Soft-launch of Goya and Africa, our first online exhibition
Last week saw the soft launch at Boschendal Art Gallery in South Africa’s Western Cape Province of a working draft of our new digital-first exhibition, Goya and South Africa. The exhibition is being co-produced and co-curated with Brundyn Arts and Culture, an arts and education consultancy based in Cape Town, with input from South African teachers and facilitators Clint Bowers (Institute for the Healing of Memories, Cape Town), Lynda Leibbrandt (IES International School of Helderberg), and Chuma Nozewu (Lalela, Cape Town, and South African Education and Environment Project). Some fifty 17- and 13-year students from a nearby school and an after-school arts programme run by Lalela, visited Boschendal with their teachers find out about the exhibition and give us feedback.
Goya & Africa is designed to introduce young people with little knowledge of art history or access to art galleries to the paintings and prints of the 17th century Spanish artist Francisco de Goya, and to works by contemporary African artists including William Kentridge, Roméo Mivekannin, Grace Nyahangare, Johannes Phokela, Athi-Patra Ruga, Yinka Shonibare and Diane Victor. A small temporary display of these works and information about the online exhibition has been installed at Boschendal and will be visited by other school groups over the next few months.
Goya’s paintings and prints are some of the most powerful artworks ever produced about human responses to conflict, poverty and violence. The exhibition shows some of them in dialogue with those of contemporary Africans, bridging the visions of great artists working centuries, continents, and cultures apart. In four virtual galleries entitled “unsafe”, “broken promise”, “belief vs reason”, and “reimagining the future.” The exhibition showcases each artist’s singular imaginary at the same time as the many the points of contact between them all. Some contemporary works quote directly from Goya, but more often the display reveals similar responses to difficult histories and to the search for humour and optimism against a backdrop of anxiety and uncertainty.
The exhibition website also includes short films in which each artist speaks about their work, and Teachers’ Resources including timelines, artists bios, activity sheets and videos discussing the different print-making techniques employed in many of the works.
As is clear in the video above, the students’ and teachers’ responses to the content were overwhelmingly positive. Co-curator Lindsay Hendricks spent two hours with each group, introducing them to Goya and the contemporary African artists featured in the exhibition, and showing the students how to access the material on their mobile phones. For most of the young visitors, it was the first time they had seen works by most of the artists or visited an art gallery other than Boschendal. For many, it was also their first encounter with prints and print-making.
Athena and Brundyn Arts and Culture will roll the project out to schools around South Africa – and hopefully in other nations in Africa and around the world - over the next few months, collecting and responding to feedback via a brief survey on the website. The draft website will go live in early May and the plan is spend the rest of the year reviewing both the content and design on the basis of this feedback, launching the final digital-first exhibition to a wider public and press at Investec Cape Town Art Fair next year.