Art Rotterdam
19 - 22 May 2022

Main Section
Mia Chaplin
Sisse Holst Pedersen
Marilyn Sonneveld

Projections
Buhlebezwe Siwani

online catalogue

WENDY CABRERA RUBIO | AFRA EISMA | ALAN HERNANDEZ
SAM SAMIEE | HEND SAMIR | Buhlebezwe siwani

online catalogue

Graphic design: Cengiz Mengüç

As part of Amsterdam Art Weekend, No Man’s Art Gallery is thrilled to present Queen’s Substance a group show that includes the works of Afra Eisma (NL), Alan Hernandez (MX), Hend Samir (EG), Buhlebezwe Siwani (SA), Sam Samiee (IR) and Wendy Cabrera Rubio (MX).

In a beehive, the carefully balanced power dynamics depend on a single substance, exerted by the Queen Bee. This Queen’s Substance is licked from her body by her worker bees, who in their turn pass it along to the rest of the hive. As the Queen ages the substance is spread too thinly. Steadily and inevitably her society crumbles….

Opening: Thursday May 12th
Time: 5 - 9PM
Location: No Man’s Art Gallery KIOSK, Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327
13 May - 25 June 2022

Photos: Neeltje de Vries

06.02 - 27.03 2022

No Man’s Art Gallery is honored to present Impilo inegama, the second solo exhibition of Buhlebezwe Siwani (1987, ZA) at the gallery.

In Impilo inegama (loosely translated: Life has a name), Siwani addresses how Black motherhood is not viewed in a tender manner as one would view the process of becoming a mother, primarily because Black women’s bodies and fertility have not always belonged to themselves.

“When we hold conversations on and about slavery, we are focused on the bodies that make a voyage, rarely do these conversations touch on women who were kept as slaves whose sole purpose was to bear children who could work as slaves themselves.” (Siwani) A new series of soap paintings reflects on the experience of motherhood for these enslaved mothers and the voyage of the foetus within the mother’s body. Their titles Mdlezana translated from isiXhosa mean new mother, as this will be the only phase of motherhood these mothers get to experience before their babies are taken away from them.

In the video Ulishiyele bani ibele (2022), directly translated from isiZulu meaning “who did you leave the breast for?” We see the artist, herself carrying a child, performing repetitive rhythmic movements. Her voice recites the poem The Slave Mother (1854) by Francis Ellen Watkins Harper:

He is not hers, although she bore

   For him a mother’s pains;

He is not hers, although her blood

   Is coursing through his veins!

In both Ulishiyele bani ibele and Mdlezana we witness the unbearable loss; - the loss of a child, of self, of motherhood, of one’s body, but Siwani also shows us an incredible strength. A vigorous force that is materialised in ceramic sculptures. In Umdali and OoMama abadala the artist honours the creator, the life giver. This strength carried by not one but a group of women; a cycle of ceramics is placed close to the ground, rooted to earth. The hand of Siwani has left behind its traces, suggestions of mark making, taking ownership over one’s own body, one’s own womanhood and one’s own fertility.

Press: “De bittere smaak van zwart moederschap” Lucette ter Borg in NRC Newspaper, March 2022

Opening hours:
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday : 12.00 - 17.00h or by appointment (call 06-3755 0132). This exhibition extends to both gallery locations in Amsterdam: Bos en Lommerweg 88-90 (mezzanine) and Willem de Zwijgerlaan 327.

Photos: Neeltje de Vries

Buhlebezwe Siwani is a visual artist working predominantly in performance and installation. Siwani completed her BAFA(Hons) at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg in 2011 and her MFA at the Michealis School of Fine Arts in 2015. Siwani’s work interrogates the patriarchal framing of the black female body and black female experience within the South African context. Siwani’s art practice is strongly correlated with her practice as iSangoma, a spiritual healer that works within the space of the dead and the living.

Siwani was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2021 and nominated for the Theodora Niemeijer Prize in the same year. Past exhibitions include Sonsbeek 20-24, Arnhem, El Espacio 23, Miami, USA; Materiality, Iziko National Gallery, Cape Town, SA; Being There, Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, FR; Curitiba Biennial 2019, BR; Tell Freedom, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, NL; Documenta 14, Athens, GR, Kassel, DE; Africa Raccontare un Mondo, PAC Museum, Milan, IT; Deep Memory, Kalmar Art Museum, Kalmar, SE; Busuku benzolo, Labor Zero Labor, Triangle Arts, Marseilles, FR; Reparations, Theater Spektakel, Zurich, CH.

Unseen
16 - 19 Sept. 2021

Desiré van den Berg
Buhlebezwe Siwani

ONLINE catalogue

Art Rotterdam
1 - 4 July. 2021

Afra Eisma
Bertrand Peyrot
Buhlebezwe Siwani

online catalogue

OVR Art Brussels
1 - 14 June 2021

Mia Chaplin
Afra Eisma
Fabian Herkenhoener
Sam Samiee
Buhlebezwe Siwani

view on artsy

05 - 29 September 2019

Since 2011 No Man’s Art Gallery has opened temporary galleries in Rotterdam, Hamburg, Mumbai, Amsterdam, Paris, Copenhagen, Cape Town, Shanghai and Tehran showing the work of many young artists in atomic shelters, warehouses, historical residences and graveyards.

Exactly one year ago, the gallery opened a permanent gallery space and bar in Bos & Lommer hosting an exhibition program influenced by the artists and networks we started collaborating with abroad.

The only way to celebrate our 1 year anniversary here in Amsterdam West is by inviting the artists that have been contributing to our international pop-up program over the past 7 years. 

Photos: Dieuwke Eggink

Art Rotterdam
7 - 10 Feb. 2019

Majid Biglari
Afra Eisma
Buhlebezwe Siwani

Press:
Museumtijdschrift 2019

REQUEST PORTFOLIO

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