
Zeitz MOCAA announced its summer programming. Two new exhibitions will open that focus on experimental lens-based practices and include a solo, survey exhibition Self as a Forgotten Monument by Mame-Diarra Niang and a group exhibition titled Seekers, Seers, Soothsayers.
On view from Friday, 27 October, Seekers, Seers, Soothsayers features the work of seven artists — Gladys Kalichini, Latedjou, Sekai Machache, Nyancho NwaNri, Pamina Sebastiāo, Buhlebezwe Siwani and Helena Uambembe. Using the number seven — a spiritually significant numeral in
various belief and cultural systems — as its anchor, the exhibition explores thematic accounts and experiences connected to the non-physical world: spiritual, psychological, supernatural and
abstract.
The artists use experimental film, immersive installation, performance, sound and narration to depict how ritual, devotion and acts of remembrance can bring restoration and alternative perspectives of the self. The exhibition title is inspired by the 2007 poem ‘Speaking in
Tongues’ by Jamaican author Kei Miller and forms a mantra for the constellation of works on display.
Self as a Forgotten Monument is the first museum exhibition by Mame-Diarra Niang and is a survey of the artist’s practice from the past decade, bringing together significant bodies of work in dialogue with spatial choreography. Niang’s prolific practice is characterised by an exploratory,
abstract and subversive approach to lens-based media, such as photography and immersive video installation. Her work is an act of remembering, through which she resists categorisation and
assumptions about geographies and specificities.
The exhibition further presents a constellation of two key trilogies — bodies of work that are thematically related or stem from a particular period in the artist’s oeuvre — and includes new iterations of two immersive room installations commissioned by Zeitz MOCAA. The new works ground the artist’s sensibility and personal meaning-making that she embeds in her practice and is site-specific to the museum while retaining a lineage to the different spaces that Niang’s works
have previously occupied.
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