Zwelethu Mthethwa: Photographs by Zwelethu Mthethwa is the artist’s long-awaited first comprehensive monograph, providing an overview of his work to-date and featuring the stunning portraits that have brought him international acclaim.
The book, published by the Aperture Foundation in New York and distributed by Thames and Hudson outside the United States, will be launched in South Africa at iArt Gallery in collaboration with the Book Lounge, who will be stocking the book. In keeping with the impact of this important publication, mural-size photographs by the artist will be shown for the first time in South Africa.
A portion of the money raised by the event will go towards the funding of a scholarship, co-supervised by Zwelethu Mthethwa and a leading South African University.
About the Artist
Since Apartheid’s fall in 1994, South African photography has exploded from the grip of censorship onto the world stage. A key figure in this movement is Zwelethu Mthethwa, whose stunning portraits powerfully frame black South Africans as dignified and defiant, even under the duress of social and economic hardship. Working in urban and rural industrial landscapes, Mthethwa documents a range of aspects in South Africa—from domestic life and the environment to landscape and labor issues. His work challenges the conventions of both Western documentary work and African commercial studio photography, marking a transition away from the visually exotic and diseased—or “Afro-pessimism,” as curator Okwui Enwezor has referred to it—and employing a fresh approach marked by colour and collaboration.
ZWELETHU MTHETHWA (born in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 1960) received his Diploma in Fine Art and Advanced Diploma in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, a then “whites-only” university he entered under special ministerial consent. In 1989, he earned a master’s in imaging arts which on a on a Fulbright Scholarship to the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York. Mthethwa has had over thirty-five international solo exhibitions in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa and Switzerland, and has been featured in numerous prominent group exhibitions, including the 2005 Venice Biennial; Prospect.1 New Orleans, 2008; and Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, which toured internationally. He is represented internationally by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
About the Authors
ISOLDE BRIELMAIER (editor) is visiting assistant professor of art at Vassar College, and guest professor at Barnard College/Columbia University as well as an independent curator and writer.
OKWUI ENWEZOR (essay) is dean of academic affairs at San Francisco Art Institute, and the former artistic director of both Documenta XI and the second Johannesburg Biennale. He is a pioneering critic and curator.
About the Aperture Foundation
Aperture – a nonprofit foundation dedicated to promoting photography – was founded in 1952 by photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, and Minor White; historian Beaumont Newhall; and writer/curator Nancy Newhall; as well as Melton Ferris, Ernest Louie, and Dody Warren. With scant resources, these visionary artists created a new quarterly periodical, Aperture, to serve photographers and photography enthusiasts worldwide. Aperture has maintained the founders’ spirit throughout its history – in terms of its editorial freedom, its experiential nature and the confluence of disparate sensibilities and approaches that may converge in any given issue of the magazine. The aim is to foster both the development and the appreciation of the medium and its practitioners.
In the 1960s, Aperture expanded to include the publication of books (over five hundred to date) that comprise one of the most comprehensive and innovative libraries in the history of photography and art.
Details
Date: 22 April 2010
Venue: iArt Gallery, 71 Loop Street, Cape Town, South Africa
Contact: +27 (0) 21 424 5150 / www.iart.co.za
