Claudia Tennant’s exhibition Waking The Dead presents a series of original mixed media works on paper and canvas. In this series, Claudia Tennant addresses Africa’s empires across thousands of years of history and courageously confronts her socio-political and cultural heritage as a white South African.
A homogenous set of works on paper and several canvases of imposing dimensions are presented in the Petite Galerie. The 50 x 65 cm sheets of paper display Claudia Tennant’s multi-layered practice, in which she superposes multiple layers of paint, drawings, pasted on photocopied texts, stitching and fabric remnants. Her works teem with details and, to get its bearings, one’s gaze is first drawn to the recurrent elements of painted text. Proper nouns immediately catch the eye, as do the names of international museums, concepts and artworks represented schematically. The ensemble constitutes a dense network of reference points, like a multitude of landmarks on a map, which seems to map out a new vision of the mutilated African empires of years gone by.
This exhibition by Claudia Tennant (South Africa), recipient of the Cité internationale des arts’ CAPSULE programme, is curated by Karin Schlageter (France), who is recipient of the "Cité internationale des arts & the Centre national des arts plastiques" programme.
The complete text of the exhibition to read HERE!