STEVENSON CAPE TOWN presents Kemang Wa Lehulere’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, his first in the Cape Town space. Wa Lehulere is the 2015 Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art.

Titled Every distance is not too far, Wa Lehulere’s exhibition is a direct and indirect response to a work by Chieko (Mieko) Shiomi (b 1938), a Japanese artist with links to the Fluxus movement, whose Spatial Poems comprised instructions for small interventions as well as reports on these actions by participants. Taking his cue from Spatial Poem No 3 (Falling Event), Wa Lehulere suggests forms of falling, both literally and metaphorically, and connects various real events/moments, time and distance  in a non-linear manner. He will utilise sculpture, video and other mediums to excavate pasts, both static and malleable, existent and imaginative, instructive and fantastical in this new body of work.

Opening: Thursday 22 January, from 6 to 8pm.

Wa Lehulere was born in 1984 in Cape Town and lives there. He has a BA Fine Arts degree from the University of the Witwatersrand (2011). Solo exhibitions have taken place at Lombard-Freid Projects, New York (2013); Stevenson, Johannesburg (2012); the Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg (2011) and the Association of Visual Arts in Cape Town (2009). Notable group exhibitions include the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014);  Public Intimacy: Art and Social Life in South Africa  at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014);  The Ungovernables,  the second triennial exhibition of the New Museum in New York (2012);  A Terrible Beauty is Born,  the 11th Biennale de Lyon at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France (2011) and  When Your Lips Are My Ears, Our Bodies Become Radios  at the Kunsthalle Bern and Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland (2010). Wa Lehulere was the winner of the inaugural Spier Contemporary Award in 2007, the MTN New Contemporaries Award in 2010, the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts in 2012 and the first International Tiberius Art Award Dresden in 2014; he was one of two young artists awarded the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2013. As the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art, he will have a solo exhibition at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, in July 2015, which will go on to tour the country.

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