Contemporary South African Art and the ARCHIVE
South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2013
Torre di Porta Nuova
Arsenale Nuovissimo
Venice
June 1–November 24, 2013
ernst.hilger [at] hilger.at
hilger.at
Curator: Brenton Maart
Cameron Platter was born in 1978, Johannesburg. He graduated with a BFA in painting from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, in 2001. Recent exhibitions include Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rencontres Internationales, The Centre Georges Pomidou, Paris and Haus Der Kultur, Berlin; Le Biennale de Dakar 2010, Dakar, Senegal; Coca-Colonization, Marte Museum, El Salvador; and Absent Heroes, Iziko South African National Gallery.
He makes stories, pictures, and objects that are documents of contemporary morality; exploring a reality stranger than fiction, through fantasy, satire and subculture, using themes appropriated from the universal concerns of sex, love, violence, beauty, advertising, food, battle scenes, pornography, writing, politics, religion, crime, dancing, lust, greed, things falling apart, and spaceships.
Platter fills the ordinary and marginal with incendiary new meaning. Working from everyday experience with subjects overlooked or considered delinquent, sordid and lowbrow, he reconnoiters notions and concepts on the outside fringes of South Africa’s popular culture.
His work appears in the permanent collection of MoMA, New York; The FRAC Centre, Orleans, France; and the Iziko South African National Gallery. His work has been highlighted in The New York Times, Vicemagazine, NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, Artforum, and Art South Africa.
He lives and works in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Gallery Hilger has represented him and shown his work since 2003.