The Johannesburg Art Gallery has honoured the father of urban black art and South Africa’s leading musician, Gerard Sekoto, by staging the Sekoto Youth Festival and Sekoto Dialogue.
Sekoto was born in Middleburg, in what was formerly known as the Eastern Transvaal. He left South Africa in 1947 and lived in Dakar, Senegal, for a while before moving to Paris, where he died on March 20, 1993, at the age of 79. Sekoto’s Yellow Houses, A Street in Sophiatown (1940) was the first work by a black artist acquired by the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1940.
On April 22, the Sekoto Dialogue featured a panel discussion and a pre-recorded musical performance in response to the artist’s work by Seipone sa Sekoto, an ensemble led by Masello Motana and featuring Malcolm Jiyane and Gontse Makhene. Sekoto composed and performed music in Paris, which is a lesser-known fact. The music, composed by Sekoto, inspired Seipone sa Sekoto’s performance.
“Following my performance and response to the archive by Sekoto, I reimagined the Johannesburg Art Gallery as a space, taking ‘Jaggers’ between Noord and Joubert Park into account because I wanted to respond to the archive in a way that people outside of the JAG proximity could understand,” said Motana, the leader of the ensemble Seipone sa Sekoto.
The Sekoto Festival consisted of three components: the Sekoto School, the Sekoto Dialogue, and a screen-printing workshop. The screen printing workshop is scheduled for 30 April 2022, and it is a youth-focused workshop aimed at demonstrating the practice of silk screening with a group of 15 previously disadvantaged youngsters.
Khwezi Gule, the Chief Curator of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, expressed his gratitude and said: “I’d like to thank the audience both physically here and virtually for joining us at Seipone sa Sekoto. I can’t thank you enough for the spirit, energy, and insight you bring to your work, as well as the thought that goes into it.”
“Art is important because it teaches us in so many ways how to understand the world, and sometimes how to understand the people around us or the situation we are in. It communicates in an unknown language or mode of communication in which language is insufficient to describe a feeling, a thought, or even its content,” he concluded.
Written by Ntombifuthi Junerose Nkosi
24/04/2022