12 February 2002

• Selection from the 19th World Wide Video Festival in Cape Town
• The Artists

Selection from the 19th World Wide Video Festival in Cape Town: 18 February - 10 March 2002

On 18 February a special exhibition will open at the Gallery of the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in Cape Town (South Africa) with installations by Minnette Vári, Tracey Rose, Matthew Hindley, Fernando Alvim, and Malcolm Payne. Work by these artists has been presented at recent editions of the World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam and was greeted enthusiastically by both press and audiences.

The exhibition is also the starting signal for the development of this gallery as a venue for media art. According to initiator Malcolm Payne, an artist and a professor at the Michaelis School, visual art involving new media is seldom being shown in South Africa. There is no infrastructure, as there are very few exhibition platforms and a general lack of equipment and means.

The collaboration between the Michaelis School and the World Wide Video Festival as coproducer and the Dutch HIVOS (Humanistic Institute for Development) as sponsor, gives African artists the opportunity to develop and exhibit new work, not just at international platforms like the World Wide Video Festival, but regionally as well.

The Artists

Minnette Vári (°1968, Pretoria, South Africa)
She will show her work Chimera, which she made especially for last year's World Wide Video Festival: a series of dream images about the history of her native country, projected onto transparent veils. Chimera is the fire-breathing, man-eating female monster from Greek mythology, half-lion, half-goat, but also a symbol of deceit and delusion. Vári shows herself naked with a goat's mask like the Chimera and her image slowly melts in with animated images from the Voortrekkers monument, a narrative bas-relief depicting the Great Trek of white farmers into South Africa (1835 - 1854). After the abolishment of Apartheid the monument was claimed by the Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging as an important national symbol, a claim which leaves this white South African artist with mixed feelings. She both loves the monument and is embarrassed by it.

Tracey Rose (°1974, Durban, South Africa)
In a playful and intelligent manner performance and video artist Tracey Rose deals with her experiences as a 'coloured person' - someone of mixed blood - during the era that Apartheid divided South African society. In her installation Ode to Leoness, presented at the festival, a dancer and a goldfish keep changing colour, shape and even sometimes location while the landscape and other participants remain constant.

Matthew Hindley (1974, Cape Town, South Africa)
Hindley's installation Allow me to Observe shows video images that were created in a rather unusual way. Via sensors on fingertips connected to a head-mounted camera only those things are recorded that excite the person wearing the camera. Filming is done through the tactile senses, so literally with feeling instead of with the eye, which makes for some pretty surprising images. It turns out that housekeeping is not at all exciting to Hindley's aunt, that to a friend of his choosing the music to accompany love-making is more exciting than his girlfriend undressing and that with Hindley himself the camera is activated more often when he is talking than when he is just watching. At this exhibition Hindley will show recordings made in both Amsterdam and Cape Town.

Fernando Alvim (°1963, Luanda, Angola)
The work of Fernando Alvim, an Angolan artist from Portuguese descent, is characterized by a strong political involvement and a fascination with the complex historical relationship between the African continent and the west. At the Cape Town exhibition his film Guela uanga/War and art of elsewhere will be shown, an artistic documentary on the culture of warfare based on the war that has been raging in Angola for over forty years. The film reflects the sometimes contradictory views of 14 artists about the traces the war has left in memory.

Malcolm Payne (°1946, Pretoria, South Africa)
This artist, a professor in Cape Town and initiator of the Cape Town exhibition, has shown installations at the 16th and 18th World Wide Video Festival. In his latest work Anthem Malcolm Payne shows black and white images of his own face and fragmented takes of the 'Company Gardens' in Cape Town on two opposite screens. The alternating images react to each other and thus form a visual dialogue, as it were, with underlying motifs such as 'reflection' and 'water'.

The exhibition in Cape Town was made possible in part by the support of the Dutch Embassy in Pretoria and Public Eye.