Talking Loud is a reminder that to be a South African arts practitioner is to be built for contact. Viscera is spattered on walls by artists who transmogrify physical contact into testimony. Snubs from gatekeepers with colonial receipts catalyse social contact between collaborators to create diverse spaces. In these settings, peers who have circled each other with wary eye contact finally acknowledge one another by exhibiting each other's works. And at the basest level, Talking Loud voices the subliminal contact of each artist with the demon godchild that is the subconscious.
Callan Grecia and Shalom Mushwana moderate this conversation of imaginaries: offsetting seriousness with levity and allowing playfulness to foil confrontation. Emerging talent expresses multiplicity outside the industry conventions of pre-sold openings and bought reviews. The co-curators elicit dialogue about the state of South African art as it is navigated by its practitioners, especially those who elude canonisation due to the complexity of their lived experiences.
Book to join a hosted walkabout with curators, Shalom Mushwana and Callan Grecia.
Artist Biography
Callan Grecia (b.1991, Durban, South Africa)
Grecia currently lives and works in George, South Africa. Through painting, his frenetic and constantly shifting output pushes on the boundaries of the medium. Growing up in a post-apartheid South Africa, just short of being ‘born free’, Grecia’s obsessive making mirror’s the act of self discovery as a young South African thrown head first into the rainbow nation experiment, just prescient of everything prior.
Sampling Y2K internet aesthetics, early-2000s television, pop culture and consumer capitalist culture, Grecia’s compositions reflect an “ultra-nostalgia” for the recent past; a conflation of millennials’ wildest dreams and ultimate discontents.
Grecia graduated with his MFA in Painting in 2017. He has participated in numerous group shows nationally and internationally. He has had solo shows in South Africa, Korea and Spain and was a finalist for the MTN New Contemporaries Award in 2022.
Shalom Mushwana
Shalom Mushwana is a multidisciplinary artist based in Makhanda South Africa. He is a graduate of the University of Johannesburg and the Market photo workshop. Shalom was a participant of the Scotland + Venice Professional Development Program for the 59th Venice Biennale and has participated in a multitude of group shows locally and internationally. His interests in photography and multimodality in medium have informed an approach to his practice which often wrestles with (but is not limited to) the amorphous and ambiguous nature of ideas like nationhood and identity in South Africa.
Credits
Curated by: Shalom Mushwana and Callan Grecia
Participating Artists:
Boytchie Phillip Newman
Callan Grecia
Cameron Platter
Georgia Herron
Tumelo Mtimkhulu
Kwazokuhle Phakathi
Luyanda Zindela
Nonzuzo Gxekwa
Natalie Paneng
Sandy Harris
Shalom Mushwana
Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo
Inga Somdyala
- Grahamstown Gallery
- Albany History Museum
- Daily during the Festival 09:00 to 17:00
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Daily entry to the exhibitions is free. The scheduled walkabouts have a minimal cost and booking is essential.
