Sinazo Chiya
9 More Weeks
9 More Weeks, a book of artist interviews by Cape Town-based writer Sinazo Chiya, follows 9 Weeks with visiting writer/curator Hansi Momodu-Gordon (2016). Where the first volume, in Momodu-Gordon’s words, 'mapped a journey through an artistic landscape, at a particular moment in time', Chiya’s edition functions 'to reflect rather than map the elasticity of artists’ perspectives and practices in an accelerated social moment'. The conversations - with Dada Khanyisa, Zander Blom, Bronwyn Katz, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Guy Tillim, Mame-Diarra Niang, Claudette Schreuders, Simphiwe Ndzube and Portia Zvavahera - touch on the political potential of abstraction, 'whether or not the question of beauty is still worth asking and if artists have any obligations towards the time and place in which they find themselves'. 'Authorship, material and meaning prove sites of contention', and 'language finds itself wanting'. Chiya continues, in her introduction,
Repeatedly, these conversations reflect a moment of unknowing, speculation rather than conclusiveness. Assertions are made on the basis of feeling as each artist unveils a cosmology of shifting personal deities, spanning childhood games, recurrent fascinations, a love for plants. These discussions seem a display of some chimerical alchemy. They are reminders that despite the obscurantism endemic to contemporary art, sincerity is the driving impulse for any set of individuals who have dedicated their lives to the act of creation.
Published by Stevenson | 2018
Softcover, 144 pages | ISBN 978-0-620-81069-2 | Unavailable
