Of all the signs offending the eyes of commuters along the stretch of N1 tarmac between Pretoria and Johannesburg — and the competition for this award is stiff — the most egregious must surely be an enormous white hoarding in Midrand advertising rental agency Houss. It takes an impressive level of tone-deafness to make a pun out of an endemic national crisis.
There is no such thing as a “Houss-ing problem”, the good folk at Houss reassure South Africans. Well, not for those who make enough money to be in the market for a luxury lifestyle apartment. For the rest, the message seems to be: don’t make your housing problem our problem.
While Gauteng is less marked than other provinces by structural inequality in terms of identity categories like race and gender, the vast discrepancies between its cheek-by-jowl pockets of wealth and poverty are made visible by what might be described as “inequality of structures”. Sprawling mansions and tin shacks. Security estates and dilapidated high-rises.
If this is a familiar phenomenon in many places around the world, the Joburg cityscape is its locus classicus. Appropriately, then, Structures is the second iteration in the three-year theme of Worldmaking at the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF). Following Ecospheres in 2024, Structures focuses not only on the built environment but also on the non-material components that are encoded within it — bodies of knowledge, social frameworks, and the collective unconscious of a place and its denizens.
This curatorial concept is especially well-suited to the space that houses JCAF: a former tram shed, later an electrical substation, the restored red-brick building is an iconic heritage site in a city not known for preserving its architectural past. Visitors enter via Stephen Hobbs’ installation Mnara (titled after the Swahili word for tower), a construction that invites numerous associations.
The scaffolding, reaching skywards, reminds us of the godlike aspiration behind grand edifices. It could simultaneously suggest the precarious and makeshift nature of many urban structures. Yet Hobbs also has in mind the wooden spars employed in the traditional mud and clay buildings seen across Sub-Saharan Africa. Each of these considerations is echoed in the exhibition inside.
Rebecca Potterton’s mural, Marks of Home, is a celebration of architectural diversity across the Global South — as, in its way, is Hélio Oiticica’s interactive installation from the Penetráveis series, recognising the “cultural vibrancy” of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas while critiquing the wealth-poverty gap in Brazil. Kader Attia’s model of the ancient Algerian city of Ghardaïa also at first appears to be celebratory. On the wall behind the work there is a copy of Unesco’s recognition of Ghardaïa as a world heritage site; alongside this are two photographs of modernist French architects Le Corbusier and Fernand Pouillon, who were both strongly influenced by Ghardaïa.
If we recall the relationship between France and Algeria, however, and the mixed legacy of Pouillon’s “social housing” projects in both countries, there is a shadowy menace to the images of these famous architects hovering over the work. Attia’s sculpture looks like it is made from sand — but it is, in fact, the Maghreb region’s staple food of couscous. With the world’s eyes turned to the razed cities and manufactured famine in Gaza, we need little prompting to discern the connections between food and colonial violence.
Jellel Gastelli’s photographs of white stone mosques on the Tunisian island of Djerba sustain a different north African imaginary. Kiluanji Kia Henda draws our attention to the south with his photographic series Structures of Survival, with a rickety shelter in the Namib Desert representing the socioeconomic divides that characterised the construction boom in Angola after that country’s civil war.
The entrenching of such divides — the operation of political power — in and through SA structures is the subject of David Goldblatt’s photographs, Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s Panel Beater’s Wall III, Igshaan Adams’ Gebedswolke and an installation by the Matri-Archi(tecture) collective documenting public attitudes towards Constitution Hill and the Union Buildings.
Tours of the exhibition culminate in the sensory immersion of Dinokana by MADEYOULOOK, affirming not urban but rural “structures”: the resilient farming by generations of Bahurutshe and Bakoni, as well as the eternal Bokoni hills themselves.
• ‘Structures’ is at JCAF (1 Durris Road, Forest Town) until November 15.
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