of casting his own body; in these works Gormley’s body functions as subject, tool and material. His more recent works deal with the body in a more abstract or indirect way and are concerned with the human condition. These large scale works explore the collective body and the relationship between self and other.
Karlyn De Jongh: In an interview with Declan McGonagle, you have spoken about a transcendental or utopian reading of your work as being ‘too easy.’ What do you mean here by ‘too easy?’ How do you understand a transcendental reading? And how do you read your work?
Antony Gormley: Religious art and specifically Christian images of the crucifixion are icons of suffering which promise escape. I think we’ve evolved from that position of needing idols that give us succour. My works are instruments for spatial awareness. When I say ‘spatial awareness,’ I don’t just mean space out there; I mean a reconciliation of spatial proprioception with space at large. Sometimes I use scale, as in the Lelystad project in Flevoland, Netherlands, or with Field (1990), to open up a certain reflexivity in the viewer. This has nothing to do with the old economies.
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