Trans is an evocative title for an art exhibition. As Brazilian curator and researcher Daniella Géo observes, "trans" has morphed from a mere prefix to "a word in its own right".
This shift opens up new conceptual possibilities: "trans" as an adjective or a noun pertaining to a person challenges fixed categories of gender and sexual biology, but this has wider implications.
You might say, applying a broad interpretation, that we are all "trans" — in an ongoing process of changing, becoming something new, being in one place and then another.
"Trans" means travelling across, going through, moving beyond; it is exciting, daunting, stimulating, unfamiliar.
It is also the perfect descriptor for the Bag Factory, an arts programme founded in 1991 that has drawn dozens of artists from around the country and the globe to its Fordsburg studios, and that has itself shape-shifted and been reinvented over 27 years. It transforms as new artists join its expanding collective — and those artists, in turn, are altered by their involvement.
Usha Seejarim and Diana Hyslop, both resident artists at the Bag Factory, initiated Trans (at the University of Johannesburg Art Gallery in Auckland Park, until September 19) and invited Géo to curate. The result is both a snapshot of current work by artists in the collective and a gesture towards the Bag Factory’s enormous "archive".
Appropriately for a platform that emphasises the artist as "citizen of the world", one of the main implications of "trans" in the exhibition is movement across national borders.
This is not, however, entirely celebratory. In Joël Mpah Dooh’s Crossing the Boarder, the Cameroonian artist reflects on being stranded at an airport — unable to board that symbol of easy migration, an aeroplane.
Géo’s compatriot, Marie Ange Bordas, engages with the much more precarious form of statelessness that is experienced by African and Asian migrants trying to enter "Fortress Europe": her video and photo installation, Co_movere (Cargo), pays tribute to the 34,361 people who have died in the attempt.
Barbadian Alberta Whittle recalls the "Windrush generation" of Caribbean immigrants to the UK, whose status as British citizens has been undermined by Theresa May’s government.
There are also allusions to the colonial legacy of "internal displacement" in SA. David Koloane’s Saxophone, "a memory of Natal in the 1940s", locates the roots of maskanda in the migrant labour system.
Kagiso Pat Mautloa’s City Buzz purports to be an affirmation of the "global village" circa 2018, but could equally be an expression of the alienation that often accompanies urban cosmopolitanism.
By contrast, the subject in Mozambican photographer Mário Macilau’s God Bless My Son seeks the transcendence of the spiritual realm.
In his 2015 Faith series, Macilau documented animist practices with a connection to the ancient. Yet in the same year, his Profit Corner series captured material realities from which there is no escape: O Homem Atravessado [The Cross Man] depicts a young scavenger in Mozambique’s largest landfill, a scrapheap for technological junk.
Macilau’s humanist and ecological concerns are echoed in Vibha Galhotra’s Manthan, which re-mythologises the polluted "holy" water of the Yamuna River (a tributary of the Ganges in northern India).
The blame for environmental degradation, economic inequality and histories of dispossession may readily be laid at the feet of the "big men" portrayed in Blessing Ngobeni’s The Case of the States Man: political leaders and plutocrats who peddle false narratives to their gullible, impoverished constituencies. But somehow that is too easy, because all of us transgress (to lesser or greater degrees) when it comes to consumerism and corruption. This hypocrisy is suggested by the Cubist two-facedness of Ngobeni’s figures.
Cubism is the subject of Lady Skollie’s black feminist critique in her rendering of the iconic Les Femmes d’Alger, which subverts Picasso’s deracialising and objectifying gaze.
The works in Trans that explicitly engage with gender and sexuality — Myer Taub’s ADORE and Celina Portella’s Derrube [Knock down] are other examples — return the focus to what Géo notes is the most common association with the term "trans".
As she also notes, this encourages us to consider "interrelated opposites" — not just in sex and gender but in every aspect of human identity.
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