What to expect from Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation’s latest exhibition

The final and definitive exhibition in this series — Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: Modernist Identities in the Global South — opened to the public on October 25 at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF), and is arguably one of the most exciting events on the annual art calendar: that's because, for the most part, local audiences will never have had the opportunity to see paintings by Frida Kahlo or Amrita Sher-Gil in person.

We recently caught up with the JCAF’s executive director Clive Kellner to talk about the significance of this kind of exhibition on local shores and what visitors can expect. 

What can visitors expect from this exhibition?

Visitors can expect to obtain insight into three extraordinary artists from the Global South. Three women who changed the history of modernism: Frida Kahlo, Amrita Sher-Gil and Irma Stern. The show tells their stories and explores the contexts in which they practised through objects, journals and a significant painting from each artist. For example, visitors will be able to see one of Frida’s original attires — a blouse and a skirt.

This is the first time that the public will see a Frida Kahlo and Amrita Sher-Gil in SA — can you please expound on the significance of this feat?

The exhibition is the culmination of four years of research, travel and loan negotiations to result in a show that includes these three artists. This is also the first time the three artists will be shown together. With this, we hope to contribute to the rewriting of art history from the south. Moreover, this allows audiences who might not have the opportunity to travel abroad to see these paintings and archival material here, in Joburg, free of charge. 

With this being the third and last exhibition for the Female Identities series, how have the two previous series’ affected visitors and what are you hoping for in terms of the effect of this last one?

When we launched JCAF in 2020, it was very important to us to curate content that spoke to the type of narratives we were interested in as an institution. As a way of positioning ourselves both locally and internationally, we decided to focus on women's practice for three years: contemporary artists in our first exhibition, artists of the 60s and 70s from Latin America in dialogue from contemporary artists from the SA, Africa and the diaspora for our second show; and iconic modernist painters to finish this “genealogy” of women. 

With the current show, we expect to historicise contemporary practice but, overall, our intention is to make world-level exhibitions accessible to South Africans. Although our visitors have all come from very different backgrounds, it has been interesting to see how the audiences shifted with each exhibition: while our first exhibition attracted more people from the professional environment, the second one was visited by more creatives. We are looking forward to meeting the visitors for our third exhibition.