South Africa's got Kin in Paris

au La Palais Galliera, La Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris

I chose not to go to see the highly publicized African Art exhibit of carved masks by the Masters of Sculpture from Ivory Coast at the Musée du Quai Branly while I was in Paris in April. I wanted to see Western Art in Europe. I was starved for it.

The National Portrait Gallery, London

Sargent at London's National Portrait Gallery. Matisse, Munch and Picasso at La Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Dürer and the Brueghels at Munich's Alte Pinakothek.

Jan Van Kessel, Africa (detail) from the cycle "The Four Continents", Alte Pinakothek, Munich

 a display of 900 buttons collected by Henri Hamm (1871-1961)

I also saw works by Yves Saint Laurent at La Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent; Jeanne Lanvin at La Palais Galliera, the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris; and a button exhibit called Déboutonner la mode featuring garments and accessories by emblematic couturiers such as Paul Poiret, Elsa Schiaparelli, Christian Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier and Patrick Kelly at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. And the Treasury of jewels at The Munich Residenz. That's Western Art to me too!



And there are probably people who consider Currywurst to be a kind of art as well. I am just not one of them! But if you are, then Berlin's Deutsches Currywurst Museum is the place for you.

au La Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

So when I stopped in at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Montmartre, I was only looking forward to seeing his iconic photographs again as well as the gallery's other black and white images of street life in Paris.

Then I walked into an exhibition of contemporary photographs and saw this image.

And then I read the title. What's this? Hillbrow 2013. Wait a minute. Hillbrow is in Johannesburg, not Paris.

I picked up a catalog in the lobby and found out that the photographer, Pieter Hugo, is South African. His exhibition, called Kin, was made up mostly of portraits of South Africans of all ages and color, all living on the margins in post-apartheid South Africa. Pieter had set out to photograph the notion of "home" in order to consider one's place in its history. According to Pieter, home is where belonging and alienation coexist. To look at home critically is to look at one's self and one's fellow man.

These two aerial photographs of literal homes graphically articulated the divide between two very different Joburg realities, the Johannesburg township of Diepsloot and the suburban gated community of Dainfern. Note that the scale of the two photographs are the same. Illuminating.

Diepsloot 2013

Dainfern 2013

It was quite a timely exhibit to see considering the current xenophobic crisis happening back in South Africa. Pieter's exhibit did not provide any answers, but it sure gets you thinking.

(Pieter is associated with the Yossi Milo gallery in New York as well as the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town and Johannesburg.)