Photographer questions identity of place
Exhibition presents a journey of exploration and nostalgia.
BRAAMFONTEIN – Photographer Mack Magagane’s latest body of work, to be exhibited at Room Gallery, presents a journey of experiencing a foreign city and nostalgia for home.
The images that form Somewhere Between Here suggest a cinematic quality that tempts, lures and seduces the viewers into relatively intimate moments.
The gallery’s Maria Fidel Regueros said through the personal relationships Magagane developed during a three-month residency at Paris’ Centre Photographique d’ille-de-France, the body of work portrayed a “witnessing of a youthful Parisian lifestyle”.
‘I try create what would seem extraordinary or unfamiliar out of the simple day-to-day encounters.’
“It is a glimpse of a city coming across as familiar, yet causing an element of uncertainty through a blurred lens of semi-recognisable experiences, juxtaposed with unidentifiable subjects, sentiments or not much given context to each image narrating the works,” she said.
“Somewhere Between Here entertains a sense of nostalgia in being in a foreign space… and the reference of home — Johannesburg.”
The exhibition will consist of images presented in light boxes as sculptural fragments of moments captured by the artist.
“In other words, playing with the juxtaposition of the dimensionality of the mediums and that of the experience,” she said.
Magagane said his work explored “the urban”.
“I try create what would seem extraordinary or unfamiliar out of the simple day-to-day encounters… Creating subjective, intimate, close to surreal narratives from my observation of the city I live within today,” he said.
Magagane was born in Soweto in 1990.
He completed his photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in 2010, and has exhibited locally and internationally.
He won the 2011 ACT ImpACT visual artist award, and was numbered among the Mail & Guardian’s 200 Young South Africans in 2013.
Somewhere Between Here will run from 14 March until 19 April at Room Gallery, Space 4, 70 Juta Precinct, Juta Street, Braamfontein.
Details: 011 074 4944; www.urbanartprojects.org
