Creative Cape Town

“We want artists to go home with a real South African story” says /A WORD OF ART about its new international artists’ residency programme. And then it puts artists out on the street. Strange exchange? Not if you understand ‘street’ in the context of this creative collective.

We’re not talking the uninformed, un-awesome, bipolar debate as seen here here.  We’re talking grass-roots, grounded art that goes beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’– art that is neither inaccessible nor numb, yet still niche. “So very Cape Town,” you might say. “So new contemporary civilian movement,” we say.

‘New Brow’ is an unofficial term coined for a genre of contemporary underground art penetrating popular culture. It’s also an award-winning documentary film on the subject.  While stemming from the same name source, New Brow advocates neither high brow which can go over heads, nor its reactionary term, lowbrow which tends to pull down.  Rather, get down, it suggests – get busy, get dirty, and do it in public.

Your art, that is.  Which is what happened on 14 January, 2011.

/A WORD OF ART has been jamming aesthetic and meaning together in an old building in the semi-industrial area of Woodstock for some time, and counts as its neighbours other creative centres as  Biblophilia  Bookshop and Rooiwolf Studio.  But on this day, the live-in, international artist residency kicked off in typical creative industry style with a well-attended public debut-cum-house warming party called Guten Tag.

We Are Visual Gallery participated, and 3 visual artists exhibited and created in the space using materials from the city streets. A 3-day exhibition of paper works from Hamburg artist squat the Gaengeviertel and local artists including Tyler B Murphy, Sindiso Nyoni, Michelle Son and Faith47 followed. Owner Ricky Lee Gordon was pleased at the public response.

“The show was a huge success with over 800 people attending and staying to party and dance till 4 in the morning, I was left completely overwhelmed.  My highlight was that we had such a diverse mix of people; young old, black, white.  Everyone was so responsive to the artwork.”

The residency programme is now in full swing, envisioned as a way to widen perspectives, inspire and open doors to greater exposure, new markets, networking, exchanges and collaborations.

Participants of the residency programme get sneak peaks of the city (like behind-the-scenes tours of The Aquarium), document and publish their time on /A WORD OF ART website,  and participate in its Write on Africa Community art project.

image (c) TIKA

Meet TIKA, a globe-trotting artist from Zurich whose first whiff of Cape town included “the warm air with the smell of sandalwood, sea breeze and a bit of smoke from the wood fire on the hills the day before”.  TIKA already loves Cape Town, despite (or perhaps because of) finding it ‘contradictory’.

TIKA takes her artist name from AntibioTIKA (German for antibiotics).  “I liked the letters and their sound. Also antibiotics rescued me several times. Later on I found out that TIKA is Hindi-slang for tilaka – the different blessing-signs Hindus wear mostly on their forehead. It also can be understood as a symbol of power to protect the third eye.”

Her artist statement is aligned with many of Creative Cape Town readers’ concerns and interests :

“What occupies my mind most is the diversity of points of views on life.  Like development of cities. How this affects spaces for self-determined living and projects. How buildings full of history get ripped down for glass cubes. What effects globalisation has on regional and traditional habits and architecture. Vanity and love of people. How long and short at the same time a life can be and the before and after of it. I like to read about sagas and myth and also about the written-down and told-to-be-true history. Also the actual circumstances in politics/economy/environment.”

Watch out for TIKA’s imminent solo show «KAPTIKA» of art produced during her residency as well as creative work from other resident artists in the near future.