Pickup Notes: Liz Johnson Artur, Madiha Sikander, and Zara Julius – Group Show

Pickup Notes is a group exhibition that features work by Liz Johnson Artur, Madiha Sikander, and Zara Julius and is curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Rosa de Graaf. The title refers to notes that occur before the first downbeat of a piece of music. Pickup Notes create a sense of motion and anticipation and are used to establish a tone delivered in rhythmic waves in a musical piece.

Liz will show a series of cyanotype prints drawn from her Black Balloon Archive developed over 30 years. Liz’s intimate images taken at PDA (Public Display of Affection), a cult South London club, are developed from negatives using the cyanotype printing formulation. The images suggest tensions between invisibility and hypervisibility of bodies and their relationship to photographic agency.

Madiha Sikander’s Majmuā, a ‘curtain’ assembled using cloves, beads and monofilaments makes its first appearance through windows facing Witte de Withstraat, it releases a scent before it can be seen in space, first in its totality, then in detail.

In Zara’s Maroon Time, a man (Vusi) dances to South African jazz pianist Andile Yenana’s 2002 composition Tembisa (The People). Vusi’s captivating, improvised dance moves simultaneously flow with and against the music. Music here stands for Time (past, present, future) whilst the reference to the maroons* helps us think about escape, or fugitivity as a way of performing possibility in the context of ongoing oppression faced by people in the ‘global south’.

*A Maroon is a member or descendent of formerly enslaved Africans who ran away from captivity to form communities in the mountains and forests.

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