20 November 2018 - 20 January 2019

No Man’s Art Gallery is honored to present the fourth solo exhibition by French artist Bertrand Peyrot. ‘When water becomes earth’ shows us the subtle shift into the realm of the three-dimensional.

During the course of his career Peyrot has worked incessantly to control the process of oxidation in order to influence the metal plates to demonstrate an opulence of colour and texture. Peyrot’s experience with the technique allowed him to gradually minimize the interventions with the metal plate, trusting on the natural changes that the water would make to the metal, leaving the result more up to time and chance. The corrosive process brings a myriad of layers, outlines, drawings, and detail – elements that create a painting.

‘When water becomes earth’ emphasizes the phenomenological experience of space, process, gravity and time. The artist has translated the metal plate into experimental sculptural gestures and suspended abstractions with a three-dimensional view, often combined with the use of pigments to create a painterly composition.

Bertrand Peyrot was the first artist to have a solo exhibition at No Man’s Art Gallery in 2012, when the gallery was still located as pop-up location at the Plantage Muidergracht in Amsterdam. NMAG has exhibited Peyrot’s work at all pop-up locations including the ones in Tehran, Mumbai, Shanghai and Cape Town. This summer Peyrot showed a retrospect of his work at Palais du Roi de Rome near Paris, France.

Photo credits: Chun-Han Chiang

20 November 2018 - 20 January 2019

No Man’s Art Gallery is honored to present ‘iNcence’, the first solo exhibition of Buhlebezwe Siwani in the Netherlands. Siwani has a multidisciplinary practice that includes video, drawing, and installation always in relation to the performative and bodily act. Siwani’s art practice is strongly correlated with her practice as an initiated sangoma, a spiritual healer that works within the space of the death and the living.

For ‘iNcence’, Siwani presents three large scale soap drawings on paper in dialogue with soap drawings on enamel plates and video work. Each of the works on display relates to the act of cleansing, both physically and spiritually. The act is performed by and for the black body. For Siwani, “the works reconcile broader ideas around the colonial, the black body, spirituality, how DNA carries trauma, memory and purity. “Soap and black bodies have been synonymous with the thought that black bodies are always dirty, that would mean that black men must be dirtier? But I am not a man; I am just a female lens that has been asked to cleanse herself endlessly in multiple ways because one is always thought of as a lesser or rather dirtier human being.” (Siwani) By performing the ritual of cleansing, both spiritually and physically, can one cleanse the presence of history and colonial trauma?

In the right mezzanine, we see a video in which Siwani performs a spiritual cleansing by removing the feathers of a white chicken from her body. The abstract suspended soap drawings on paper in de left mezzanine have taken bathing scenes as a point of departure, or rather the common trope of “the bathers” in the canon of Western art: the intimate ritual primarily performed by female nudes, symbolizing cleanliness, vulnerability and purity. Siwani reacts to these representations by envisioning the black male into these scenes, seeking to disturb the idea that this sensitivity, purity and cleanliness is a feminine aspect or tied to female sensitivities while at the same time seeking to absolve the black male of the ways in which the black body has been represented in the Western art history.

Green soap is a well-known and everyday used product in South Africa’s rural areas by people with modest socio-economic conditions. In Siwani’s memory, the long brightly green bar is cut into pieces, each piece its own purpose: either meant for the laundry, the dishes, or the body. Its smell is penetrating, its composition tenacious. In the practice of Buhlebezwe Siwani it is a recurring material, presented in many forms. Its usage in the large bather drawings alludes to the presence of the bodies that have been dissected and fetishized throughout (art) history.

Buhlebezwe Siwani completed her BAFA(Hons) at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg in 2011 and her MFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in 2015. She has exhibited at Documenta14, Art/Afrique, Le Nouvel Atelier, Foundation Louis Vuitton, Africa Raccontare un Mondo, PAC museum Milan and Labor, Reparations, Theater Spektakel, Zurich, Switzerland. She currently works and lives in the Netherlands.

Press:
’Langzaam plukt ze haar veren’, Het Parool, Sophia Zürcher
’Man overboord’, Elle, 2018

Photo credits: Chun-Han Chiang

10 November - 20 December 2018

Johannesburg is an eerie metropolis, haunted by the ghosts of the colonial and the apartheid past and the uncertainties of the present. There is a supernatural charge to the deep shadows cast by brutalist skyscrapers, the alien worlds of abandoned mine dumps, the incandescent light searing off its koopies, the concrete tributaries of sidewalk and high walls.

Imbuing these spaces with colour and life are the artists and creators, using their work and personal style as statements of beauty and mystery. Their hair, their clothes, the backgrounds they pose in speak of a potent new mythology, creating new gods and spirits that could only come from this time and place.

‘Avatar’ is the first solo presentation by Jamal Nxedlana in Amsterdam.

4 September - 4 November 2018

Tell amateurs not start too fast, or they will end up in a quick fatigue. Touch your elbows to your thighs, repeat it, your goal is a 100. During the PFT the other’s active presence is pivotal. Count 1,2,3,4,5….. Up and down. Repetition is key.

What is consumed fast still leaves an after taste, references to personal, social and even broader, political events. Spit out the melon pits. It is not merely a way to escape daily life, it is a shared experience created through everyday pictures, sometimes altered, reconfigured, cropped. Filters. Endlessly swiping down, images on repeat, constantly appropriated. Caption this!Fast consumption does not abort critique. Contemporary imagery, the absurd becomes universal, viral. Who’s afraid of the beast that enjoys a cone of cream?

Bowls dedicated to friends, late night dinners, ramen nights. Perhaps the last supper? Playing by yourself when no one else wants to play with you.

Speechless tongues on repeat. So many waiting rooms. Expectations. A constant desire to be pinpointed. Ping-Pong ball. Keep on playing, together this time. Baked in the oven. Atmospheric backdrops, coloured threads.

The act itself is hard labour, manual. When yellow is missing. We could share a sunset.

Press:
’Are you friend or foe’, Mister Motley, 2018

Photo credits: Chun-Han Chiang & Neeltje de Vries