VIDEOart! at Joburg Fringe 2010
Joburg Fringe is presenting a two team line-up of local and visiting video artists at various venues around the city during the Joburg Art Fair.
Through this the Joburg Fringe offers the opportunity for some great artistic extra curricular activities to be viewed – taking chances not risked at the art fair.
Galleries pay huge amounts of money to formally participate in art fairs. Galleries being there to make money from sales – ergo they are naturally inclined to show works capable of generating serious commercial incomes.
Not so for a fringe – it can pop up and vanish – strut its stuff on floor space that costs a fraction of the fair’s. At the fringe it’s mainly the artists – those up and coming, those ignored by commercial galleries, the discoverables who cough up work for no commercial gain – who relish the possibilities for exposure. Established and well-known contributors often join fringe events giving themselves an edgy platform to be shown on and new talent to show with. Fringes and fringers are by their nature opportunistic – they happen around the buzz that is generated by the staging of an art fair – busking to the audience who came for the fair. The stage is set, the public is in an art-frame-of-mind and the international buyers are in town looking for cool work looking to the fringe for new little-seen-before talent.
Globally fringes have gained a special place – like the fringe at the Edinburgh Festival. And anyway what respectable art fair doesn’t have its fringe? With time art fairs are linked to their fringes; Art Basel (Liste, Volta4 and Scope), Art Cologne (Rheinschau, Tease Art), Art Basel Miami Beach (Nada, Pulse, Scope, to name 3 of 23+ accompanying fairs!) and Art Forum, Berlin (Kunstsalon, Berliner Liste, Preview). Locally - the Grahamstown Arts Festival and her gorgeous fringe draw the crowds with their double bill performance.
Irritating as fleas to the body of the great talking dog act, it can’t be denied the scratching stimulates growth.
In 2008, at the time of the first Joburg Art Fair, Fouad Asfour, Sharlene Khan and Claudia Shneider came up with the idea to do a fringe show to take place concurrently with the first time JoburgArtFair. They co-founded the show titled Esikhaleni – Spatial Practices in collaboration with the Dead Revolutionaries Club and the Afrika Cultural Centre. It consisted of a curatored show and four galleries from the vanguard of the South African art scene.
Contributors to this first fringe show included fearless exhibitionists from the vanguard of the South African art scene – Blank Projects, Spaza Art Gallery, Outlet Gallery, Worldart, Gugulective and The Bag Factory. Artists performing solos included Johan Thom, Sharlene Khan, Claudia Shneider, Senzo Nhlapo, Bev Price and Jonathan Garnham.
Blank Projects commissioned a manic fresh road video piece filmed by Jeremy Puren and Daniel Naude “the movie” - en route to the fringe. It epitomised fringeness.
In 2009 the name of the Joburg Fringe was registered.
Reflecting the zeitgeist of 2009 the Joburg Fringe retreated to a one man show in a collaboration with Right on the Rim and Arts on Main to stage a Pre-Exhibition fringe event in the raw theatre presented by the incomplete building site of Arts on Main. Claudia Shneider built the Living and Dying in Africa instalative dead elephant sculpture from global shoppers.
Again little reviewed by the main stream art press its memory lives on in the minds of those lucky enough to see its brief existence next to the first floor deceased lift shaft at Arts on Main.
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| Claudia Shneider, Living and dying in Africa, global shoppers, Arts on Main, Joburg, 2009 |
This year’s list of venues reflects the growth of the Joburg Fringe. It includes The Bioscope, Canteen at Arts on Main, The Bag Factory, Mofolo Art Centre Soweto, Anglo Gold Ashanti and a Sandton venue to be announced. The spread of venues should ensure that the videos can be viewed by as many people as possible across Joburg’s huge area – and includes the possibility of a car boot in a well known parking lot in Sandton.
In 2010 curatorial direction is kept to a minimum. Participants have no set themes to follow and no time limits imposed. The works provide diverse viewings of what is out there; eye candy, serious short narratives, lyrical non-performances based on various messages and some classical gems from the masters of contemporary European VIDEOart!
One day this fringy fringe will expand to the whole continent – says founder Claudia Shneider: “Joburg Fringe will eventually provide an African venue for exceptional, under-exposed work”.
