A LABOUR OF LOVE
December 3, 2015–July 24, 2016
Schaumainkai 29
60594 Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Curated by Gabi Ngcobo (lecturer Wits School of Arts, co-curator 32nd Bienal de São Paulo) and Yvette Mutumba (curator Weltkulturen Museum, co-founder Contemporary And).
A LABOUR OF LOVE presents over 150 works produced by black South African artists in the 1970s and 1980s, which form part of the Weltkulturen Museum’s seminal collection of contemporary art from Africa.
The exhibition focuses on a key part of the Weltkulturen Museum’s contemporary art collection: 600 works from South Africa, which the museum acquired in 1986. It includes works by internationally renowned artists such as Peter Clarke, Lionel Davis, David Koloane, John Muafangejo and Sam Nhlengethwa.
The selection of works from the museum’s collection is informed by different ways of reading the notion of love in the works themselves, as well as by their historical contexts: love between man and woman, woman and woman, man and man; the love of a mother and child, brother and sister, activist and fellow campaigner. But the works also reference forms of love in complex hierarchical relationships—for example, between missionary and missionised, mentor and student, or patron and artist, where the dynamics driven by religion, faith, politics, activism and economics play a major role. The exhibition invokes these diverse definitions of love, yet simultaneously evokes the passion and commitment behind the production of these works and the creation of the Frankfurt collection.
A LABOUR OF LOVE offers a contemporary perspective on this special collection through new works produced by Gabi Ngcobo and four young South African art students investigating the collection and its specific history since mid-2014. This perspective is further expanded by new works by acclaimed South African artist Sam Nhlengethwa during a residency at the Weltkulturen Museum in July 2015. Nhlengethwa’s works from the 1980s are already part of the Frankfurt collection. Their reassessment and their historical context is visibly informed by the perspective of a contemporary witness.
The accompanying catalogue includes new essays by Yvette Mutumba, Gabi Ngcobo, Ciraj Rassool, Same Mdluli and Neo Muyanga, as well as new interviews with, among others, Lionel Davis, David Koloane, Peter Clarke, Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa and Charles Nkosi, plus extensive image material. Published in German and English by Kerber Verlag.
Participating artists: Sam Nhlengethwa, as well as Gabi Ngcobo and Wits School of Arts students Michelle Monareng, Matshelane Xhakaza, Chad Cordeiro and Nathaniel Sheppard
Press contact: weltkulturen.presse [at] stadt-frankfurt.de / T +49 69 212 45115
Press material: www.weltkulturenmuseum.de (texts, images and films for download under PRESS)
Exhibition support: Funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes) and generously supported by Hessische Kulturstiftung, Lufthansa Cargo, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witswatersrand Johannesburg, ARTE, Contemporary And (C&), Frankfurter Rundschau, Journal Frankfurt.
