Group Exhibition: What is this place?

What is this place?

Notions on site

A group exhibition of works by the 2023/24 commissioned artists and artworks from the Bag Factory Collection.

24 February–29 March 2024

Bag Factory is pleased to present What is this place? Notions on site, a group exhibition exploring the intricate relationship between space and place, comprising painting, drawing, prints, furniture design, textile art, and sculpture. As an investigation into practices of place-making through site-specific work, the exhibition aims to underscore the intrinsic connection between the creative energy artists carry and the unique identity Bag Factory has as a place.

The exhibition features commissioned pieces created under the Bag Factory's 2023/24 Artwork Commissions programme, as well as works donated by resident artists since the institution's inception in 1991. The commissioned artworks were initiated through an open call that emphasised themes of Bag Factory's surrounding environment: Fordsburg's multicultural social fabric, resilience, optimism, and play. The Bag Factory's various residency programmes also attract artists through open calls, which each consider different artist development priorities essential to the institution’s mandate of fostering a culture of experimentation and collaboration. The visiting artists’ programme has connected over 200 international artists, researchers, and curators over the last three decades.

The commissioned and donated works reflect the nuanced relationship between space and place–particularly how human intervention transforms spaces into places. Space is location, physical space, and geography; while place is what gives a space meaning, “personality” and a connection to a cultural or personal identity. Space is defined by an abstract scientific, mathematical, or measurable conception while place refers to the elaborated cultural meanings people invest in or attach to a specific site or locale. The open calls are, therefore, exercises in place-making: presenting to partner institutions, artists, and the public what the place’s priorities are and drawing in folks who align with these. What is this place? Notions on site questions how this adherence to institutions’ own idea of themselves impact the creative spirit and the work made at their spaces and for their places.

What is this place? challenges traditional notions on site-specificity, acknowledging that site-specific work today is more adaptable, often inspired by an ideology, mandate, or growing community rather than a fixed location or moment in time.

The show engages in a broader conversation about the evolving nature of creating art in a specific context, citing curator and art historian Miwon Kwon's critique of how the term has been diluted, leading to a need for redefinition:

Site-determined, site-oriented, site-referenced, site-conscious, site-responsive, site-related. These are some new terms that have emerged in recent years among many artists and critics to account for the various permutations of site-specific art in the present. [...] This concern to reassess the relationship between the artwork and its site is largely provoked by the ways in which the term “site-specific” has been uncritically adopted as another genre category by mainstream art institutions and discourses [...] and it is embraced as an automatic signifier of “criticality” or “progressivity” by artists, architects, dealers, curators, critics, arts administrators, and funding organizations [...] But the current efforts to redefine the art-site relationship are also inspired by a recognition that if site-specific art seems no longer viable—because its critical edges have dulled, its pressures been absorbed—this is partly due to the conceptual limitations of existing models of site-specificity itself. In response, many artists, critics, historians, and curators, whose practices are engaged in problematizing received notions of site-specificity, have offered alternative formulations, such as context-specific, debate-specific, audience-specific, community-specific, and project-based. These terms, which tend to slide into one another at different times, collectively signal an attempt to forge more complex and fluid possibilities for the art-site relationship while simultaneously registering the extent to which the very concept of the site has become destabilized in the past three decades or more.

By complicating the orthodox sense of site-specificity, What is this place? meditates on how institutional objectives interact with individual creativity. Each of the artworks commissioned and donated are ultimately works that could not exist if the Bag Factory did not exist–as a space and a place–and yet, each has a different relationship to the site itself: falling on a kind of Specificity Spectrum, with some being immovably tied to the Bag Factory's space, while others might retain their meaning in other contexts. This spectrum raises questions about the commodification of art (or the impossibility thereof); spatial and temporal limitations; and the complex idea of immobility in a city shaped by, on one hand, migrant labour and, on the other, trapping poverty.

Some of the works are documentarian in their approach, others are tributary; while others still are reflective: contemplating the institution's place-making themes. As artist and scholar Sally Stone writes: "[...] site specific installation can sometimes be little more than a process of recognition, understanding and heightening of the qualities of the existing situation, while at other times they are outrageous interpretations.” By exploring the interconnectedness of space, place, and creative energy, What is this place? invites viewers to contemplate the evolving concept of site-specificity, the invisibility of institutional power and the transformative force of artistic expression, within the unique cultural landscape of Johannesburg.

N'lamwai Chithambo

Vanessa Majoro