STEVENSON presents Transience, a solo exhibition by Nandipha Mntambo. Comprising video, sculpture, painting and printmaking, this is the artist’s first large-scale showing in Johannesburg since her Standard Bank Young Artist tour in 2011-12.

The various elements of the show are structured around themes of nostalgia, mythology and embodiment. The experience of nostalgia here is not a romantic longing for something unpolluted or innocent but rather a yearning to uncover an original form, to reveal images that are collectively known and experienced, but which are also deeply personal to every human life. The mythological character of Pothos, the figure of eternal longing or yearning, is ever-present in this body of work.

The exhibition opens on Thursday 10 April, from 6 to 8pm.

Born in Swaziland in 1982, Mntambo has had four previous solo shows at Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg, and held her first European solo exhibition at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, in 2013. A solo show of her work launched the Zeitz MOCAA Pavilion at the V&A Waterfront, Cape Town, in 2014. Notable group exhibitions include the touring exhibition ‘The Divine Comedy‘, opening at the MMK (Museum für Moderne Kunst), Frankfurt, on 21 March 2014; ‘My Joburg’ at La Maison Rouge, Paris, and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2013); the 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2012); ARS 11, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2011); the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); the 9th Dakar Biennale (2010; ‘Peekaboo: Current South Africa’, Tennis Palace Art Museum, Helsinki (2010); Les Rencontres de Bamako biennial of African photography, Mali (2009); ‘Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art’, Stenersen Museum, Oslo (2009); and ‘Apartheid: The South African Mirror’, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (2008).

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