Public Art/Private Lives            
A review exhibition

21 February – 23 March 2013
     
Opening on Thursday 21 February at 18:00             

The opening of the exhibition will coincide with the launch of Hotel Yeoville, the book on Terry Kurgan’s participatory public art project, published by Fourthwall Books

The exhibition will be opened by photographer Jo Ractliffe, and Bronwyn-Law Viljoen, editor and co-founder of Fourthwall Books, will talk about the book project

A conversation between Terry Kurgan and Sarah Nuttall will take place on Saturday 16 March at 12:00 at GALLERY AOP (Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Director of WISER at the University of the Witwatersrand)

Terry Kurgan will do a walkabout on Saturday 2 March at 12:00
All welcome

The exhibition is accompanied by a brochure, please scroll down for the Download. Printed version available from the gallery

“Terry Kurgan’s solo exhibition, Public Art/Private Lives, is an act of reflection, and of re-looking at aspects of a career’s work to date. An endeavor to rearticulate through revised collation and reconsidered pairing some key bodies of her work that continue to speak, both intimately and more overtly, to themes that have defined her interests and creative practice over many years. “

“In this review exhibition, Kurgan reassembles older bodies of work in relation to new ones, and the more ‘public’ images of her practice are explored against her own archive of private or intimate reflections on self and family. The process reveals striking parallels in her work across these divides – not simply at a formal level of composition and staging, or in their echoing aesthetics, but in how the space between public and private can so easily blur, and the questions of family or public find their confluence in how they resonate at the level of being human.”
 -Extracts from Tracy Murinik’s essay for the exhibition brochure

Terry Kurgan runs an active studio and public sphere practice from her studio in Johannesburg and has created a diverse body of artwork that explores notions of intimacy, pushing at the boundaries between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ in the South African public cultural domain. She works across a broad range of media from drawing, printmaking and photography to public participatory art projects.

Kurgan received a BAFA from the California School of Arts in San Francisco and an MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She has been awarded numerous grants and prizes, including the FNB Vita Art Prize (2000), BASA awards (2007, 2009) and a PUMA.Creative Mobility Award (2010). Hotel Yeoville was shortlisted for the 2012 International Award for Excellence in Public Art (IAPA). Kurgan has exhibited and published broadly in South Africa and internationally.

Downloads