Hit Me Harder – You Need To Visit The JAG For This International Exhibition [Aht]

 

It’s difficult for me to describe exactly how I was feeling when I left the newest Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) exhibition Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and ArtI expected to be gushing about seeing work in my own country that I had only read about, or over how exciting it was to see local artists treated with the same respect as international ones. Though both these expectations were more than satisfied, I never expected the mixed bag of emotions I carried out of there with me.

At best I could say that the show unexpectedly managed to hit home harder than I thought it would. As South Africans, we seem to believe that being labelled such a violent society means we’ve almost seen it all. But even I – an ever so slightly socially conscious woman who takes time to read the news and is aware of many atrocities happening to women around the world and people I know personally - found myself feeling very ignorant at the scope of violence being portrayed so beautifully by all the artists who participated.

This isn’t where I start preaching about women’s rights or start rattling off tales of trauma. This is about an experience that actually made me feel something. And isn’t that what art is supposed to do? In a time where we are so over saturated with imagery and “shock factor”, it’s been a very long time since I genuinely felt something in the presence of art other than “Wow, that’s kinda cool.”

It wasn’t just the topic of the show that made it so impactful but the level of execution. Without a doubt it is the highest calibre of the work I have seen curated in South Africa for a really long time. I specifically went to see the works of Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović - who are megastars in the art world (yes, there is a lot more to Yoko than John Lennon) and yet the lesser known artists sat comfortably beside them and occasionally impressed me more.

It’s sad to think that, in the middle of Hillbrow, this *COMPLETELY FREE* international exhibition hides in the almost forgotten JAG (that is insanely beautiful in its own right) and will not get the full exposure it deserves where people will obsess about an underwhelming R4.5 million mosaic at Art Fair and call it a worthy cultural experience.

I most definitely implore you to go see Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art before the 17th of November, even if it’s just to say you saw an Abramović in Africa. And who knows, you just might feel something too?