Sheriff Hlobo
Joost O. Bosland of the Michael Stevenson gallery recently chastised us for our recent run of U.S.-focused arts coverage. (This, right after the In the Lab founder let us have it for getting the description of his site slightly amiss.) So while we're nursing our wounds, check out Johannesburg, South Africa's Nicholas Hlobo, whose first solo exhibition at Micahel Stevenson is full of grand gesture installations that evoke idiosyncratic personal histories and unnamable inner conflicts and resolutions.
The show is titled Izele, which means "someone or something has given birth." But, according to the Michael Stevenson website, Hlobo insists on a double entendre in which it can also mean an adding to or a filling up. Hlobo plays with concepts of birth, conception, and sex throughout the show. Specifically, Hlobo deals with the question of how sexual minorities engage with the larger society. Says Hlobo, "Gay men have always reserved some space for fun and celebration of who they are. However, to some this doesn't come easy--the performance becomes a weapon through which they fight the heavy baggage that comes with being gay." Hlobo completes his performative installations through the use of evocative materials such as rubber, silicon, soap, and ribbon in order to engage ideas of "comfort, shelter, protection, beauty, cleanliness, sacred space, pleasure and fantasy."
We knew we liked this cat when he said this, according to Artthrob: "The lack of arts writers, particularly black arts writers, is compounded by the minimal media attention allocated to the arts, as well as the lack of institutions offering specific courses for writing or curating." He's talking about South Africa, but sounds to us like the U.S., Canada, most of West Africa, and several other countries we're familiar with.
Hlobo was born in Cape Town in 1975 and has been seen in group exhibitions throughout South Africa, Europe and the U.S. He is the winner of the Tollman Award for Visual Art 2006. The show ends 16 September.
7 September 2006