KINSHASA – the Invisible City
Do yourselves a favour and go and hang out at the Johannesburg Art gallery in Hillbrow next to Noord Taxi Rank& for suburbians it may feel a little hairy getting there but once you’re in it’s an amazing space to hang out in for a few hours. Just wind your windows up and do it.
For more on the Johannesburg Art gallery click here
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A friend of ours who affectionately calls it KIN, once said that Kinshasa was the scariest place that they had ever been to, but, he added, it also had an attraction to it that made him go back for more, despite his fear. This exhibition seems to examine this very ‘two-sided” experience of KINSHASA and sounds like a fascinating look at URBANITY in Africa. We encourage everyone to go to the exhibition to further inter-cultural understanding in Africa. GO GO GO. It opens on the 11 June.
The Johannesburg Art Gallery is please to be hosting the exhibition: Kinshasa, the Imaginary City. The advent of this exhibition in Johannesburg is appropriate not only due to the increasing interest in various forms of urbanity especially in African cities but also because of the need for greater dialogue between the various communities in Johannesburg and other African cities. It is also relevant in light of the large number of Congolese in Johannesburg and the cultural influences that this influx has brought.
The exhibition was commissioned and realized with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community for the 9th International Architecture Biennale of Venice 2004. The Belgian pavilion received the Golden Lion for the best country’s pavilion.
Kinshasa, the Imaginary City is not solely focusing on the city’s material infrastructure or the urban colonial legacy. Rather, it comments upon Kinshasa’s urbanity, which exists beyond the city’s architecture. Underneath the surface of the material city lurks a second, invisible city that exists in the autochthonous mind as a mirroring reality of the visible world. The exhibition explores the constant transactions that take place between these two levels. The exhibition and the accompanying book are the culmination of many years of field research. This anthropological approach aims at stimulating the ongoing debate on the postcolonial African city as a salient site for the renegotiation of ‘modern’ citizenship and for the development of ‘alternative modernities’.
RELIGIOUS TV CHANNELS
Over the past decades Kinshasa has witnessed the rise of a whole range of Christian fundamentalist churches. Many of these churches have their own private TV channels, broadcasting religious music, masses and prayer sessions.
The TV itself, omnipresent in the living room but also in more public spaces such as bars and restaurants, greatly contributes to the religious transfiguration of the public sphere.
SOAPS
The religious TV channels regularly broadcast soap series and films produced in Nigeria and Ghana. Certain films – such as Karishika, the Queen of Demons – have strongly impacted on Kinshasa’s collective imagination. The figure of Karishika has become emblematic of Kinshasa’s witch-children. As such, West-African fiction has grafted itself upon Kinshasa’s collective imagination and has contributed in its daily lived realities.
The River
Sunk, immobilized, stuck in the mud, most of the large boats at the riverbanks of Kinshasa were dismantled and turned into squatters’ camps since the 70’s.
In spite of the spectacular architecture of decay around the river, an informal economy has given birth to multiple technologies of fixing and repairing. It forms a constant reminder of the productivity of degradation and its capacity to invent new material structures and generate social ties.
The Body
In the African city one of the main infrastructural unit is the human body. For Kinois men and women the body is a basic tool in the cultural realization of oneself, and in the creation of the city’s private and public spheres. Certainly in Kinshasa’s youth cultures, identity is expressed corporeally, through dress and dance. The physical body, with its specific rhythms, thus determines the rhythms of the city’s social body and generates the relational networks through which the urban space is shaped.
Death
The broader socio-political crisis has created a general atmosphere of connivance, familiarity and interchangeableness between the living and the dead. It zombifies and turns the living into ‘living dead’, while the dead, with disembodiment, increasingly seem to expand their presence into the realm of the living.
Witch Children
In Kinshasa, children are increasingly accused of witchcraft. They are held responsible for all forms of misfortune befalling their relatives. Children are thought to become witches by accepting a gift from an adult person, often in public spaces like markets and shops.
At night, the adult will come back to claim a counter-gift in the form of human meat. From that moment onwards, at least in the imaginary world of the occult, the child will have to ‘kill’ in order to pay off the debt.
As a result of these accusations, thousands of children undergo exorcizing rituals in the churches, but their reinsertion in their families often remains problematic. Many children end up living in the street.
SemEnce
The ýglises de rýveil have launched the phenomenon of semence, seed, under the motto: “Give to God and He will give you back”. References to semence on advertisements for churches and shops abound in every street.
The notion of semence illustrates the shift from the never-ending flow of gifts and reciprocal transactions between the members of the extended family to a more urban monetary logic as it is promoted within the new church movements.
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5 May 2006
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE’S ACCLAIMED BLACK BOX/CHAMBRE NOIRE FOR JOHANNESBURG ART GALLERY
Internationally renowned South African artist William Kentridge’s latest project Black Box/Chambre Noire is to be exhibited at the Johannesburg Art Gallery from Sunday, May 7. Sponsored by Deutsche Bank, the work was commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and shown to huge acclaim at the gallery from October 2005 until January this year.
Says Martin Kingston – Executive Chairman of Deutsche Bank in South Africa “Deutsche Bank in South Africa are delighted to be sponsoring William Kentridge’s latest project along with the Johannesburg Art Gallery and Deutsche Guggenheim. Kentridge is recognized as one of the most important artists of our time and his ability to blend formal technique with an emotionally complex understanding of socio-political history will hopefully appeal to many people.”
Mozart’s The Magic Flute and the German genocide on the Herero in Namibia are all themes in Black Box/Chambre Noire in which Kentridge creates a mechanical, miniaturised world theatre that is also an elegy to forgotten history.
Says JAG’s Clive Kellner about the coup of this exhibition coming to Jozi: “The Guggenheim Foundation, Deutsche Guggenheim and Deutsche Bank sponsorship of the exhibition affords the opportunity for a local audience to be able to see and engage this extraordinary exhibition. Kentridge is one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists and as a son of Johannesburg, the Johannesburg Art Gallery is pleased to be hosting the exhibition”.
In addition to his body of work exploring the history of Africa and South Africa, Kentridge has also long exhibited an affinity to German art and culture, creating works inspired by or in response to German visual artists and literary figures.
Within this contextual framework, the artist began to explore the history of German colonialism in Africa through the lens of its colonial era cinema. The process was undertaken while Kentridge was preparing to direct a major production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. This work would lead Kentridge to Black Box/Chambre Noire, which explores the darker implications of that era’s philosophical legacy.
Kentridge’s work reflects a deep engagement with issues of history and memory. He uses reworked charcoal and pastel drawings as the primary basis for his films. Kentridge is also known for his collaborations with the Handspring Puppet Company, with whom he has crafted complex, multimedia performances combining puppets, animation, and live performance. In theatrical productions and video sculptures, he has employed objects and their cast shadows, the puppet and the hand of the puppeteer, as well as his signature traces and erasures.
Black Box/Chambre Noire consists of animated films, kinetic sculptural objects, drawings and a mechanised theatre in miniature. In the work, Kentridge considers the term “black box” in three senses: a “black box” theatre, a “chambre noire” as it relates to photography and the “black box” flight data recorder used to record information in an airline disaster.
Kentridge explores constructions of history and meaning, while examining the processes of grief, guilt and culpability as well as the shifting vantage points of political engagement and responsibility. The development of visual technologies and the history of colonialism intersect in Black Box/Chambre Noire through Kentridge’s reflection on the history of the German colonial presence in Africa, in particular the 1904 German massacre of the Hereros in Southwest Africa (now Namibia).
Says Kentridge: “”I’m looking at German colonisation in reference to Namibia for the exhibition. I went there to look at the place where there was a great massacre of the Herero by the Germans from 1904-1907. Some of that archival material and footage shot in the mountain where the genocide began is in the final piece.”
The curator of Black Box/Chambre Noire is Maria-Christina Villaseýor, Associate Curator of Film and Media Arts and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Black Box/Chambre Noire opens at the Johannesburg Art Gallery on Sunday, May 7th. There is a press preview from noon where Kentridge will be available for interviews. A Deutsche Bank representative and the curator will be present. The exhibition opens to the public at 6pm. It will run until the 9th July 2006
