Hang Puts... Parkwood, Johannesburg

Faith 47

From 8 November until early 2013
Faith47’s Fragments of a Burnt History, showing at David Krut Projects Parkwood,  is comprised of an installation of found objects and artwork created in the artist’s studio, as well as a new series of monotypes produced in collaboration with the David Krut Print Workshop. Faith47, based in Cape Town, is a recognised street artist whose work can be found in cities all over the world. She has an established international gallery career, with exhibitions in Europe, America and Australia, but Fragments of a Burnt History is her first solo exhibition in South Africa, indicating a culture of cross-over from street to studio that is already well underway abroad.
The body of work presented in this exhibition is, appropriately, drawn from the artist’s experience of her own country, particularly the city of Johannesburg. Although the work is not a direct interpretation of the city, her experience is of Johannesburg as a representative African city, the streets full of the energy of transformation and endless possibility, but also the evidence of the harsh realities of day to day life. The textures of the streets are incorporated into her studio work, which becomes a combination of her signature graphic style and marks left behind by people who were in those locations before her. The installation of work communicates the emotion that Faith47 experiences on the streets, which tell her ‘a real, hard and beautifully sad story.’ The nostalgic architecture of the city is present in the work, and the sense that the ‘history of the city is etched deep into its streets’ – the works are fragments of this history, containing signs of the dynamic transition that has been, at times, reeling and painful, but has also been honest, allowing itself to be offered up for comment and consumption. The voices of the people that occupy this symbolic South African city, incorporated into Faith47’s own voice, allow her work to function as a penetrative look into the psyche of the spaces that we communally inherit.