Those of us who have been around Joburg long enough love a good moan about the Johannesburg Art Gallery. “JAG has gone to the dogs”, we fogies cry. “Nobody ever goes there,” or: “The city has allowed one of Africa’s great art collections to languish in a crumbling building.”
Much of the whinging is deserved, but all that history, nostalgia and outrage can make it difficult to imagine JAG as anything other than a problem requiring repair.
Then along comes a group of third-year architecture students, many of whom have never set foot inside the gallery. They’re also refreshingly free of our accumulated, collective art museum hangups.
Their brief, set by Alexander Opper, senior lecturer in the University of Johannesburg’s department of architecture for a term assignment, was wonderfully audacious.
They were tasked with radically reinventing not only JAG but the entire urban block containing it and Joubert Park — and to imagine how all 10,000 or so objects in its collection might be made accessible. At present only about 5% can be displayed at the same time. A budget was not invited to spoil the party (we can all dream of such freedom).
The resulting projects are now on show in Beyond the Gallery: Reimagining the Johannesburg Art Gallery, a small but enormously cheering exhibition in the Atrium at Rosebank’s Keyes Art Mile that will be on until the end of the month. We encourage you to poke your head in and take a look.
A dreamscape
The students have dreamed up gardens, space age-like domes, markets, art laboratories, event spaces, restaurants and galleries that spill into Joubert Park. Some extend across the railway line or occupy neighbouring buildings. Together, these projects ask a far more interesting question than how to patch up JAG: what should a museum in a 21st-century African city actually be?
As examples, Kate Titterton’s vision was a gigantic, undulating amorphic “machine”, Tshego Ntwagaea’s graphics were captivating and a response to the building’s colonial heritage, while Fancella Chingombe’s approach was seriously topical.
Chingombe, originally from Harare, approached Joburg as a continental crossroads. He began by tracing the languages and words shared across Africa (this bit of research is in itself fascinating), illustrating how intertwined we all are.
For his envisioned space, he pulled the international bus routes that are already passing through Joubert Park into a new terminus, alongside an African market and artist residences, as well as exchange programmes. A green gallery roof becomes an extension of Joubert Park, while the existing Victorian greenhouse is folded into the exhibition space.
“Growing up, I’ve always been fascinated by African geopolitics and pan-Africanism,” Chingombe says. “With Operation Dudula and the xenophobia happening, I wanted to use JAG as a civic building to remind people that we are all Africans at the end of the day.”
In a country where movement across borders is too often met with suspicion, it is a powerful reality check — and a reminder that Joburg was and is a city made by people arriving from elsewhere.
Chingombe’s concept is just one of a number we could imagine being manifested with the help of a spectacular benefactor, but no, these proposed structures won’t be built. That isn’t really the point. What the projects offer is something most welcome: fresh eyes, big ideas and the possibility that an old building might yet have an entirely new life.
Beyond the Gallery runs at the Atrium at Keyes Art Mile, 21 Keyes Avenue, Rosebank, until August 31. Admission is free.
Join the public panel discussion:
On Saturday August 29 a great panel of participants will be gathering to discuss the possible futures of JAG. They include acclaimed heritage architect Brendan Hart, art writer and researcher Ashraf Jamal, cultural strategist and curator Pholoso More and two of the UJ students, Byron Stroud & Hasina Mohammed.
Time: 11 am
Venue: Trumpet Building, Keyes Art Mile.
