International artist to exhibit at NAGN

WINDHOEK, JULY 11 – Following successful exhibitions in museums and university art galleries in Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, China and Uzbekistan, the TERRA exhibition will be hosted by the National Art Gallery of Namibia.

TERRA: a solo exhibition by South African artist Jeannette Unite will officially open on 19 July 2018 at 18h00 in the NAGN’s main gallery and will run until 6 September 2018.

The exhibition itself focuses on mining in Africa; this body of work was produced in response to extensive a range of mining and industrial sites in Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, and Southern Africa and examines the paradox of plenty and corporate constructs around mineral companies’ tax and legal aspects of mineral rights and the impact on socio-political subjects.

For over a decade most of Unite’s work has focused on the mining industry, resource depletion in Africa and the economic and sociological conditions impacted. Her large-scale drawings of mining headgear and
industrial complexes are executed with chalks and pastels that the artist makes herself, making use of minerals that she gets from mines as waste by-products after the extraction of ore. At first glance these works may appear to be lyrical, graceful compositions portraying old mining machinery but Unite is at pains to embed a fundamental critique of the way mining has shattered lives, displaced communities and wreaked
havoc on the environment.

Unite is a very active researcher both in archives for source material from which to draw and ‘on the ground’ in
mines themselves and the communities that provide labour for their operation. Unite’s works reference mining heritage sourced from archives and museums. This includes early geological historical maps and texts that
were created during the Industrial Revolution to guide mining the coal that fuelled the engines that drove modernity and the quest for minerals.

The artist has traveled through more than thirty countries accumulating an extensive personal archive of images and materials from the mining industry. The photographs from these travels and images duplicated from mining museums and archives are as precious a resource to Unite as the site-specific sands and slimes pond tailings from the mines and industrial detritus soiled with history, and loaded with meaning that
she mixes into her paints and pastels.

These mining artworks are made from the very mined material they interrogate so the material is thus both subject and object, Unite explores the impact and relations between power and earth through the mechanisms, both technical and social of our modern world that are so inextricably linked to mining.

All wealth is derived from the earth, and laws and legislation are constructed to regulate who has access and ownership of the resources from the planet, images of the industrial sublime critiques the force of human compulsion for material goods regardless of the environmental and social consequences. – NDN Staffer