Billie Zangewa 41 rue Mazarine, 75006 Paris, France +33 1 46 33 13 13 contact@imanefares.com www.imanefares.com
Billie Zangewa Embroidery on silk / Tapestry Born in 1973 in Blantyre, Malawi. Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Billie Zangewa s work focuses on emancipated human relations and the urban. Her chosen material for creative expression is textile. She recycles strips and scraps of silk to make her sewn and embroidered artworks which can be compared to contemporary tapestry. The quasi-cinematographic narratives are figurative and inspired from the fashion and graphic design industries. Rather like episodes from a private journal with all the immediacy that implies, fragments of manuscript texts are woven into asymmetrical surfaces. These works are strident determined advocates for freedom of action and thought. In 2004, she was awarded the prestigious Gerard Sekoto Prize on the strength of a triptych of handbags depicting cityscapes of Johannesburg titled Faith, Love and Hope. Billie Zangewa has a monograph published by Les Carnets de la Création. Afrique du Sud, Les Editions de l oeil, Paris, 2009. Text by Pierre Jaccaud. Major exhibitions 2015 Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Women Artists, WIELS, Brussels 2013 My Joburg, La Maison Rouge, Paris 2012 Hollandaise, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Amsterdam Love and Africa, The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas 2010 Transformations, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg 2006 Dak Art, Biennale, Dakar Collections Rhodes University Alumni collection Reserve Bank of Botswana Fondation Blachère Spier J.P. Morgan Chase 2
The Sun Worshipper, 2009 Tapestry with embroidered silk, 137 x 102 cm Private collection 11
Disarming mars, 2010 Tapestry with embroidered silk, 136 x 123 cm Private collection 12
Business as Usual, 2009 Tapestry with embroidered silk, 83 x 125 cm Private collection 13
Call of the Wild, 2008 Tapestry with embroidered silk, 137 x 102 cm Private collection 14
My Family Circle, 2007 Tapestry with embroidered silk, 104 x 104 cm Private collection 15
The Inquisition, Dinner at Mrs Wong, 2007 Tapestry with embroidered silk, 44 x 103 cm Private collection 16
Ponte Tower, 2004 Tapestry with embroidered silk, 72 x 50 cm Private collection 22
En toute innocence - September to November 2014 Courtesy of the artist and Imane Farès 24
Billie Zangewa Embroidery on silk / Tapestry Born in 1973 in Blantyre, Malawi. Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Solo Shows 2010 Black Line, Afronova Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa Solo Project, ARCO Foire Internationale d Art Contemporain, Madrid, Spain 2009 101 Tokyo, International Fair of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan 2008 Stitch by stitch, Afronova Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa Fragments, Galerie Johann Levy Gallery, Paris, France 2007 Tapestries, Afronova Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa 2005 Hot in the City, Gerard Sekoto Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa 1997 With a series Gestures, Alliance Française, Gaborone, Botswana Group Shows 2015 Making Africa, Vitra Design Museum, Allemagne Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Women Artists, WIELS, Bruxelles 2013 1:54 Contemporary Africa Art Fair - Magnin-A, London, UK My Joburg - La Maison Rouge - Curated by: Paula Aisemberg and Antoine de Galbert - Paris, France 2012 Hollandaise, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Love and Africa, The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, USA 2011 Celebrating 20 artists, MDIS, Johannesburg, South Africa En toute innocence: subtilités du corps, Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, France Afrique, Galerie Hussenot & Magnin A, Paris, France Art Paris (Magnin A), Grand Palais, Paris, France Kaddou Diggen, Galerie Le Manége, Dakar, Senegal Marrakesh Art Fair, Palace Es Saadi, Marrakesh, Morocco 2010 Space, Museum Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa Paris + Guests, Art Paris, Grand Palais, Paris, France Transformations, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa 2008 Re / Presentaciones: Ellas, Casa Africa, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain Vibrant exposure, Amaridian Gallery, New York, U.S.A 2007 Afronism, Afronova Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa Social Fabric, Goodman Gallery, The Cape, South Africa 2006 Nie Meer, De Warande Kunsthalle, Turnhout, Belgium Dak Art, Biennial of Contemporary African Art, Dakar, Senegal 2005 Black Fine Art Show, Galerie Intemporel, New York, U.S.A 2004 L Atelier Award exhibition, Absa Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa Brett Kebble Art Award exhibition, Cape Town Convention Centre, The Cape, South Africa Aardklop Festival, Absa Top Ten, Potchefstroom, South Africa 26
2003 Handbags, Merely Mortal, Johannesburg, South Africa Fashion Design, Design District, Johannesburg, South Africa Playtime Festival, Johannesburg, South Africa 2001 Spark! Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa 1999 Printwork, Rhodes University retrospective, Albany Museum, Grahamstown, South Africa 1997 Artists in Botswana, National Gallery of Botswana 1996 Gallery Anne, Gaborone, Botswana Collections Rhodes University Alumni collection Reserve Bank of Botswana Fondation Blachère ABSA Spier J.P. Morgan Chase Collection Gervanne et Matthias Leridon Awards 2006 Air Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium 2004 Gerard Sekoto Award 1997 Artists in Botwana Award Publications B. Zangewa, P. Jaccaud, Billie Zangewa, Les éditions de l oeil, 2009 Hot in the City, Billie Zangewa, 2005 Business Day / BASA Awards, catalogue, 2005 Christine Eyene, L art au Féminin : approche contemporaine, L Harmattan, 2011 ArtParis, Catalogue, 2011 Andre Magnin, African Stories, Marrakech, 2010 Pierre Jaccaud, Animal Anima, Fondation Blachere, 2009 New Art, Fresh Discoveries, 101TOKYO art fair, catalogue, 2009 Living and Dreaming. AIM 29. Bronx Museum, NY, 2009 Elvira Dyangani Ose, Arte Invisible, ARCO Madrid Art Fair, 2009 Danielle Tilkin, RE/ presentationes: Ellas, 2008 Afronova Modern and Contemporary Art, catalogue, 2007 DAK ART Dakar Biennale, Catalogue, 2006 Absa L Atelier Awards, Catalogue, 2004 Brett Kebble Awards, Catalogue, 2004 27
Text 29
Billie s beautiful and sad world Par Sean O Toole, 2005 The only art hanging on the wall of Billie Zangewa s studio, in the docile suburb of Parkhurst, are three prints from her days as he student at Rhodes University. The setting of the triptych bears much in common with her current work: the city. Despite the slightly morbid nature of the work, which depicts a murder scene, the prints nonetheless suggest many of elements that continue to preoccupy this emerging young artist. Narrative is certainly one of them; Billie s work often asks the viewer to engage with the written word as much as it does with visuals. Then there is also Billie s delight in pop, be it manifest in her unorthodox choice of material or overt references to Franck Sinatra. But, it is the urban settings that remain most striking. I came to Johannesburg in 1997, explains Billie in her poised yet casual speaking manner. Then a resident of the suburb of Kensington, she often used taxis to navigate her adopted city. She still recalls the journeys she took from her home in Kensington into the inner city along Commissioner Street. It was so beautiful, the geometric patterning of the city, the glass and how it reflected the light, she recalls. It always inspired me even though I didn t know what to do with it. A suggestion one day by an interior designer friend that they visit the store St Leger and Viney proved quiet fortuitous, and helped unblock the creative impasse. This statement requires a brief preface. Before her move to Johannesburg, from Gaborone in Botswana, Billie had already started experimenting with embroidery on fabric, a skill she had learned in primary school. Many of the subjects in these fabric works were rendered in a plainly realist manner, and depected scenes from her family garden: indigenous trees, plants and insects. While browsing through St Leger and Viney, a store notable for its fastidious clients, Billie chanced upon a silk fabric swatch. In an instant she was reminded of the urban settings she had observed from the taxi window. She played around a bit with the silk and realised it allowed her to create scenes that were more abstract than those depicted in her embroideries. I decided to explore the idea a little more and started making once-off bespoke bags with silk off-cuts, she explains. Billie says the abstract blocks of colour that decorated her bags had an almost pixellated quality, an observation that is consistent with her training in graphics. Although soured by her early experience of Johannesburg s art scene, she entered three bags into the 2004 Absa l Atelier Art Competition. Her entries won her the Gerard Sekoto Prize. 30
Emboldened by the outcome, she decided to try-out on another competition and entered a new work into the 2004 Brett Kebble Art Award. Unlike the works submitted to the former competition, Billie opted to enter a two-dimensional work, partly because it takes forever to make a bag, sometimes three times as long. This latter work, with its jagged, almost asymmetrical character, defines the look and feel of her most recent work, which is also presented on a flat surface. This new body of work brings together two of Billie s most profound interests: fashion and art. Quite how they meet is revealed when I ask Billie about the enduring appeal of silk in her work. Silk has a fabulous reflective quality but at the same time I think it is quite modern and edgy, she explains. Just think Issey Miyaki. But the fabric is also important in defining my obsession with fashion and surface. I think it really started there, with the idea that the surface is as important as the thing you put on it. Billie describes her working process as intuitive with certain pieces spontaneously arrived at, while others are the product of mistake. It is however the winsome sentimentality of the texts that appear on her works that first caught my eye, those kitsch little sentimental situations, as Billie describes them. I ask her where they are derived from. Her personal journals, she replies. Transcribed verbatim mistakes and all these text pieces can be seen to function as memorials celebrating very private things. Yes, a lot of the works are about failed relationships and personal things, admits Billie. in this sense the work is at all intellectual, it is very much about human emotions. Sean O Toole est critique d art, écrivain, journaliste et rédacteur en chef du magazine trimestriel Art South Africa 31
Billie Zangewa Born in 1973 in Blantyre, Malawi, brought up in Botswana, Billie Zangewa took interest in fashion from a very young age. She studied drawing and printmaking at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, then returned to Botswana where she ventured in painting. Oil pastels then gave form to the glamorous feminine figures haunting the young artist s mind. When she settled in Johannesburg in 1997, a brief foray in the fashion world did not distract her passion for visual arts. Encouraged by a friend to explore textile rather than pigment, Billie created a small series of embroidered silk handbags. She gained recognition from the art world when she won the Gerard Sekoto Award in 2004. It is while preparing the exhibition linked to this prize that Billie felt the need to transpose her silk work on a two-dimensional surface. Today Billie Zangewa has gained international renown for her tapestries, although she favours the term appliqués. Her pieces are generally preceded with preparatory work consisting in a pre-arrangement of forms with pencil drawings and watercolours. The fabric is then cut, assembled and sewn in a manner that leaves appearing threads and stitches as if to highlight the handmade aspect of her work and translate its relative immediacy. Billie Zangewa s oeuvre is autobiographical. What is meant here is that one could almost envisage each tapestry as an embroidered page of her diary. The artist becomes her own muse and uses her body to describe various women s narratives. Her stories often deal with the love cycle: from early days infatuation up until the point of break up. First depicted as an object, subject to male desire, a trophy for the one who conquered her, each time the protagonist experiences new phases of emancipation. Thus the embroidered scenes, sewn and patched, play on the subtlety of the female body, from innocence to sensuality, from the reclaiming of oneself to the inversion of gender relationships. Beyond the autobiographical, emanates from this slim figure with short hair, a quintessential African beauty. At a time where contemporary African art practices have adopted digital culture, with its lot of multiple images broadcasted at an ever faster pace, the work of Billie Zangewa is a necessary reminder of the slow maturing of forms, and the skilfulness of a hand applying, one by one, at human speed, patches of silky fabrics selected from across the world. Christine Eyene London, October 2011 32
Publications and Press 33
6 Feminist African Artists Changing The Body Of Contemporary Art The Huffington Post By Priscilla Frank Posted: 02/20/2015 9:40 am EST Updated: 02/20/2015 11:59 am EST In 1929, a group of Igbo women gathered in the Nigerian city of Aba to protest the tax policies of the British colonial administration. As their weapons, they used their own naked bodies. This event, for many, marked the beginning of a modern Nigerian women's movement, and the symbol of the unclothed female body as a tool of protest. A Brussels-based exhibition entitled "Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Women Artists" will follow the narrative of using bodies as a vehicle of feminist expression to its contemporary manifestations. Featuring the work of six contemporary female artists from throughout the continent of Africa, the exhibition will explore the various modes of black feminist expression, as well as the way the body can serve as subject, object, model, tool and field of reference. Billie Zangewa "What is an African female black body?" curator Koyo Kouoh asks in a statement. "Is it the supreme object of patriarchal sacrifice? Is it the sacred, stained body, transgressing the boundaries of race and gender in the way it stages and embodies history? Is it all of the above?" In her statement, Kuoh also references Womanism, a term coined in the early 1980s to denote a more inclusive form of feminism. The movement emerged from a widespread Huffington Post, 20.02.2015 34
disappointment in the predominant feminist movement, as well as white radical feminism, both of which overlooked the realities of life for women of color and often marginalized them in their demands for "equality." This vision of a feminist world that is truly all-inclusive runs as a continuous thread throughout the show. The exhibition, held at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, features the work of Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Marcia Kure, Miriam, Syowia Kyambi, ValŽ rie Oka, Tracey Rose and Billie Zangewa, all of whom have been active in the African art world since the 1990s. The artists currently live in places ranging from Abidjan, in C te d'ivoire, to Princeton, New Jersey, working in media ranging from video to performance to painting to sculpture. Billie Zangewa's "The Rebirth of the Black Venus" adapts Botticelli's 1486 painting to the city of Johannesburg, replacing the traditional Venus Pudica with a black body that negates the male gaze. Her medium, a silk tapestry, references a traditionally female craft, imbuing it with the power of a contemporary goddess. The sash around her body reads "surrender whole-heartedly to your complexity," communicating the immeasurable power of knowing oneself. Zoulikha BouabdellahÕ s "LÕ araignž e" is a looming sculpture composed of eight arches, each representing a different architectural style. Together, the sweeping forms create the silhouette of a massive spider, reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois' haunting tribute to her mother, "Maman." The piece conjures questions regarding the mythology associated with the spider, and its relationship to protection, freedom, sexuality and the soul. Bouabdellah offers up the spider as a sort of social body, not quite fixed and open to the world in flux. "Body Talk" runs until March 5, 2015, at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels Huffington Post, 20.02.2015 35
42 Billie Zangewa, plasticienne, «Les carnets de la création», Afrique du Sud, édition de l œil, 2009
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44 Billie Zangewa, plasticienne, «Les carnets de la création», Afrique du Sud, édition de l œil, 2009
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41 rue Mazarine, 75006 Paris, France +33 1 46 33 13 13 contact@imanefares.com www.imanefares.com