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Nka•159 tives, essentially unstable, held in place and reinforced by the institutions of control in society, institutions that underwrite the experiencing consciousness as much as they underwrite the manufacture of history. Within this frame, historically art has served and continues to serve an ambiguous role: on one hand, it naturalizes power through the presentation of experience in terms of dominant discourse; on the other hand, art has evolved into a social institution challenging and secondguessing the order of things, making, by representing, the world in different ways. The initial version of Anthea Moys’s collaborative performance on the opening night of the exhibition was anything but resolved. It was of the order of a series of real-time notes toward a developed scenario—notes that were subsequently worked up to the final performance presented on June 7. Nonetheless , the crucial elements of the contestation more fully realized in the final performance were sketched out in the simple and startling counterpoint of the Goodman Gallery-sponsored minstrel troupe’s rude and vibrant noise, with a haunting and penetrating song performed by a Congolese singer—two radically different expressions of soul competing for suzerainty of the evening air. Such exuberant challenging or subversion of discourse also determines the conceptual shapes of Anthea Moys’s other work in the Power Play exhibition . In a cycle of photographs made from a performance titled It’s What You Want at the Johannesburg Art Fair earlier this year, Moys uses the environment of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange to mock that august institution ’s pretensions and assert a hormonally laden playfulness—power-dressed participants showing buttocks, tugging one another’s ties, and the like. Moshekwa Langa’s archetypes are more deeply embedded in the medium and language of his aesthetic explorations . In what is essentially a quiet and meditative cycle of work, he pursues a series of artistic strategies to draw the integrity of the root image into a discursive jeopardy. The images in question are culled from the media— or at least have that look—and moreover are rendered, large scale (gallery scale), in a style that makes the virtual pixels generated in the photolithographic medium a part of the immediate presence of the image. In some pieces, Langa lets the quiet inwardness of the image itself speak to the viewer from behind the virtual veil of the print technique. In others, he plays an almost Cubist game, isolating details of the composition, blowing them up, and displacing them in frames within the composition as a whole. In this gesture he alienates the subject from itself and, simultaneously, enjoins the viewer to engage with the image as a moment within a discourse of power, and as a picture of what it records. It is not necessarily significant, but certainly suggestive at the level of duality metaphor, that there are two sets of twins among the participants in the Power Play show. The twin brothers Jean and Zinaid Meeran have for some time pursued an intriguingly eccentric and multifaceted program of highlighting and exploring the paradoxical identities and self-presentations of thirdworld elites in the postcolonial era. In a deceptively complex image of the ambiguities of cultural reality, one of the works in the Power Play exhibition shows two pretty girls of the hip-hop generation with iPods as attributes, similar to the iconographic and culturally subscribed way that John the Baptist ’s staff once would have communicated his status as the forerunner of Jesus Christ. Here however, the assertion of the image is compromised by the fact that neither girl relates to the camera —despite the fact that one of them does in fact make eye contact. The iPods and their earphones lead the viewer into an indeterminacy, a layered inwardness and ambivalence in what the picture communicates. It is perhaps more than merely coincidental that in one of the works of the Power Play exhibition, Dan Halter uses a mealie kernel as his canvas. The work, presented as an almost forensic specimen under a standard lamp/ magnifying glass, has inscribed on the seed kernel the following legend: “When the belly is full the brain starts to think.” The message from a Zimbabwean national is...

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