Ernest Cole Award Exhibition: 'The Weight of a Kiss', with Motlhoki Nono
Photo: is pleased to announce the exhibition of the Ernest Cole Award recipient 22/23. The Award acknowledges Ernest Cole’s important role in South African photography. Motlhoki Nono is the recipient. The Ernest Cole Award exhibition will open on 9 September 2023, at 70 Juta St, Bramfontein, Johannesburg at 18h00.
Nono’s exhibition, ‘The Weight of a Kiss’ is an intimate exploration of the social and filmic experiences of love. Dealing with questions around constructions of love, it explores how this is fabricated and translates in different social settings. For this iteration of the work, the focus is on the event of the kiss in romantic productions, particularly films. Attempting to deconstruct the cinematic kiss by inserting a ‘witness’ in-between mouths kissing, the work becomes an uncanny, awkward and humorous comment on the weight of a kiss. The work centres black people’s intimate experiences with kissing.
As part of FNB ArtJoburg’s Open City programme, the exhibition will run from 1 September 2023 and until 15 September 2023, at 70 Juta St, Braamfontein, Johannesburg. It will be open from 10h00-18h00 on weekdays.
About the Ernest Cole Award
The Ernest Cole Award was established to commemorate Ernest Cole and to acknowledge him both as a key figure in the history of South African photography and as a contributor to the struggle against apartheid. Ernest Cole faced many struggles in his career as a photographer, struggles that lead to his exile and the struggles that continued in his time as a photographer in the United States and Europe. The Award is framed by the need to support and provide professional guidance to photographers facing various difficulties while trying to establish their careers. Conceptualised and operated from within South Africa, the ECA is an important identifier for photography practice in the cultural sphere of South Africa and for South African photography internationally. The relaunched ECA looks to facilitate positive change in order to extend opportunities for South African photographers beyond the scope of the Award and does so by supporting creative practice that expands photography’s field of engagement and by resourcing photographers through tailor-made support structures such as a circle of mentorship, peer review, and exhibition and publication opportunities. The Ernest Cole Award is given every second year. Motlhoki Nono is the recipient of the Ernest Cole Award 2022-23. This exhibition is the culmination of Motlhoki Nono’s work over the duration of the award period. Lebohang Kganye has been mentoring Motlhoki Nono.
Ernest Cole Award Recipient 22/23: Motlhoki Nono
Motlhoki (b. 1998, Pretoria, South Africa) is a printmaker and video artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. She defines her practice as Black Romantic Studies, examining ‘the socio-political contours of love’: How the articulation and experience of romance manifests at the intersection of race, class, geography and gender. Motlhoki’s practice departs from observing the racialised gap that excludes the experiences of black people, as well as the gendered one excluding black women as the subjects of love in romantic productions. Using various lens-based media, print and digital found objects as tools, Motlhoki examines this gap with a decolonial and sociological approach, questioning and problematising the implications of this exclusion on the experience of romance for black women. Her practice operates within the absence of black romantic representation. Through a language of composition, consumption and romantic aesthetics from South African black townships, Motlhoki explores the romantic within the frame of the political. Her romantic based practice maps the lines of intimacy and violence within love, in an attempt to contribute towards a black romantic archive that centres the experiences of black women in particular. Motlhoki earned her BA(FA) at the University of the Witwatersrand and has since exhibited her work internationally in Germany, New York and Switzerland, and nationally between Cape Town and Johannesburg. She has been the recipient of a number of awards and grants and is currently the recipient of the Ernest Cole Photography award. Most recently, Motlhoki completed her three-month residency in Germany as part of the Leipzig International Art programme.
Lebohang Kganye
Lebohang Kganye was born in 1990 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she currently lives and works. Kganye’s practice explores a familial archive that is concerned with layered and temporal storytelling. While her work may resonate with a particularly South African experience; it critically engages with oral tradition as form and memory as a tangible source material. Kganye has been Motlhoki Nono’s mentor over the award period.
The Ernest Cole Award is supported by:
Photo:
Photography Education Truat
David Goldblatt Legacy Trust
Open City 2023
Photo:
Photo: is a platform that promotes socially relevant photography projects/work and photographers. Through curatorial and educational projects throughout the African continent and beyond, Photo: promotes emerging and practicing photographers and photography with the aim to encourage critical and experimental approaches/responses, that challenge and stimulate how we think about photography and our world. Further, through commissioning, producing and connecting photography projects and practitioners, Photo: wants to encourage dialogue, exchange, engagement and participation. Central to its vision, is the idea that photography can be a delicate tool for social change. Photo: was founded in late 2015 by John Fleetwood and is based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Photography Education Trust
The Photography Education Trust is a registered public benefit trust to encourage and nurture photography as a response to South Africa’s vibrant, conflicted and constantly changing society, as a means of creating mutual understanding; thereby assisting in the evolution of a better society for all. It aims to provide training to aspirant photographers, including aspirant photographers from disadvantaged backgrounds, to equip them with the attitudes, experience, values and technical skills necessary to enable them to find employment or create self-employment while pursuing the ethos described above
Open City 2023
Together with the three-day fair, Open City fulfills FNB Art Joburg’s quest for economic stimulation, inclusivity, and better access for all. To do this, Open City encourages Johannesburg’s visitors and residents to immerse themselves in Johannesburg’s rich and layered cultural offerings to the point where it becomes a part of their everyday. Activating the city with art, music, performance, food and fashion, every day of the week for 16+ days, Open City then gives independent and emerging cultural practitioners the opportunity to reach a wider audience of culture consumers.
Posted 25 August 2023
