Barnard Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
20 Mar 2014 - 01 May 2014
Lien Botha 'Witdraai I, Kalahari, South Africa, September 2012', 1289 x 941 mm, Inkjet on cotton rag paper
Barnard gallery announces award winning photographer, Lien Botha’s solo exhibition entitled Yonder; her first with Barnard Gallery, and the 10th in a career spanning twenty-five years.
“Photography, as indexical of whatever was in front of the camera when the image was taken, traditionally carries the stain of its moment. A purveyor of the disintegrating instant, even in the digital age, it is a medium that Botha, as many commentators have noted, uses to create taxonomic collections of images. She does not often document the publicly significant, but creates a private inventory in which her images/objects do not easily reveal their place in a specific narrative. Rather they seem to act as an index or even co-ordinates of her travels across the country that give a sense of her bearings, rather than fix location.
Yonder is no exception. The very title of the exhibition indicates distance. It implies that something is being pointed out, in the direction indicated, but that it is ‘over there’, beyond our direct reach or view. Botha asks her audience to mentally join the dots, to attempt to make sense of what we see much as we might try to make sense of our own lives which come to us in fragments of encounters, part of a larger whole which we cannot quite discern.” (excerpt from Beyond What One Can See by Virginia MacKenny)
Lien Botha is a graduate of the Michaelis School of Fine Art, where she obtained a BA Fine Arts in 1988. She was the winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 1997 and has received international residency grants from various institutions including the San Francisco Art Institute and the Ampersand Foundation in New York. Her work has been included in survey shows at various local and international venues including IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Musee da Cidade, Lisbon; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Te Papa Tongerewa Museum of New Zealand; Museum of Modern Art, Algiers; Musee National du Mali, Bamako; BOZAR, Brussels and Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon.
