Mondays are a treat every two weeks or so, because of the great snacks at the AVA. This Monday was no exception, I waited outside till the speeches were over and then hunted down the people with the trays, using two hands to snatch and shove.

When I finally made it inside, the first thing I saw was a huge work by Mario Pissarra. It is generally considered bad form for a curator to put his own work on a show, especially when it is the first thing you see. But putting this aside, it was a large piece with letters made up of sand, ceramic, stones spelling Assimilado, apparently a Portuguese word meaning assimilated. Or more specifically, in the context of Portuguese colonialism, the assimilado was the colonised individual whom the system deemed to have succeeded in the process of stepping up the civilisational ladder. How appropriate I thought, as this is what we had throughout the whole show. A bunch of artists being quietly sucked into a modernist vision of Africa. Assimilated. A place where Cecil Skotnes once stood. A place where the word Authenticity gets battered around. Indeed, I don't think I saw a criticism of the assimilado in the show, or even a self-awareness.

All these artists are producing is tourist art that expresses an old and outdated concept of Africa South, a tail end of the colonial project. (I'm generalising here, for which I apologise, but sometimes on a group show it is necessary)

Afterwards, I thought about the Gugulective and their recent show Titled/Untitled, where they brought a shebeen to blank projects (the only part of the two part exhibition I managed to get to), and sold bottles of Baas Lager. How right they were, we still drink that stuff down.

Labels: Africa South, ava, Gugulective, Mario Pissarra