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Sandile Radebe Portfolio August 2016

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“...And this body of work re-reads the city, in my view at least, through what I would call a hip-hop aesthetic and a graffiti sensibility. And as a result, he is able to turn maps into mazes, buildings morph into humongous letters and numbers, letters buildings can reflect and double up, multiple identities, multiple if you will, elements of language, of grammar. And the cartographic lines morph effortlessly into symbolism. And so what happens when you stack all of these things together and you move between these different representations, is that the city get re-represented and re-imagined, in this almost endless language game with the multiplicities of grammars and this facility to invoke a different grammar that I think is really, really important and exciting... ”

--Edgar Pieterse, director of African Centre for Cities at University of Cape Town, opening speech for A Walk in the City- October 2014

Artist’s StatementSandile Radebe is a Johannesburg based artist who in-vestigates the notions and contexts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces in urban and natural environments. Radebe’s starting points are the reconstruction of the dynamic genres of urban graffiti based shapes and languages- which he explains ‘act more broadly as the way language works to help construct our realities’. The artist interpre-tation and construction of ‘graffiti’ in abstract sculptural forms serve to act as both manifestation and metaphor for marking territory and redefining this seemingly temporary language. Most well known for his life-size labyrinthine structural installations in gallery space and outdoors, these serve to create formal forms which imaginatively evoke the artist’s own experience of walking through Johannesburg. As Sandile explains: through a creative navigation in time and space my aim is that the viewer is encouraged to think about form and ‘language’ in a new way, all while conjuring the city ‘out there’

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Contents

pg. 7................................................................................................................................................................Introduction

pg. 8....................................................................................................................................................................Paintings

pg. 14..................................................................................................................................................................Drawings

pg. 30.........................................................................................................................................Installations/Interventions

pg. 70.................................................................................................................................................................Faciltation

pg. 80.................................................................................................................................................................Biography

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Introduction

Left:

Exhib

ition s

hot. 2

014.

'A Walk in the Mind'

Today, I went for a drive to Sea Point promenade to see for myself the pair of giant sunglasses Perceiving Freedom that has caused consternation in Cape Town. The graffiti intervention had vanished but this in no way diminished its popularity among passersby. A shiny oversized sculpture looking out to Robben Island greeted me, positioned adjacent a playpark on the one side and an exercise park on the other. Children sprawled on top of its bridge and slid down one arm. A father followed suit, walking up and over the public sculpture as if it were a jungle gym. Upon closer inspection, there were no more lenses in the frame either. The surface upon which the Tokolos Stencil crew had graffitied its Marikana protest art had disappeared so that all signs of the collective's objection to Michael Elion's artwork had now vanished -- except for social media where the debate was still alive and well. The backstory, in a nutshell, is a corporate-sponsored public artwork that leverages the legacy of Nelson Mandela, which has raised significant ire including that of Tokolos who promptly defaced it. The same collective recently attended the opening night of a group exhibition at a commercial gallery with a porta-potty (chemical toilet) to expose 'bourgeois' gallery-goers to the smell of faeces.

A South African art critic recently proposed in response to the sunglasses sculpture defacement that graffiti is no longer radical, that it has been appropriated by corporate interests to beautify public spaces and has thus lost the power to be truly subversive. ‘A Walk in the City’ suggests otherwise. This solo exhibition by Sandile Radebe provokes new readings with a singular device: an aerial view of the city grid, transformed from the built environment into graffiti block lettering. Radebe has manifested this into a maze constructed from tape that covers the floor of this striking circular gallery and partially climbs its walls. Depending upon your orientation as viewer, these letters can be differently read and even morph into integers instead. It is a hopeful gesture, to posit that language is the building block of reality and we can construct our cities or sense of 'citi-ness', as the coined term goes, by making our own meanings and linking them together. Urbanist Teresa Caldeira has pointed to the informal ways people construct their own houses over time amid stark circumstances in cities around the world, in a fashion she calls 'auto construction'. In similar vein, Radebe's visual provocation suggests we auto-construct perceptual cities in our minds. It starts with our own orientation and we can change this by simply standing in another place to take in a different view.

That is a compelling thought. What is more, this graffiti of the mind cannot be reversed by scrubbing or physically removing a lens. Radebe’s work is a timely evocation for a country challenged with a neo-apartheid hangover spatially reinforced, as Edgar Pieterse reminds us, and a worsening condition of inequality that academics such as Jaclyn Cock term 'slow violence'. In the effort to dissemble and reassemble such stubborn fixes, we need new ways of looking and forms to describe what we see; Radebe is an imagineer who takes us some place new.

--Kim Gurney, November 2014

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Paintings

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‘Untitled’ Triptych

Left:

Unt

itled

(Trip

tych)

, 201

4. Ac

rylic

on m

ason

ite. 1

20 x

60 cm

The ‘Untitled’ triptych is a play on two dimensional versus three dimensional represen-tation of letter forms. The tag/inscription that would be normally placed on a flat surface would manifest in three dimensional form as maquttes for public sculptures, installation or mazes. The letter ‘s’ as used in the “untitled maquette for public sculpture” becomes translated onto a flat surface, a reversal of the process of translating letter forms into sculptural forms. The aim is to imagine a new way at looking at the letter ‘s’. Cut out in masonite and tactile in nature, the letter gets morphed into something non figurative and becomes a painting.

Engaged in an exercise to discover elements that constitute the letter that I might have previously overlooked, because like most literate people, I would like to think that I know the alphabet. These exercises allow me to rediscover the alphabet from a calligraphic or design point of view.

The paintings documented on this spread are a result of such an exercise. Through making the same markings on a masonite that I would normally make before I cut out pieces for a maquette, I fill in the complex series of patterns and shapes that emerge from these markings. These shapes and patterns sometimes create other letters and a entry point to a new form of inscribing the alphabet.

I later then add colours that are complementary to these patterns, in search of some order. Mostly compositional order. I also like to leave other parts of the masonite board uncovered so as to make this process transparent.

--Sandile, 2014

Left:

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itled

(Trip

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rylic

on m

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20 x

60 cm

Righ

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x 60

cm

14 15

Drawings

16 17Above: Blocklettering I, 2014. Marking pen on paper. 69 x 86 cm Above: Blocklettering II, 2014. Marking pen on paper. 69 x 86 cm

18 19Above: Populating Control I, 2014. Fine Tipped Pen on Paper. 50 x 35 cm Above: Populating Control II, 2014. Fine Tipped Pen on Paper. 50 x 35 cm

20 21Above: Untitled, 2015. Fine Tipped Pen on Paper. 50 x 35 cm Above: Untitled, 2015. Fine Tipped Pen on Paper. 50 x 35 cm

22 23Spread: Married Woman Alone, 2015. Fine Tipped Pen on Paper. 100 x 35 cm

24 25Spread: Man in Woman, 2015. Fine Tipped Pen on Paper. 100 x 35 cm

26 27

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Fin

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Left: Untitled, 2015. Fine Tipped Pen on Paper. 22.1 x 14.5 cm

This Page: Process images and close ups

28 29Above: Imvelaphi I, 2016. Fine Tipped Pen on Paper. 42cm x 29.7 cm Above: Imvelaphi II, 2016. Fine Tipped Pen on Paper. 42cm x 29.7 cm Above: Imvelaphi III, 2016. Fine Tipped Pen on Paper. 42cm x 29.7 cm

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Installations/Interventions

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The Arthouse installation is comprised of many forms of art making, ranging

from silk-screen printing, to sculpted forms, stencilling,painting and found objects. The primary aim was to explore the language of graffiti in pursuit for an expression of this style of visual communication within the ‘confines’ of formal art training and prac-tice. It was only natural for me to focus on these formal principles of line, shape, com-position and so forth in order for to find an expression that would coincide with formal art training and practice.

With the various ways that I had started to use this language of graffiti, model making/ maquettes soon became the primary focus of my pursuit to locating this language of graffiti within formal art practice. So the ini-tial step was to translate this graffiti sketch-es into a three dimensional form for the purposes of building a maquette for public sculpture. I then populated a room with these maquettes that varied in dimensions. I had built these in relation to the found ob-jects that were stencilled and prints com-posing one image in this room.

Over time it developed into a further trans-lation of these three dimensional forms back onto a flat surface via the shapes they projected onto the wall. From this process a new painting style based on ab-straction was born. This style came to take form as paintings in an entirely flat surface on a canvass.

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This page: process images of Arthouse installation. 2006

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The Arthouse collaborative project was an extension of an ongoing collaboration between Katlego Lefine, BJ Engelbrecht and myself. We as a collective had executed several mu-

ral commissions at the time, naturally this synergy was extended onto art practice for class. The idea was to merely interrogate the most rudimentary tool for an artist, namely, the pencil. Being three individuals there were three distinct interpretations of the concept that allowed us to bounce these varying interpretations among each other. This resulted in these weird looking renditions of a pencil. The original site of the work was a shared studio between the artists. The pencils covered the entire space to the point that navigating through the space simulated the experience of playing in a jungle gym. This complimented this playful take on the pencil.

Arthouse Collaborative “pencil’ installation 2005

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This Page: Arthouse C

ollaborative “pencil’ installation 2005

This Page: Arthouse Collaborative “pencil’ installation 2005

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Appeal 2012 was a collaborative project

that included 12 artists who played the role of jurors. Our objective was to ex-plore the process of the judicial system through our various mediums of artis-tic production in order to achieve a form of aesthetic redress. I took on an archi-tectural path by building a pillar with cardboard which camouflaged itself in the space through other exist-ing pillars. In that way the pillar mimicked the invisibil-ity of a layman within this judicial process. A plaintiff cannot speak directly to the judge for one, as well as the legal jargon can elude a layperson and thus rendering them invisible in their own case. Ultimately the piece spoke of architec-tural redress of the space as well as highlighting the process of the judicial system.

Appeal 2012 installation, Septem

ber 2012

Left: Appeal 2012 installation, Septem

ber 2012

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Salt and cardboard installation in collabo-ration with Mandy Johnston for the Assem-blage ‘Diptych’ Exhibition, September 2013

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Solo Show InstallationThe build up to the main installation was a playful exercise between myself and Jabulani Matthews Tshuma. After following a design that I had sketched earlier on to build a tower out of cardboard, I would ask Jabu for a letter and then would make a building of the letter on the floor using duct-tape, playing with the notion of a city footprint. After some time we got so comfortable with this method that we would randomly choose words to build this footprint of the city. Ultimately we populated the space with letters that played along the footprint of the city as it would appear on ‘google earth’. This was to play with the idea of how we ‘read’ the city.

Depending on the viewer’s orientation, the letters change, sometimes they morph into other letters, sometimes into numbers. The city plan in its ambiguous form and sense changes in its meaning, its behaviour and ultimately nature. The conventions of writing, or the point of the alphabet, the purpose of transcribing, and indeed the purpose of reading, all get stretched to a new and unexpected end.

This aesthetic locates the city as a urban metropolis embellished with writing among many of its constituents, but the writing in this case is the city itself. The city blocks make up the alphabet which tempt the viewer to construct a word, two words, or possibly a sentence. You might find yourself communicating with the perceived city, or the idea of a city. In this act of searching for meaning or some order in the alphabet, one reconfigures the conventions and a finds a personalised meaning of what a city is, may be, or ought to be.

Relying on the logic of blocklettering to navigate this terrain of the alphabet, I find a new aesthetic and a new feeling of the city that I share with the city in many ways. Deciphering the graffiti that embellishes the city, the street etiquette, the lingo, the sounds of foot traffic, the vehicles, the trucks, the taxis, the buses, the police sirens. The smell of food, the smell of urine, the smell oil visible on the tarmac on the streets. It’s sunshine piercing through the buildings and its shadows or projected by it. It’s nighttime, and all of it, encapsulated in a line to facilitate marking my presence as a part of the city.

46 47Spread: Solo exhibition installation shots. 2014

48 49

Spread: Solo exhibition installation shots. 2014

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The Drill Hall intervention is a response to or is inspired by the unsa-voury state of the treason trial monument. Due to many reasons the monument has been progressively falling apart over the years. Our aim is to restore the monument to it’s approximate original state if not it’s exact original state.

The project is therefore a response to this socio-economic-political climate of the inner city of Johannesburg. This is to create aware-ness about the impact drug use has on the monument. Certain parts of the monument that are made out of aluminium are stripped off the it to be sold for cash.

The intervention is also meant to bring, once again, to the fore the names of people that were involved in their various capacities during the struggle for liberation in South Africa, with a particular focus on the treason trialists.

We also aim to reinforce the notion of reading through cutting out more that a hundred stencils of all the names that have been tak-en off the monument. The generic nature of the stencil is meant to connote repetition of text which is a way of condoning the habit of reading, and in this case a historical reading. However this reading is not only literal but also symbolic of reading your surroundings and you social climate as well.

Ultimately the viewer or the user of this space are expected to en-gage with the space on many levels. Firstly on the historical signif-icance, secondly geographic centrality of the site in Johannesburg inner city, and finally the sociological aspects the make up this envi-ronment. In that way we hope to use the medium of visual art to add value to the people that encounter this space in their various capaci-ties.

This document aims to show the process of this intervention as well as the outcome of the project.

This page: process images

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Graphoasis is a collaborative ephemeral installation initiated by Sandile Radebe and Elgin Rust. The piece was conceived for Afrika Burn ’14.The Burn is an event based in the Tankwa region of the Karoo, a place that has no cell phone signal, no electricity or running water.For one week Burners meet at this place in order to express themselves within this space. The harshness and scarcity of resources creates a conducive climate for interdependency. As such there is a heightened awareness of others and their needs. This interdependenceallows the community to engage with each other and the artworks produced for the event. This participatory space is an environment which allows artists to measure the extent that public art could engage with a community.

Graffiti is traditionally connoted by spray-painted tags usually located in public urban spaces. However for graphoasis the artists proposed to create an ephemeral graffiti tag in the natural environment of the Karoo. Triangular pieces of cardboard are sprayed and arranged in a way that spells the word trick, albeit in a very abstract fashion. Aesthetically the installation uses prime shapes and raw lines. A latte skeleton that crosses at one point is secured using hessian rope. The cardboard pieces are clad onto the raw structure using a staple gun, in this manner creating a three dimensional tag. The cardboard cladding casts a shadow, which grows and shrinks throughout the day as the sun rises and sets again offering much needed shade to the viewers. In the heat of the Karoo, shade and water are highly sought after resources. In the true spirit of an oasis, graphoasis shaded a 25L drum of water accessible to the thirsty reveller of Afrika Burn.

This page: the process of erecting the tag

56 57Above: a couple enjoying the much needed shade projected by the tag

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‘graphoasis’ is a graffiti tag created using spray paint, collaboration, the process of cladding, in a way that mimics ‘piecing’. Piecing is a process that alludes to the creation of letters by way of ‘adoration’, and in this case using triangles and arrows to create a tag. The tag being a sculptural intercession on the binnekring, the circular open intervention space of Afrika Burn.

The process of cladding resulted in the abstraction of the letters allowing our the tag to reach a level of intricate patterning that is synonymous with a ‘burner’, which through use of lines and arrows gives rise to unexpected forms. Ultimately the tag created is of an ephemeral performative nature. The ‘burner’ literally emphasised by burning the tag at the end of the ten day event. This ties in with the theme of 2014: ‘The Trickster’. All that remained was some ash and metal residue which in the spirit of MOOP* was cleared away to leave no trace. *MOOP: Matter out of Place. All participants are requested to leave absolutely no trace in Tankwa Town and are encouraged to engage collectively in maintaining the space in the spirit of Afrika Burn.This page: the burning of the tag on the third day of the installation

60 61Above: Golden City Plan, 2014. Marking pen ans acrylic paint on wall. 1.6 x 4 m

'Golden city plan' is a mural intervention that took place in Doornfontein, Johannesburg in November 2014 . The mural was drawn out of gold and silver markers, the gold alluding to the of gold mining history of the city. There silver alludes to the its bright lights. Its form is that of a city plan. The peculiar thing about this city plan is that the blocks also spell letters of the alphabet. Depending on the viewer's orientation, the letters change, sometimes they morph into other letters, sometimes into a number. The city plan in its ambiguous form and sense changes in its meaning, its behaviour and ultimately nature. The conventions of writing, or the point of the alphabet, the purpose of transcribing, and indeed the purpose of reading, all get stretched to a new and unexpected end.

This aesthetic locates the city as a urban metropolis embellished with writing among many of its constituents, but the writing in this case is the city itself. The city blocks make up the alphabet which tempt the viewer to construct a word, two words, or possibly a sentence. You might find yourself communicating with the perceived city, or the idea of a city. In this act of searching for meaning or some order in the alphabet, one reconfigures the conventions and a finds a personalised meaning of what a city is, may be, or ought to be.

Relying on the logic of blocklettering to navigate this terrain of the alphabet . I find a new aesthetic and a new feeling of the city that I share with the city in many ways. Deciphering the graffiti that embellishes the city, the street etiquette, the lingo, the sounds of foot traffic, the vehicles, the trucks, the taxis, the buses, the police sirens. The smell of food, the smell of urine, the smell oil visible on the tarmac on the streets. It's sunshine piercing through the buildings and its shadows or pro-jected by it. It's nighttime, and all of it, encapsulated in a line to facilitate marking my presence as a part of the city.

--Sandile RadebeNovember, 2014

Above: Process images of Golden City Plan

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SERVICE\ KIOS DOOR\ OPENIN

Above: My Citi Bus Station in Century City, Cape Town, 2015. Vinyl on glass. Dimensions variable

Above: My Citi Bus Station Vector DesignAbove: Graffiti Intervention in Jhb Inner City(Collaboration with Jabulani Matthews Tshuma and Tshepo Rakosa), 2015. Spraypaint on wall. Dimensions variable

Above: Process images of graffiti intervention

64 65This page: process images

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Tot Since Bloemfontein is documentation of a public intervention that took place in Vrystaat Kunstefees in July 2016. The idea was to encourage members of the public to get a sense of ownership about their city while stimulating critical awareness about its function to the users. Using found material that I had sprayed in different colours, members of the public were invited to help build a Bloemfontein they imag-ined on a contour map that I had prepared in soft wood.

The outcome was a negotiation between members of the public for services that they believed would uplift the imagined Bloemfontein mostly. This ranged from telecommunications company with free wi-fi to an amphitheatre, a hotel, a reservoir, parks a railway system among others. In each interaction with the contour map of what would be an imagined Bloemfontein people took on the role of citizens as deter-miner of their environment over just accepting what given out to us by town planners. This engagement brought about political debates between participants; for example, one gentleman did not want malls anywhere in the contour map whilst another one felt that they were needed for people in his area to have access to shopping for goods. One could infer that this difference of views manifested in the contour map is representative of existing socio-political differences in the city. The contour map brought these disparate views onto one three-metre by three-meter platform to be voiced, seen and negotiated. My aim is to stimulate this kind of engagement with city spaces in as many cities as possible.

--Sandile RadebeAugust 2016

This page: cropped image for digital print

Tot Since Bloemfontein

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‘Totem’ is a wooden geometric structure that aims to encourage spatial aware-ness through providing shade and pro-tection from the wind in Tankwa town. The design of the totem is informed by ‘isibheqe sohlamvu’ iconography. ‘Isib-heqe sohlamvu’ references symbolism found in Nguni material culture like bead-works, beer vessels, mural art and other elements to form a syllabic script. Using the shapes found in the script, I aim to build a geometric structure that rep-resents a totem. The structure also has cylindrical components that represents ‘ingungu’ part of the script that are intend-ed to create sound against the wind of the desert blowing into them. The totem represents ancestry and heritage in gen-eral but uses my ancestry to signify this. As such heritage and ancestry is person-al and direct which makes it important in the formation and conception of self. I aim to invoke introspection about this to the viewer through creating an experi-ential sense of the script by walking in and out or sitting inside the totem. This journey is aimed to extend to the physical space and thus serves to stimulate spa-tial awareness and pose questions about the function of space.

--Sandile Radebe

August 2016

Spread: Afrika Burn Proposal. July 2016

‘Totem’ Concept Descrip-tion

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Facilitation

72 73Above: process pictures of the Keleketla mural, September 2011

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As part of his skills-sharing initiative, I take part in visual art facilitation within the Johannesburg community. The next documentation is of the facilitation sessions that took place at the Keleketla! Library from March till Septem-

ber 2011.

The mural project was a culmination of various drawing and painting exercises that formed part of Keleketla’s! after school program in 2011. The attendees of this after-school program were introduced to the basic elements of visual communication. Later on, the learners were instructed to map their immediate environment, namely the Keleketla courtyard as well as the Park Central Taxi Rank. The selection of these two places was informed by the historical significance of these places as well as for it being such a prominent feature of everyday Joburg.

The Taxi rank in particular commutes a large portion of Joburg workers to and fro home. The presence of this place invokes a busy feeling about Joburg as there is constant movement in it. I felt that trying to capture this feeling would be a stimulating exercise for the learners. The courtyard also shares the same constant flow of activity as this is where the kids normally play soccer and ‘ovi’ when they are not in these workshops.

This idea worked well seeing that all learners are familiar with these two places and therefore already have particular perceptions about these places. I felt that it would be interesting exercise for the learners to engage and explore and finally express their perception and understanding of such immediate places.

After the learners started showing confidence and familiarity with certain modes of visual communication, we collab-oratively started sketches for a mural which was to be painted behind the Keleketla Library on Noord Street. The mu-ral served several purposes, one of them being re-enacting the protests that took place around the Drill Hall during the preliminary hearing of the Treason trial in 1956.

Furthermore the mural served as an advertising wall for the Chimurenga event that was to take place in the following month. The advertising for the Chimurenga event was done through pasting the Chimurenga posters on what would have been protest placards during the Treason trial preliminary hearings.

Finally the purpose of the mural was also to create awareness to the general public about Keleketla! Library(brand awareness) amidst the high traffic of Noord Street. The Intended outcome was to create an inviting backdrop to the daily Noord Street haste against the activities that take place at Keleketla! Library

In 1956 people who were against Apartheid, which seeked to suppress any and every form of resistance against it, marched around the Drill in

protest of the treason trial preliminary hearings that took place inside.

The mural painted with the after-school program learners aimed at re-enact-ing that protest whilst simultaneously engaging the learners with the history of the Drill Hall in particular as well as the history of South Africa in general.

On this page is the photographic documentation of the process towards the final piece by the learners above. With the assistance of the Reneilwe Mathibe (Co-facilitator) preparatory sketches as well as the painting of the mural were completed within the three week time frame.

76 77This Page: Urban arts Platform logo mural process, February 2012

The Urban Arts Platform is an inner city initiative that seeks to add quality of life

to inner city kids through using art as a tool to achieve this. The initiative focuses on kids living in the inner city of Johannesburg with a particular attention to the kids living in Ansteys Building in downtown Johannesburg.

The initiative seeks to engaging the inner city kids with various forms of artistic expression, focusing on visual art and the dramatic arts as an entry point to the world of artistic ex-pression. I was invited by the initiative to paint a mural with the kids as a way of engaging them with visual art. We collectively painted the logo of the organisation so that the kids could play around with colours that make up the Urban Arts Platform logo. This also served to create brand awareness to visitors of the space

This Page: Urban arts Platform logo mural, February 2012

78 79This Page: Mandela Day Mural, July 2016 This Page: Mandela Day Mural process images with Metropolitan learners, July 2016

Mandela Day with Metropolitan College Learners

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Selected Exhibitions2011 -‘Vandalieism’ Curated by Natalie Edwards Point Blank Gallery, Johannesburg (February) 2012 -’Assemblage Pop-Up show’ curated by Assemblage, Braamfontein, Johannesburg (April)l -’Assemblage Pop-Up show 2.0’ curated by Mika Conradie, Braamfontein, Johannesburg (June) -’Appeal 2012’ curated by Elgin Rust and Kim Gurney, New Doornfontein, Johannesburg (September) 2013 -’Basha Uhuru’ curated by Kalishnikovv Gallery at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg (June) -‘Diptych’, curated by Assemblage, Liberty Building Braamfontein Johannesburg (September)2014: -Fresh Produce’ group show at theTurbine Art Fair, Newtown Johannesburg (July) -Solo exhibition titled ‘A Walk In The City’ at National School of the Arts curated by Kim Gurney, Braamfontein Johannesburg (October)

2015: -’Socio-political dynamics of post-colonial cities in Southern Africa’ WISER online exhibition facilitated by Guns and Rain (April) -’Winter, A Group Exhibition’ at Everard Read, Cape Town (June) -’Broken Monsters’ group exhibition curated by Jackie Lang at Nando’s headquartes, (November)2016: -’Otherwise’ a group exhibition at Sosesame Gallery (April) -’Winter, A Group Exhibition’ at Everard Read, Cape Town (June) -“Tall Tails’ a group exhibition with the Grrr Kollective at the Johannesburg Art Library (July) -’Shift’ curated by Gonste(September)

Conferences2013: -Presented ‘Public Domain’ at the Goethe Institut’s ‘New Imaginaries/ New Publics’ symposium facilitated by AAC, Saxonwold, Johanne burg (February)

Sandile is a Johannesburg based artist whose main area of interest is art practice in both, public and private spaces. Sandile explores these spaces through stimulating a new reading of graffiti and more broadly the way language works to help construct our realities. The artist visualises graffiti in abstract sculptural forms instead of alphabetic lettering. He populates gallery spaces with installations created from these forms which, in their labyrinthine structures, imaginatively evoke the artist’s own experience of walking through Johannesburg. The viewer is encouraged to think about graffiti and indeed language in a new way while conjuring the city ‘out there’ through a creative gallery navigation in time and space.

Profile

Education2002-6: -BAFA(Honours) at Wits School of the Arts, Wits University. Braamfontein, Johannesburg

2009: -PGDA in Arts and Cultural Management at Wits School of the Arts, Wits University, Braamfontein, Johannesburg

Accolades2003: - Mural for Wits School of the Arts Launch.2004: -Mural for ’Soil’ a play by Kgafela Oa Mogogodi.2005: -24hour workshop with Christian Nerf, Doornfontein, Johannesburg. -’a very temporary monument for an unsung hero’ workshop with Jean Bernard Koeman, Braamfontein, Johannesburg. -Mural for Trinity Record, Orange Grove, Johannesburg -Mural for Park Lane Clinic, Parktown North, Johannesburg.

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Public Interventions/ Installations2014: -‘Lest We Forget’ at the Drill Hall in Johannesburg, in collaboration with Jabulani Matthews Tshuma (February). -Graphoasis’ at Afrika Burn in collaboration with Elgin Rust (April). -One Day Apprenticeship’ with Elvis atOPENLab2014- The art of being public,Modern Arts Projects, Richmond, Northern Cape (July). -Tetrafix Party OneDotZero playful intervention collaborations, Amaze and Fak’ Ugesi festival, Braamfontein, Johannesburg (September).

2015: -‘Colour Me In’ for Infecting the City, Cape Town (March). -’Graphoasis II’ collaboration with Elgin Rust at Afrika Burn, Tankwa Town (April). 2016: -’Tot Since Bloemfontein’ for the Vystaat Kunstefees, Bloemfontein (July)

Curatorial Involvement2015: -Post African. Co-Curated by Amber-Jade Geldenhuys, Sandile Radebe, and MC Roodt. Mzansi Gallery, Melville, Johannesburg.

2016: -’Material City’ Everard Read Gallery Cape Town (October)

Public Art Commissions2015: -’My Citi’ bus station, Century City, Cape Town(June).

2016: -Council Chambers, Braamfontein, Johannesburg (July).