A building full of artists makes for a dynamic community

With the commercially driven showcase Open Studios around the corner, activities around parts of August House seem to ramp up a notch. The prospect of the public roaming through the 40-odd studios in this downtown Joburg building has somewhat subtly shifted the usual convivial tone you would expect from communal living. 

A Saturday in mid-October, a busload of Lithuanian tourists to the space provides an opportunity for a selection of artists to rehearse putting their best foot forward. With the afternoon light streaking in, mixed-media artist Thembinkosi Sinalo Ntuli takes his guests on a careful yet unlaboured explanation of the evolution of his portrait-based style; talking about its collaged elements and how it became infused with beadwork after an epiphanic moment during his attendance of a reed dance ceremony. His audience perks up when he unveils an almost life-size work of Winnie Mandela leaning against her fence in Brandfort. The bead-emblazoned highlights and shadows on her face lend her a holographic, saintly presence. The house and VW Beetle in Peter Magubane’s 1977 photograph on which the painting is based, are replaced by a kaleidoscopic acrylic paint background fittingly out of step with Ntuli’s usual two-tone ensemble. Ntuli is engaged, enthusiastic – earnest, even, without sounding too rehearsed. Incrementally, he unveils the range of his arsenal. 

Sinalo Ntuli, whose portraits feature patterns fashioned out of beads, says he came up with the idea after attending Umhlanga, a reed dance event in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal. Image: Meta Foundation

Blessing Blaai shares a roomier first-floor studio with Vivien Kohler.  Kohler responds to stark questions about the meaning of his work; the use of religious motifs, the materials. 

“It’s about an internal world,” he says of a work in which a pediment made of reinforced canvas gives way to a blanketed figure floating in replicated cardboard made of similar material. “It is about creating hope out of chaos. A lot of people in this area collect cardboard as a means to make an income,” he explains. After displaying incredulity at Kohler’s deft workmanship and its impact, some of the crowd’s attention turns to Blaai, who mines similar thematic ground. 

He explains the trajectory of a painting-based body of work titled Spaces, which marks a shift from a conventional depiction of dilapidated buildings to a surrealist exploration of interiority.

There is subtle evidence of a symbiosis between the two artists, a product of a friendship years in the making. Speaking about it in more detail, Kohler says that beyond the tangibles Blaai gleans from having assisted him since 2016, he also gets a close-range view of the other side of the game. “He’s getting a front-row seat in terms of learning what it means to work with a gallery, what it means to negotiate your art career, what it means to be wary of the industry,” Kohler says. “It’s a pretty strange industry, if I’m being honest. There are no hard and fast rules about how to make it.” 

Blessing Blaai shares a studio with fellow artist Vivien Kohler, loves to experiment with media, with his current body work featuring a range of acrylic paintings on canvas and wood. Image: Meta Foundation

Vivien Kohler, who joined August House through a studio exchange programme initiated by the Meta Foundation, works in a process-driven style that involves replicating material and reinforcing surfaces for durability. Image: Meta Foundation

Kohler, who arrived at August House in 2019 as part of a studio exchange programme, says the place is more of “an organism than an institution”, dependent largely on the nature of the mix of inhabitants. 

The studio exchange deal, he explains, involves assisting the Meta Foundation run programming for August House artists, such as 2021’s “Cape Town takeover”, which involved five exhibitions in five galleries running concurrently in that city. Among other duties, Kohler, who sits on the Meta Foundation board, is part of the residency and the Women to Watch Award selection committees.

Although he confesses to locking himself in the studio, working and going home, in every other sense he is wedded to the pulse of the building’s creative rhythm. “For me, the studio is like a support system,” he says. “I just had a solo exhibition with Gallery MOMO. When I needed help to get the works done on time, Blaai, Tawanda MuAfrika (who has since left August House) and Malwande Ngcingi came to my aid. 

“That’s what I like about August House, it’s not just one person for themselves. If one person is going through something, we rally around that person and assist as best as we can.” Proudly, and cognisant of the teamwork it took, Kohler speaks of his recent show, This Too Shall Come To Pass, as one “where I can say I did my best and lived up to my own personal standard”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emG2fXH4djw

Back with the tour, wood carver and painter Simon Moshapo (Jnr) is doing his level best to give a concise rundown of a folk tale surrounding the disappearance of the ngoma lugundu drum and the subsequent descent into a colonially augured dysfunction. Many of his conceptual wood sculptures, some featuring mythological, anthropomorphous figures, spring from the deep well of Venda culture, forming part of a continuum that coalesced around Ditike, an art centre in Venda. 

We are crammed into the studio of about 70m2, but the array of Moshapo’s sculptures and his corresponding paintings in earthy colours warp the dimensions. The recounting of his work, packed with context, makes for a heady experience. 

Entering August House earlier this year, Moshapo took counsel from Ramotoana Richard Mokgomme, the Thami Mnyele Award winner he went to school with in Limpopo. Mokgomme advised the sculptor to develop a relationship with painting as a way of “resolving his paintings with sculpture or vice versa… For example, he could take one sculpture and produce 10 or 15 paintings in terms of the elements of his art and the principles of design. He can crop and rotate the works, using the sculptures as a sketch.”   

'Walking Dead, 2022' (acrylic on canvas) by Blessing Blaai, from his solo show. Image: Meta Foundation

In the fleeting moments he spent with the European visitors, Moshapo stuck mostly to referencing the various sculptures arranged in a circle around his studio, suggesting, perhaps, that he is yet to find the satisfactory resolution the marginally elder Mokgomme has advised. 

“Sometimes the medium needs to be flawed,” Mokgomme says. “Allow it to be that because sometimes the medium is the concept itself.”

Mokgomme, whose child attends a school nearby, pops in regularly to check on Moshapo's progress.

On a midweek afternoon as several artists gather around portraitist Wisani Manyisi’s studio, preparing to head to an UpstArt Galleries show at The Catalyst Hotel, Kohler’s point about the “living organism” is made clearer. An artist who looks to be the youngest of the group shares a particular issue he is dealing with related directly to his practice. His peers listen, make fun of his circumstance and then proceed to dish out considered advice from their respective vantage points. As we take the lift to ground level and descend into the building’s bowels, it becomes sharper how the downtime can be just as productive for artists as locking themselves up in the studio. DM/ML

Sosibo is participating in a Writer’s Residency at August House facilitated by the African Art Content Agency, a non-commercial art journalism project. 

Open Studios takes place on Sunday, 30 October from 10.30am to 4pm. Tickets are R30 online or R50 at the door. The programme includes meeting 40 artists, a screen-printing demonstration and a kids’ area, and food and drinks will be on sale. A shuttle service ferries guests from Access City. Tickets can be bought through Quicket. Visit www.augusthouse.co.za for more information.

In case you missed it, also read The figurative ‘ghost’ that haunts the art at August House

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-10-18-the-figurative-ghost-that-haunts-the-art-at-august-house/