Mar
30
2012

Nandipha Mntambo: Faena & Leonie Marinovich: Not Me-Not Mine

The 5th leg of Nandipha Mntambo's national touring exhibition, Faena, opens at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg on 3 May 2012 and runs until 9 June. Mntambo is the winner of the 2011 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art.

"Winning the Standard Bank Young Artist Award is wonderful. At this stage of my career it is a great affirmation of my achievements within my art practice," says Mntambo. "My hope is that the scope of my art creation would be increased."

Faena refers to the final dance between the matador and bull before he or she delivers the death blow. The exhibition presents a new body of work in which Mntambo continues to explore her interest in the cow as a subject, using cowhide as a medium and exploring the dynamics inherent in the art of bullfighting. 

"Nandipha Mntambo is one of South Africa's most remarkable young sculptors," says Brenton Maart, National Arts Festival committee member for visual art. "Her mastery of an incredibly difficult medium, animal skin and hair, allows her to shape morphing structures that are part human and part animal, part alive and part dead, part grotesquely revolting and part sensually enticing. It is this ambivalence, that sense of unease that elevates Mntambo's work above the level of the commonplace into the ranks of the astonishing." 

Running concurrently with Faena is Leonie Marinovich's Not Me - Not Mine. In an effort to highlight the exceptional vulnerability to HIV of women and girls in eastern and southern Africa, the UNAIDS (a Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS) Regional Support team for eastern and southern Africa commissioned a comprehensive photographic essay and two documentary films that intimately explore the interrelation between women and HIV. The photographs are by Leonie Marinovich and the films by Jungle Works Production.

Marinovich's photographic essay consists of portraits of HIV-positive women from Namibia and South Africa. The photographs are accompanied by a DVD. 

The title of the exhibition, Not Me - Not Mine, derives from a quote by one of Marinovich's subjects, Anne Leon, who was asked why women still get infected despite the information available and the courage of people who speak openly about their status. She answered, "Never me, never mine," referring to the way that almost everybody seems still to think that HIV won't happen to them or those close to them; friend, lover, sister or child.

The documentary films are character driven and draw attention to some of the more nuanced issues women are faced with in the context of the HIV epidemic. One of the films is shot in Uganda and focuses on three HIV sero-discordant couples, or couples in which one partner is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative. The second documentary is filmed in Lesotho and is a cross-generational conversation between a young woman and her aunt who is living with HIV.

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    I have read Leonie's article on the stories of the women living with HIV in Southern Africa.I was trully moved.Would love to see the photos.

    Nandipha Sithole

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