This exhibition is presented as part of the Young Curators Incubator – a program conceived and conducted through the Goethe-Institute Johannesburg in collaboration with UCT’s Michaelis school of Fine Art, mentored by Professor Nomusa Makhubu.
18 Mai 2023, 18:00 - 21:00: Exhibition Opening
20 Mai 2023, 11:00: Exhibition Walkabout
View the 'Jive' exhibition daily during general opening hours:
Mon - Thu: 08:30 am – 06:00 pm
Fri: 08:30 am – 02:30 pm
‘Jive’ is an exhibitionary endeavour that enables a Cross-cultural dialogue between peri-urban spaces of Cape Town and Johannesburg. This exhibition draws from communal aesthetics resulting from exclusion and the responsive manoeuvres of joy, love, and justice. Through colonial and apartheid geopolitical constructions that seek to push us to the peripheries of society, how do we center ourselves? To center is to hold us in accordance with our environment and connect us to ourselves and our land. Through navigations of exclusion, division, and geopolitics, how do we dance, and above all, where will you meet me to dance? This exhibition calls on artists, musicians and cultural workers dealing with migration and memory amidst colonial mappings. It’s the intangible qualities that help us generate our own centers. Joy, memory, love. These attributes destabilise the mappings that not only exclude us but bury us from the canons of history. But to feel is to remember. To remember is to keep alive. We dance to remember. Will you meet me to dance?
An ode to urban sound as a communal geography. From Cape Town to Joburg. The songs of love, joy and resistance
Artists: Sahlah Davids, Bongani Khoza, Unathi Mkonto, Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Scott Eric Williams, Lorraine Kalassa, Vusi Hlatywayo, Thato Makatu
Jive also known as ‘township jive’ is a form of dance music, originating in Soweto township, holding ties to anti-apartheid movements. It is also the name of a popular sugary drink in South Africa that is much enjoyed predominantly along the Cape Flats. Interestingly, the drink was initially not marketed within conglomerate businesses but in the ‘informal’ sector, such as spaza shops. The disruptive (in)formality and anti-hegemony associated with jive, again surfaces in the slang use of the term denoting someone who is naughty or when someone is in trouble (ejayivini).
Sonically, Jive is a sound that lays a particular influence across the South Africa music scene; however jive as musical lexicon is not exclusive to South Africa. Jive is rooted in the infamous music genre, Mbaqanga, but if viewed through a pan- Africanist lens, its genealogies go back to African American jive of the 1930s, a noted dance style that originated in the United States. Jive’s further influence extends towards several genres such as the infamous Hip Hop emergence in the Cape in the 1990s, which too held strong Anti Aparthied sentiments. It’s influence in Black townships in Johannesburg and Cape Town then attests to its resonance. Jive crafts an alternate geography, one that enables the communality that is present through sound.
Although this exhibition centres the South African ascriptions of jive it is worth noting the cross cultural and worldly cosmopolitans that emerge within what it means to jive. Jive holds a transatlantic connection, highlighting that within these sites on the periphery, there is a search for freedom, and through radical acts of celebration, sound, dance, and community, it is found.
Jive then becomes a metaphor for subaltern urban imagination, but also of a cosmopolitan dynamism. We often come to associate jive with the element of joy, but in understanding its roots, and understanding its placement, the notion of jive as a form of celebration, holds deeper sociopolitical imaginaries. As a state of surrender and disruption synonymous with protest towards the notions of displacement, exclusion, and systemic violence.
Jive as a metaphor holds joy, love, and celebration as a form of sonic imagination. Hearing what we can be and seeing where we can go.
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