Showing posts with label installation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label installation. Show all posts

Sunday, 8 April 2012

Nicholas Hlobo




 
<>


It's hard to figure out what the giant piece of art is, as it slumbers in front of you. The large-scale sculpture Ingubo Yesizwe by this year's Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art, Nicholas Hlobo is now on exhibition at the Michael Stevenson gallery in Woodstock, after traveling the great seas and back again.

The sculpture was the centrepiece of Hlobo's exhibition at Tate Modern, London, which ran from December 2008 to March 2009 in the Level 2 Gallery. Made of leather off-cuts, rubber, ribbons and gauze, with an underlying steel structure, the work resembles a great, slouching creature, measuring 30 metres from its head to the tip of its long tail.

The title of the work, Ingubo Yesizwe, translates as 'clothes or blanket of the nation', referring to the Xhosa ritual whereby cowhide is used to cover a corpse before burial to protect the deceased as they enter the afterlife. The Tate Modern exhibition curator, Kerryn Greenberg, wrote: 'Ingubo Yesizwe implies protection, integration, and the potential for transformation, both of the materials Hlobo uses and the country he lives in.
 

visual diary
 
Thoba, utsale umnxeba” (2010)
Nicholas Hlobo’s handmade costumes serve the function of helping to establish his character within his performance pieces. In the piece above, the title of which means “to lower onself and make a call” in Xhosa, Hlobo wears his robe and cap in meditative concentration in order to communicate with “the space, the museum, the gallery, the location of the museum, the culture — the culture is almost foreign to me,” as he says in a interview. Hlobo’s practice includes sculptural pieces which sometimes incorporate clothing as ways to challenge or interrogate gender, sexuality, and culture and relationship of each to different notions such as comfort, pleasure, or protection.
dragon

ingubu 1
 
 


Sunday, 18 March 2012

Ai WeiWei

What interesting views on sculpture and installation.
i love it when one artwork takes over an entire space and does so effectively.

snake ceiling

Sunday, 11 March 2012

Carsten Höller

What a cool guy. love his work. first heard of him through Design Indaba.