Terry Kurgan: Hotel Yeoville | PUBLIC INTIMACY
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South African artist Terry Kurgan creates a participatory public art project inspired by the vast community bulletin boards and internet cafes that serve the Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville.
From the exhibition, Public Intimacy, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in collaboration with SFMOMA: See more about Hotel Yeoville at
About Terry Kurgan:
Terry Kurgan was born in 1958 in Cape Town; she currently lives and works in Johannesburg. Kurgan's interest lies in photography and the nature of all photographic transactions, and she often collaborates with people and communities in her work. She runs an active studio and public sphere practice and has created a diverse body of artwork that explores notions of intimacy, pushing at the boundaries between the private and the public in the South African public cultural domain. She particularly enjoys projects that require a contextual response, such as the ongoing Hotel Yeoville—a collaborative, multi-platform, long-term public art project that has evolved through a series of distinct processes and inter-related products, including an initial research process, a community web project, a digitally interactive exhibition installation, and a book, Hotel Yeoville (2013). Other undertakings have been in spaces as diverse as a maternity hospital, a popular Johannesburg shopping mall, and a prison, often combining design and spatial understanding with a new and exciting way of representing contemporary South African social issues. Inter-related concerns run through works made for different contexts, whether personal projects developed for a gallery/museum, projects made in response to a public space and its associated community, or those realized in relation to the social communications needs of a business or corporate environment. She is an active member of the Joubert Park Project, an energetic artists collective which shares a passion for projects in Johannesburg's inner city.
Kurgan has been awarded numerous grants and prizes, including a PUMA Creative Mobility Award (2010), Business and Art South Africa (BASA) awards (2009 and 2007), and the FNB Vita Prize (2000). She has participated in exhibitions around the world, including at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2011); Gallery AOP, Johannesburg (2011); Idensitat 07, Barcelona (2008--9); and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2002, 2002, and 1997). Hotel Yeoville was shortlisted for the 2012 International Award for Excellence in Public Art (IAPA).
About Public Intimacy:
Disrupting expected images of South Africa, the 25 contemporary artists and collectives featured in Public Intimacy eloquently explore the poetics and politics of the everyday. This collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presents pictures from SFMOMA's collection of South African photography alongside works in a broad range of media, including video, painting, sculpture, performance, and publications—most made in the last five years, and many on view for the first time on the West Coast. Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of democracy in South Africa, Public Intimacy reveals the nuances of human interaction in a country still undergoing significant change, vividly showing public life there in a more complex light.
Public Intimacy includes works by Ian Berry, Ernest Cole, David Goldblatt, Handspring Puppet Company, Nicholas Hlobo, ijusi (Garth Walker), Anton Kannemeyer, William Kentridge, Donna Kukama, Terry Kurgan, Sabelo Mlangeni, Santu Mofokeng, Billy Monk, Zanele Muholi, Sello Pesa and Vaughn Sadie with Ntsoana Contemporary Dance Theatre, Cameron Platter, Lindeka Qampi, Jo Ractliffe, Athi-Patra Ruga, Berni Searle, Penny Siopis, Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse, and Kemang Wa Lehulere.
Public Intimacy also includes a publication and a symposium on visual activism affiliated with the third biennial conference of the International Association for Visual Culture.
Public Intimacy is co-curated by Betti-Sue Hertz, Director of Visual Arts at YBCA; Dominic Willsdon, Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Programs at SFMOMA; and Frank Smigiel, Associate Curator of Public Programs at SFMOMA.