My name is Storm Janssen van Reensburg.
I'm a South African curator that lives in Berlin for a year now, but eight months ago
I received an invitation from Jörg Jundin of Nolan Jundin Gallery to put a show
together and our first initial conversations was to put an African
show together of contemporary African art and Africa is a big place with 52
countries and over 2,000 languages and how do you represent that in one
exhibition and kind of I went back to the drawing board and decided to work
with artists that I've worked with more closely in South Africa but also that
have a connection to Southern Africa maybe more and that made me think also
to more clearly about what position to take in terms of the the profile of the
artists to include so I selected young artists most of them born after 78 it is
a very important generation I think in Southern Africa in terms of you know
social political reasons but I also thought it was also a generation of
artists that work and operate internationally they call many places
home but at the same time while they are world travelers and world citizens
there are aspects of the work that are really connected to kind of where they
from originally so in a social political way I think the exhibition is also kind
of awesome pertinent political questions many of the artists grapple with a lot
of I think quite serious issues but at the same time I think there's also kind
of like a sense of hope and humor that kind of comes through the work of a
lot of the artists but they all have a very particular critical position about
where they from how they relate to the world and their messages as well what
we also discussed me and Jo Kudin was to think about a generation of artists or
artists that also are not known in Berlin and that have not such a strong
presence here of having not shown in Berlin or in Germany but I don't really
kind of like internationally relevant and that was very important for us to
include
in terms of this generation of artists that has been born in this particular
period there's a couple of that refers to themselves as the born-free
generation the the generation that were born after the independence of Zimbabwe
for example or kind of the advent of democracy in South Africa that have a
different sense of their relationship with the with the past and also very
traumatic either on one hand colonial or apartheid history and the approach is
very different I think to artists that grew up in a different time period for
the rights for obvious reasons I think but for me it was very important that
that those voices come through very strongly
I just want to briefly talk about the mention about the title of the
exhibition the title is called the beautiful ones which in itself is
quite a poetic moment maybe this exhibition says that this is the beautiful
generation but also if you say beautiful and the beautiful ones you also
beauty in itself is an exclusionary concept so it also talks about those
that are not included in these beautiful ones the title makes reference to
publication a text very important African text by Aikwe Amar and I borrowed
the title from his book title which was the beautiful ones are not yet born and
if you think about the title the beautiful ones are not yet born it also
says that maybe we are still waiting we are still there's still new generation
to come and that for me talks about a certain utopia
