African Adventure, by Jane Alexander

                                                                        

                                                                  

                                                                   African Adventure(1999-2002)                                                                                                                               

                                                                                               by Jane Alexander

Jane Alexander (born 1959) is a South African artist and sculptor best known for her sculpture, “Butcher Boys” which can be considered her response to the state of emergency in South Africa in the late 1980s. She creates sculptures, installations, and photomontages which are based on her own perceptions of actual events, people, or issues that occur in the world around her. Most of her pieces are based and influenced on the political and social overview of South Africa. (Wikipedia)

(Tate M.) Alexander rose to prominence in the early 1990s at the end of the apartheid era, as South Africa was opening up following Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the first democratic elections. The country quickly became a fashionable tourist destination and an entry point to the rest of the continent. Travel agencies like African Adventure in Cape Town, after which this work is titled, emerged in response to the demand.

African Adventure comprises thirteen figures on a rectangle of red earth, which references the infertile soil found in Bushmanland, an arid area of South Africa historically occupied by the indigenous KhoiSan people. The green walls and chandeliers evoke the British Officers’ Mess in the Castle of Good Hope, a fortress constructed by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century and the oldest surviving colonial building in South Africa, where this work was first installed.

The objects positioned among the figures include sickles, machetes, a Victorian christening dress, boxes for explosives, a steel car and a worker’s overalls. These relate to themes such as migration, trade, labour, colonial legacy, conflict and faith. But African Adventure does not present a particular moral or political message, as is often expected from work made in South Africa in the immediate post-apartheid era. Like the hybrid human-animal characters who are both confrontational and vulnerable, the work is ambiguous, moving between realism and metaphor, mixing the everyday with the uncanny.

Curated by Kerryn Greenberg

I belive that the strength of this work lays in its ambiguity and in the artist’s ability to give birth to a surreal and bothersome environment. I’ve seen the composition as a concentrate of absurd and defeat, hidden beyond the attempt to label reality for “recognise” it better. The work seems very cinematic or theatrical but in the same time all the characters seem in a very passive posture, they are subjected to reality/life, they don’t participate, they are made by, they don’t interact with it. In a way is showing how putting labels or trying to force an identity can’t really identify humans/animals but can alienate and force them to fit in categories like they misfit in their modern suits…like a world forced to progress in the wrong direction. (Dan Cirneala)