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 not yet discovered by commercial galleries, the up-and-coming artists on fame's threshold– 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 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.
Reflecting the zeitgeist of 2009 the Joburg Fringe retreated to a one man show in a courtesy of Right on the Rim and Johnathan Liebmann 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.
Last year’s VIDEOart! 2010 got off its backside and went out to find its public. Without the generous, unfailing technical assistance of Rob Mills; who seemlessly sewed all the videos together, and always came up with a solid solution for insurmountable problems, this show would not have been the success that it was. We are indebted, Rob. The videos were shown all around town: on the wall opposite the main entrance, opening night of the JoburgArtFair (thanks to Maraschino's Restaurant), at The Bioscope (then still at Arts on Main), The Bag Factory, The Sports Bar at the Troyeville Hotel and at Anglo Gold Ashanti Headquarters. The spread of venues ensured that the videos were viewed by as many people as possible across Joburg’s huge area. Once out there, it grew legs and off it went:
to Leipzig as PRIVATE VIEWING, South African Video Art
and to Munich as
1 hour of VIDEOart!
http://www.rupertwalser.com/shneiders/screening.html
and recently to Berlin, as
Agter die Berge The Joburg Fringe Video Berlin
http://www.7hours.com/_Actual_Page/html/JoburgFringeBerlin/AgterBerge_JoburgFringeVideoBerlin.htm
snow ball ling as it went.
