Shifting Territories
This
past weekend saw the peeling of what could have been the gallery’s most important
exhibition at the KZNSA, shiftingterritories.
The
importance of the exhibition, for various reasons, rests firmly in its name. It
was a particularly challenging engagement, for both the artists and the
audience. shifting territories was a
group effort by the Durban’s notorious streets artists whose output was
diligently knitted through by the curator, Doung Jahangeer of the organization
dala.
‘’ Street Art doesn’t speak TO
its immediate environment, it doesn’t speak ABOUT its immediate environment. It
JOINS the environment, attaching itself and all of its ego and contradictions
and politics, forcing itself to be seen, experienced, witnessed, and ultimately
reacted with. It claims its space unashamedly, forcing us to question its
existence, to contest its existence, and when we cannot provide any adequate
rationalization for why it shouldn’t exist, we must eventually accept it’’.
At
its root, the concept sought to probe at how graffiti would respond to the
‘’institution’’, the gallery. After thorough interrogation of this thematic, it
had evolved to an enigmatic experience for the artists, the same experience to
be later felt by the audience. And that’s exactly the point to shift the known,
the obvious and the everyday to something slightly, well, slightly unexpected.
Altogether
to shift the territory of the artist and that of the audience, to shift the
metaphysical and psychological territories that inform the way we engage with
territory in its broadest sense. About their methodology;
‘’ the writers, were also
asked to blindfold themselves and to let their pen traverse paper, apprehending
the space of the paper in a movement that could only feel, understand the
distances and the orientation – much as we cross the city’’
There’s
something to be said about the important relationship between the curator and
the participating artists, which is that both their works are immensely
informed by and applied on the streets.
''Power, when conceived of as constitutive of the public sphere, as inherent in the categorisations and legalities which influence our reading, allows us to understand how a city is also a textual economy. Street Art is a fundamental, transgressive, part of this economy. Its transgression is both physical and visual. Physically it appropriates, dislodges, superimposes and subverts.’’
Doung,
the curator, has been doggedly exploring a specific walkway from peri-urban Cato
Manor to downtown Durban for the past decade in weird and wonderful ways. The
graf artists on the other hand are from diverse backgrounds with mad years
under their caps, collectively spanning over forty years of experience. All
this has informed a new narrative that they’re forging, individually. They have
come from points of difference and they’ve used this difference to set a common
agenda that they can all interrogate as practitioners.
The
opening night of the exhibition was filled with ambiguity and loss for the most
part. And that triggered the audience to start the journey of finding
themselves within the frame of the sketches and broken lines painted on the
floor of the gallery. Yes, most of the art was on the floor, and on that point the
boys had this to say, ‘’
The final composition involving several street artists - on the floor of the
gallery - requires a reading path across its surface. To read one must
actualise a path, a vector, a direction over the composition’’
Perhaps
deservingly so, considering this statement ‘’our
movement within a city, the way we interact with its streetscape, its surfaces,
its asperities and ruptures, is a reading.’’
The staging of
the exhibition at the KZNSA and its theme has too much to do with the shifting territory
of the gallery itself as it sheds its conservative heritage and beckons the
young voices asking new questions, shaping new perspectives and shifting the
territory of the white walls called the gallery.
