Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) will present Meleko Mokgosi: Your Trip to Africa, an exhibition of newly commissioned works created by the artist specifically for PAMM's 30-foot double-height project gallery. On view from February 27, 2020 through May 30, 2021, the exhibition will investigate themes of colonialism, nationalism, and contemporary southern Africa. The show will feature a series of large-scale paintings that together function as a single, unified work.
Meleko Mokgosi, who was born in Botswana, employs traditions of Western European painting to deliver sharp political critiques relating to the postcolonial condition. By combining a high degree of painterly skill with a poetic, open-ended semiotic approach and an affinity for archival research, the artist shines light on some of the complex socioeconomic dynamics that animate contemporary southern Africa. Mokgosi typically employs hyper-realistic figurative imagery on an epic scale, incorporating mysterious, unidentified personages loosely linked to one another in implied storylines, sometimes spanning multiple timeframes within the same composition. Mokgosi's work references murals and cinema as well as the conventional European artistic genre known as history painting. Whereas traditional history paintings feature lofty subjects-military battles or climactic scenes drawn from ancient legends-Mokgosi elevates everyday, anonymous persons and common objects, setting them against mundane domestic contexts while inserting references that establish an array of subtle yet powerful suggestive effects.Mokgosi's exhibition at PAMM centers around the 1966 film Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa) by the seminal filmmaker Peter Kubelka, who is widely recognized as one of the progenitors of the Structural film movement. The film follows a wealthy Austrian family on their safari trip through Africa, revealing the differences in social and economic status between the two cultures. As the Europeans engage in various leisure activities (swimming, sunbathing, teasing their native attendants, and, of course, hunting), the action is intercut with fleeting glimpses of African passersby engaged in their daily labor (carrying water, pounding a mortar with a pestle). Kubelka punctuates these sequences with the repetitive, gruesome spectacle of the Austrians killing and skinning an elephant, a zebra, a lion, a giraffe, and other wild animals.
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