Friday 16 March–Sunday 25 March 2012
19h00 until 22h00 daily
Venue:
281 Commissioner Street
Maboneng Precinct, Johannesburg
Free admission
From 15 March to 25 March 2012, the factory building at 281 Commissioner Street will house The Trinity Session’s ‘REVIEW’ exhibition. From Johannesburg to Dakar, Martinique to Mali, Mozambique and Sandton Central; The Trinity Session’s two members, Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter, have extended an investigation into social and electronic networks and varied urban terrains. For South African art lovers, this is a rare opportunity to see The Trinity Session’s groundbreaking work, developed over 10 years and displayed on local ground.
As much of their work is experiential and ephemeral in form, the unique venue will play host to an exhibition made up of light. Video, photography, mind maps and artifacts from a dense archive of research will be transformed onto large projection surfaces. Visitors will witness the development of a powerful artistic partnership in Hobbs/Neustetter, and the revealing of diverse conceptual and practical processes.
The beginnings of the Trinity Session saw Jose Ferreira, Kathryn Smith, Marcus Neustetter and Stephen Hobbs imagining numerous possibilities for a way forward as artist-collaborators in a visual art context. In the early 2000s, Johannesburg offered almost no access to established contemporary art spaces, which seemed indicative of an art world unable to form an identity for contemporary art in the years following apartheid. Yet for the Trinity Session, it was an ideal time to explore the merits of self-organisation and self-promotion. This led to a multi-disciplinary and entrepreneurial approach that is still the company’s hallmark today.
Despite the sheer volume of their body of work and its varying curatorial themes, the one constant thread that runs through their art is a preoccupation with states of vulnerability inherent to “place”, and the urban environment in particular. Much of their work looks at the fragility of both the human condition in the urban context and the vulnerability of a built environment that, on the surface, appears to be stable, yet always simultaneously hints at its own potential demise.
This prevailing interest in the way that places and people relate to each other contains an echo of another earlier trend in The Trinity Session’s methodology, which was to explore the relationship between analogue and digital networking. This can be seen on both a physical and metaphorical level where being “disconnected” in the digital realm equates to being “unconnected” in a physical, spatial sense. A key aspect of Hobbs/Neustetter’s exploration of this analogy involves travel, or a deliberate displacement of the body from a meaningful social and cultural context into environments where meaning has to be reconstructed and identity continuously renegotiated. Seen from the perspective of the artists, their travels across the globe—and particularly in Africa and the Diaspora—signify a reenactment of the conditions of migration. As such, travel becomes a means of exploring the pervasive interest in that which is seen as home, or that which becomes home in the absence of a homeland.
281 Commissioner Street, soon to be branded as the Museum of African Design (MOAD)—a bold addition to the Maboneng Precinct—will serve as an experimental canvas for video projections and light installations complementing the first phase of creative outdoor and orientational lighting of the precinct, designed by Hobbs/Neustetter. The exhibition is free to the public and will be open daily from 19h00 until 22h00.
For more information please go to www.onair.co.za or send an email to office [at] onair.co.za.
