On 10 June Goodman Gallery Cape Town launches Ads Imitate Life by Hank Willis Thomas – the fourth solo exhibition by the cutting edge African-American artist since joining the gallery stable in 2010.
“My last show [at Goodman Gallery] was a transformative experience as an artist… I was surprised by the overwhelmingly positive response I got from South Africans, considering the fact it’s not my country of birth and the nuances of racial politics are very loaded”, says Hank Willis Thomas.
Disturbing cultural stereotypes
For Ads Imitate Life, he presents three celebrated bodies of works – Branded | Unbranded: Reflections in Black Corporate America | Unbranded White Woman – in which he subtly edits print adverts from 20th and 21st century America to expose the manipulative visual language strategies implicit to advertising. In the works selected for this show, the artist focuses on adverts rooted in disturbing cultural stereotypes surrounding black masculinity and white femininity in particular.
“Advertising plays on a society’s hopes and dreams – it is through this medium that we can glimpse a collective subconscious. It is also a global language in the sense that the ideas that circulate in adverts have as much of an effect on the countries in which they were made as in the countries that they were exported to via mass communication.
South Africa and the USA were founded on quintessentially ‘male frontier mentalities’. Yet, today, both countries position themselves as a beacon of hope for many, as pioneering examples for international human rights with respect to individual freedoms and constitutional rights.
In Ads Imitate Life, I expose the backward attitudes that continue to pervade American advertising, undermining the neat narrative of ‘progress’ that countries like the US hold dear.” – Hank Willis Thomas
In 2015, he curated the pivotal group exhibition, Young, Gifted and Black, with Goodman Director Liza Essers as part of Essers’ gallery initiative to deepen and drive conversations around race, post-colonialism and gender between artists on the African continent and in the Diaspora.
Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working with themes related to identity, history and popular culture.
He received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and his MFA in photography, along with an MA in visual criticism, from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco.
Feature-length David Goldblatt doccie
Goodman Gallery is thrilled to announce that the first ever feature-length documentary on the South African photographer David Goldblatt – titled Goldblatt – makes its world premiere in Johannesburg on Tuesday, 6 June at 6.30pm at Rosebank Nouveau and on 9 June in Cape Town’s Labia Theatre at 6.30pm as part of Encounters Documentary Festival (1-11 June 2017).
“This moving documentary has been in the making for six years”, says executive producer Liza Essers. “It comes at an exciting moment in the 87 year old’s career, which is showing no signs of slowing down, with two current exhibitions in British prisons and an upcoming retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2018. The documentary marks the moment when we finally turn the lens on this shrewd witness to social change in South Africa and document his remarkable contribution to photography, both locally and on an international scale. It is the second film in an ongoing documentary series on major SA artists that I conceptualised 10 years ago, starting with a film on William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas in conversation in 2010”, Essers adds.
Goldblatt features interviews with Zanele Muholi, William Kentridge, the late Nadine Gordimer, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Howard Booth. It’s produced by Essers and Josh Ginsburg and directed by Daniel Zimbler. Book a ticket: Encounters Film Festival
Who: Hank Willis Thomas
What: Ads Imitate Life
Where: Goodman Gallery Cape Town, 021 462 7573/4
When: 10 June – 1 July, 2017
Web: www.goodman–gallery.com
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