SWELL II | My contribution to the Spier Light Art Exhibition 2019-2020. Curated by Jay Pather and Vaughn Sadie
This living room from the past, allowed to slip under the current, with little resistance from anyone around. We are allowing it to disappear unceremoniously, even melodramatically. It is both comical but also unnerving as it speaks to the loss of memories and histories, and the instability and temporality of that which we thought were fixed.
“The impact of social media on my work has been profound. As my proficiency on social media sites grew with the use of certain visual-centred Apps like Instagram I also became interested in different modes of communication like memes, quotes, gestures, tags and emoticons whilst in conversations, chats and dialogue with others. In a series of new works, I use images posted everyday of the view in front of my studio in Cape Town at dawn and daybreak. These images become the vehicle to communicate an artistic vision of my state of mind but also serve as a means to translate these digital modes of communication into the language of painting – thus unsettling both and leaving room for re-intepretation (#luansview). – Luan Nel, 2018
With his solo exhibition titled, ‘The Poseidon Adventure: S.O.S’ at Fried Contemporary, Luan Nel places some of his Instagram images of the landscape in front of his studio in relation to the landscape paintings and maps of early colonial explorers. Certainly these images act as a kind of subjective form of evidence of what is in front of Nel every morning. But also, as the artist acknowledges he is keenly aware of “social media and its propensity for fake news, untruths and half truths” that are often the result not only of will-full deceit but also of the lack of context inherent to the medium.
Much of the early colonial landscape painting of Africa that was sent back to Europe was embellished through the subjective exaggeration and even straightforward ideological manipulation of the contents of the work. The so-called natives appeared and disappeared, mountain ranges and sky-scapes seemed all too familiar to the European eye, albeit ones sans clear signs of ‘ European civilisation’ such as smoke, crowded streets and manicured bright green lawns. Certainly these European artists exoticized much of what they saw in order to appease their European patrons.
Of this Nel is all too aware and states: “I am cognizant of the tradition of landscape painting in which a project such as this clearly follows. These include representations of the land as seen by the early explorers from Europe into Africa and later the colonial paintings that in many ways staked claim to land. My current paintings hinge on this ‘fake news’ from our colonial and explorer past”.
Nel’s own views of having a vista differ fundamentally from that of the early colonialists. He believes that what is in front of him also belongs to anybody else once he vacates the space and it is occupied by another. For him the landscape belongs to no-one in perpetuity, and yet, exactly this is the case it belongs to us all in the moment.
“I focused on the moment just before dawn or soon thereafter. In most of the work, the light featured is a reflected light due to mist. I used metallic to simulate the reflective quality one encounters in mist as the sun is dawning. The images are not clear – some are focused and others become vague leading to very atmospheric works where a play between light and dark takes place. These misty mornings are a common sight in Cape Town in winter. I draw on them as a metaphor about our relation to our future and our country. They might stir a sense of dread or possibly melancholy, they could be hopeful but the one thing they aren’t are definitive answers.”
For this exhibition, Nel’s format remains square in keeping with the default settings on his Instagram account (@luan_nel).
For the past three years I have continuously taken an Instagram of the sunrise as seen from my studio in Cape Town. Having worked with the language of social media for some time now, I have yet to include this specific platform or what happens on my profile on it. I was invited by the gallery to present a solo and it gives me the perfect opportunity to explore my most frequently used Instagram account luan_nel and specifically looking at the sunrises, which also happens to be the bulk of activity on this account. It can be read as a form of diary, also a kind of seasonal calender. The time of day is very specific, sunrise. To me it is a time I always find myself in a quiet space in my head. Many people meditate at this time, or pray. It is perhaps because as a moment in time it holds all the promise, and also holds all the hope for the following 24 hours. I spend this time looking at that which is in front of me. The landscape. It might be called #luansview, but my intention is not to impose ownership on what lies in front of my eyes, not in the sense of land ownership. I try to explore my experience of that moment, in that space, looking in a specific direction. I attempt to own that fragment of existence. It is fleeting. I quietly manipulate my lense, with what tools I have in the studio at the time, and tools within the application. This is rarely very neat or organised. It is methodical only in the sense that I do this daily. But there it ends. Each day the sun rises differently. each moment is unique, and beautiful, full of hope and filled with promise. My psychological state of mind, my emotions and my attitude will hopefully be ‘reflected’ in this capture.
I have also received a very welcome response from one of my Instagram followers. I include this here. It is so unusual to receive such a thorough response, unsolicited and from somebody I have never met in person, only through social media have we conversed. It ties in with the exploration of these new platforms that I have been engaged in _______________
The digital exotism of posting sunrise pictures of Cape Town
#capesunrise #luansview
by Federico Monaco
His terrace becomes a stage,
and from our homes all over the world
we watch Luan taking pictures of dawns.
Do the use of a social network site can become a artistic performance? Is there a artsy way to behave online? Do we live in a age where people share glimpses of their lives to online friends and deliver it to the public then, as a collection of visual arts?
The answer for Luan Nel, a artist beknown for its attention to the details in representing life as lived moments, of course is yes.
Facebook and, more generally, all social network sites are about stories. Some are stories of people, but some are also stories of places. Places can be discovered, visited, but have been also shared by tales, maps, illustrations as well. One of the other ways to witness and widespread how these other places looked like was by bringing something out of those places (rocks, plants, fruits, artifacts, animals and also people …mostly slaves). Gifts from exotic and faraway places became soon a tradition, but what is of interest here is the unique use of visual representations as souvenir from exotic places. Bringing home pictures as gifts or as souvenirs turned soon to what became the post cards tradition, which is still lasting today. Wherever you go you can buy postcards to send it home. Why do we send postcards? As usual to tell people we have been in that place. That has to do mostly with physical spatiality, while the way we share things on the web has to do more with time and however in a new way: instantaneity.
Jan van Riebeeck’s depiction of impressions of a early morning from one of the four bastions of the Fort de Goede Hoop would have taken weeks to reach the four corners of the world.
Everyday Luan posts his instant morning impressions from Cape Town.
Everyday, everyday and everyday.
That’s all about. And it’s not a webcam, a forecasting web service, or someone shooting documentaries. It’s a man with his heart. It’s a man in love with this city. It’s a man creating landscapes that last one day from dawn to dusk, creating expectations for the next morning and for the next picture.
In the past months, Luan has been taking pictures depicting the beginning of every day from his home and posting those on facebook. Pictures of sun and fog, pictures of winter and summer, pictures of the behaviour of the neighborhood and the changes in the city life of Cape Town. Of course it might be replicated in different ways by different means. What stays unique is anyway
the way sunrises with its cold, soft and bright colours from Luan’s view are the expressions of emotions and the faith in sharing emotions with people so faraway.
Luan expresses feelings not just by taking pictures of the sun rising in Cape Town, but making a performance out of it: his terrace becomes a stage, and from our homes all over the world we watch Luan taking pictures of dawns. He is an actor that tells us stories about depicting emotions by digital means and moreover, he teaches us about using social network sites as blank canvas in a open air museum where people connected by circuits and hardware pass, watch and go, come back, watch and go. A new way to connect nature and people watching a picture a day, waiting for the next one. We live the instantaneity of Cape Town’s sun rise every single morning as if we all lived there watching Luan’s acting. Carpe Diem – Totus mundus agit histrionem.
I tend to work in a postmodern paradigm. I often lift. My sources vary. I do not choose to mine only one thought but multiple ideas. And within each strand there usually lies a multiplicity of meaning. Sometimes the work is more pointed and other times it can even come across as random. The Aesthetic also holds my attention. I loved drawing as a child and I became skilled. It is sometimes part of the struggle I inadvertently have set myself up for. How to not simply get seduced by the paint, or too captivated by beauty. I can’t always manage to walk this tightrope well. I often get seduced by beauty, the paint sometimes just feels too good. I am weak. But at my best, I usually attempt to create some conversation with the viewer that when leaving the art something hopefully lingers, if not an actual sentence or question then at least a feeling, anything from exuberance to dread. It should all be part of my language otherwise I would be speaking a kind of pidgin. SWELL sees me return to the nautical. This is an area I started investigating about four years ago. I looked at the early galleon ships the Dutch used to get to the Cape for example and later the English vessels. I especially looked at the ships that didn’t make it. Hundreds of wrecks lie in Table Bay. We sometimes forget how dangerous these endeavours were. The idea for Swell is to slant the floor giving the illusion of being on a ship during stormy weather (this can lead to motion sickness and nausea.) It could also represent a giant wave, like a tsunami, as it swells through a space. On the floor some furniture and select memorabilia. It needs to signal a space with both modern elements, nice furniture but also some older pieces, some colonial pieces. I try to minimally signal an eclectic space but not from a brochure, or a decorating floor room, it must indicate that there are owners and they have a past. Chairs have been sat upon. Hopefully the viewer gets the sense it has a ‘white’ history, one of privilege. Not necessarily ostentatious. Nothing braggy. I want people to enter the space. To aid in facilitating this I placed a ‘lure’ at the wall apposing the entrance. I placed a painting from our collection. Thereby including my own identity in the suggested narrative. It is a watercolour by Maude Sumner titled – Princess Olga of Greece. To me it is a thing of beauty but it also speaks to white privilege and history. This is at its core an example of ‘disruption’ As of late this term has been somewhat overused but usually in relation to performative art. My work involves no artist performing any act whatsoever. It relies on the architecture and suggested narrative to illicit a primal reaction from the viewers. The audience/viewers thereby become the active ingredient in this piece of disruption. They experience the work and that sense of disruption and of being out of balance is the metaphor to the place many in this privileged arena find themselves in. Another important aspect of Swell is for the audience to exert a small amount of effort, to experience a slight ‘struggle’ (with a small ‘s’ ) when walking towards Princess Olga. This because of the incline. It is that much harder to reach the other end of the room now. This struggle as apposed to The Struggle is an important aspect of this disruption. It is not about how difficult white folk who come to galleries to view art currently have it, instead it is about how relatively little effort is required to become more aware of one’s station and privilege. My work is not an attempt at ‘guilting’ viewers or belittling anybody. It is about being or becoming self-aware by entering a familiar narrative but having it disrupted. It is important to me to not be insulting the now participant viewer or frightening them with violence or shocking them into some completely useless state by indulging in what has been called ‘poverty porn’ and the like. I aim for a more nuanced approach not meant to shame but rather to heighten awareness of one’s place in the current. This may be a start
This large reverse glass painting and mixed media work was made for the group exhibition EMPIRE, curated by Emma Van Der Merwe at the Everard Read Cape Town Gallery in 2015. As the head of this social media empire I looked at, Mavis: “Each day I get more than 300 “friend-mails” in my inbox. Interesting fact: My posts get read by close to 14 000 people in just 2 hours after its posting, in a Cape Flats dialect of Afrikaans; over more than 60 countries, reaching a total of 200 000 reads a day” First of all, thank you for granting me the opportunity of meeting you in person. You look gorgeous! And quite unique. During the last couple of years, you shared with us some unbelievable stories of people living on the Cape Flats and all across South Africa. Tell us more about yourself. Thank you for your kind compliment! Yes, I grew up on the Cape Flats, mixed-raced coloured, Cape Flats Afrikaans, went to an ordinary school, and during the last 10 years I have had this profile. So, one day I just thought: Why not share our stories? In Afrikaans, I would tell people Ons het almal ons stories, en elkeen sy verhaal, so waarom vertel ons dit nie? And so I did. I want to remember my friends and happenings in my life. I must say it was quite a journey and cathartic. I was blocked, banned, blocked, banned. So now I am busy finding my Facebook feet. I have an incredible number of followers. From the USA to New Zealand, from Croatia to Hungary and Germany. Can you believe more than 60 countries and thousands of followers! I literally get lots of fanmail each week, and I personally read and respond to every single one of those. You speak several languages, as I gathered from your posts. Tell me about that. Well, yes I do – however I speak Afrikaans as a home language. Afrikaans is my heart. Its my mother and fathertongue! It’s the language I learned to love in. The Cape Flats version, of course. But I also speak English, German, Dutch and French. I had the luxury of travelling and learning new cultures and languages. So I am fortunate to have done that. Travelling has afforded me many opportunities; some I took, some I declined. Education and Humility gave me a certain sense of power. And I always try to weigh things up, before jumping into opportunities. Are you Introvert or Extrovert? I am Ambivert. I am a bit of both. In real life I don’t talk that much though. So I lean more towards the introvert side. Your Community Engagement projects are just amazing. How many projects do you run? For 2019, I will still be involved with A Reaching Hand, an NPO doing some incredible work on the Cape Flats. I am currently involved with literacy projects: one in Khayelitsha, one in Delft and one in Uitsig. My main goal is to make it as sustainable as possible. The things with dreams are that dreams live much longer than what dreamers do, and it is my dream that these children will have better lived-opportunities than what I had. I did not have a good life at all. With my Facebook fans, we had secured enough funds to pay the tuition fees for less fortunate learners for next year. Then I will also want to, if it is at any means possible work with the Tersia Jonck Initiative. It is for talented music students on the Cape Flats. It is to provide scope and opportunities to them, and to show them, that on my Page, we really do care about their creative dreams. And then I will still be working with various other projects in and around Cape Town. You are well put together: Any one you are seeing romantically? Well, I do get a lot of good offers as Mavis vannie Lavis [giggles], aside from the “Hi dear”-emails. But I am in a relationship. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know about the Mavis profile. And to secure my privacy, I also blocked him. He’s not a jealous person, and will give me my space, but when I am Mavis, I don’t have time for random kisses with someone I blocked [laughs]. In a nutshell, I am seeing someone. However, Mavis is different: Mavis can be a bit of a jintoe. She sees everyone online, especially if they earn hundreds and thousands of dollars. But I do keep a level head between myself and the Mavis-persona. Five random facts about you? Facts or truths? [giggles] Okay. I love coffee shops. I don’t like the beaches at all. Let me think: I support LGBTQI+ rights wholeheartedly and make no secret of that. Wait till 2019 for a big Mavis surprise! I am busy writing my first novel, due to be released soon, and I love, love, love people. My fans mean everything to me. Any last word? Last words sound so final. [laughs]. “Dream big”. I think a lot of people nowadays settle for mediocrity, because it is safe. I would say Dream Big. My Page will always be a supportive platform and a safe space to bounce off ideas
Mappa Mavis ( detail)
Mappa Mavis (in context)
