Towards the end of our tenure at The Film Resource Unit based in Johannesburg, a concept around experimental film exhibitions was conceived with a team of colleagues. It was when the film industry was experiencing loss of capital investment, and funding for the arts was being dealt yet another blunted sword in the neck through governmental funding restrictions.
In order to find alternative means of “distributing non-mainstream film and video art content”, a crucial idea was to use of dilapidated and derelict ruins of the former San Souci Cinema in Kliptown, Soweto.
Being one of the oldest cinemas in one of the oldest townships in South Africa, the place possessed a nostalgic spirit that made it ideal for reminiscing on the historical and contemporary receptions of cinematic arts in townships.
On one of those barely erects slab of chapped walls, with ageing peeled paint scribbled with decades of expletives and epithets of rage, graffiti art that resembled gangland tags, we painted a portion in white for the projection of African Classic Cinema.
A curated selection of 35mm films by legendary directors such as Djibril Mambety. Lionel Ngakane, Haile Gerima and Ousemane Sembene were screened on these dilapidated walls over a period of five evenings to an excited community that received the spectacle with jovial awe.
That experience was exhilarating and incredible for both the community and the team, as it had proven that through art repurposing otherwise disused and abandoned structures, new space for engaging with art.
A plethora of under-resourced communities that have otherwise been characterized by violence and lack of artistic initiatives, are looking at such exhibitions as beginnings of art as activism, thus spawning social transformation.
The San Souci exhibition created an unintended yet robust launch-pad for more experimentation around my dogged persistence with creating video art experiences steeped in real experiences of communities engaged, as well a resourceful blend of innovation that has seen video art exhibitions in a shack, at a taxi rank and soon an abandoned Transport Museum in Warmer Pan, Johannesburg.
An eventual culmination of events saw a series of video poems titled PROJECTIONS OF/IN ISOLATION being crafted in not merely coincidental a manner, but as a continued personal interrogation of how audio-visual media can exit the enclosures of cinema houses, darkened rooms and lecture halls.
But what is the point of taking a painting off a gallery wall, and pinning it against a lavatory wall in vacant hostel or train station, or a church for that matter?
This experiment which will see disused and abandoned building becoming exhibition spaces is geared at decentralizing conservative and traditional gallery and museum spaces, towards a creation of secular spaces for appreciating creative output, and yet, far and beyond artists’ studios.
The impetus to create new externalizing galleries for human impulses calls for innovative way of shifting and decolonizing perspectives, where art is tangibly aware of its viewers and viewers aware of their connection in collating meanings to be attached to the art.
Artists often disappear into limbo of punitive neglect from social and art circles having not has the opportunity to showcase their brand of genius or insanity, and this can be circumvented through initiatives that break moulds with traditional exhibition techniques and trends.
Over the course of approximately four years, Covid-19 has wrought unprecedented social and economic change across the global art world. Yet the widespread suspension of social and economic norms has also opened up a space to rethink our way of creating and exhibiting art.
It was during this period that video poet, Khahliso Matela, devised an experiment of video poems dubbed Projections Of/In Isolation, which entail a variety of visual compositions projected on corrugated steel walls of shacks that are common forms of residential architecture for vast communities of South Africa.
The visuals projected entail service delivery protests as symbolic of an expression of resilience for squatter camp based peoples from various walks of life. And currently, Khahliso Matela is working on an enquiry that seeks to uncover what would be symbolic in projecting similar images of protestations on walls of “a constructed shack sculpture” in a an abandoned warehouse.
In Kokosi, people have discovered that art can educate, entertain and provide hope in these sordid times, and know that creative practitioners are devising practical responses to the pressing need to rethink relations in the world. This awareness has allowed many to marvel at some of the Projections, even though the concept is undeniably foreign to many people.
This series of video poems are an interrogation of emotional impacts of isolation on a society whose places of residence do not allow for luxuries such as social distancing and sufficient health care. These projections are both testaments of a cluttered life forced into smaller spaces that confine and hinder our projections of fear, awe and mere discomfort.
To further augment this bourgeoning concept, EXT Lab Media has over the past three years been conducting similar informal exhibitions of documentary films Merafong, Welverdiend, where various artists’ collectives gather to discuss a variety of critical sociological issues and interrogate themes prevalent in films and video art exhibited.
With guest filmmakers in attendance, these exhibitions have become forums that have bred a generation of artists who perceive collective creative output as being essential for enriching people with knowledge about contemporary social challenges.
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