Spiritual technology
The current exhibition by Johannesburg based Magolide Collective started as activist wheat paste street art artworks that appeared on walls in London, Paris and Johannesburg and later became a body of artworks painted on Perspex with an augmented reality component.
Each piece is a portrait of someone who has made a difference by questioning authority and challenging existing conventions, and it features a unique AR video/animation attached to it. This is accessed via the Artivive app which can be downloaded for free.
Adilson De Oliveira and Mzoxolo Mayongo, are two artists who work together as the Magolide Collective, and are currently showing a body of work titled Spiritual Technology at Cape Town’s WORLDART gallery.
Besides its strong urban and activist aesthetic, the exhibition uses Augmented Reality to add an extra dimension to each artwork.
“We’re particularly interested in exploring how technology contribute to our experience and understanding of spirituality and how our art can be used as a vehicle to do so.
Revisiting African mythology and history, these technologies have the ability to lead us to new insights that help us to understand our colonial and spiritual past, as well as showing us a potential future we may experience.”
The result is an Afro-futurist approach to knowledge production that leads to a deeper level of spiritual understanding, insight and creativity.
“By embracing these new ideas of technologies with an open mind and a compassionate attitude, we can tap into the endless potential of the human spirit and maybe even work towards a brighter, more harmonious future for all.”
The exhibition can be viewed daily from Monday to Friday 10-5 and on Saturday from 10-1pm at 54 Church Street in Cape Town’s cbd and concludes on Tuesday 13 June.
MAGOLIDE COLLECTIVE
Formed in 2019 by Adilson De Oliveira (b.1998) and Mzoxolo Mayongo (b.1986), the Magolide Collective is concerned with transforming a barrage of collected reference material – historical narratives, cultural events, and academic texts – into visual renderings that incorporate performance, digital and video media, and more traditional disciplines like printmaking.
These notions are creatively accomplished through the use of a decolonial lens and performative satire to provoke and challenge the power structures and relationships of master narratives. Dismantling western frameworks inherent in both global history (and art history) and offering institutional critique therein—presenting investigations that critique the erasure and counterfactual depictions of a true African body and history.
As a result, they attempt to rewrite the narrative of the African body (continent) and other marginalized bodies in knowledge production while addressing contemporary issues such as identity, race, sexuality, socio-cultural-economics, politics, and power structures.
The duo names this act “visual alchemy”, a notion related to their moniker: “Magolide” is a Xhosa term for one who possesses or personifies gold and also references the socio-political histories of Johannesburg, a city literally built on gold – and on the labour of black migrant workers. Magolide Collective aspires to develop new modalities of knowledge dissemination, the Afro-future Centric Imagination - crossing the bridge between the past and the future, as a function of their allegorical visual practice and cultural work being mediated through new-age technological mediums across broad creative landscapes.
EXHIBITIONS
2022 How to Put the Free in Frelimo, Summer Academy, Salzburg, Austria
2022 Cosmos, Toasted, FNB Art Joburg x Open City, Johannesburg, South Africa
2022 Bona, SICKHOUSE, Enschede, Netherlands
2021 Over-Kill Festival, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2021 New Horizons, Post Contemporary, Arnhem, Netherlands
2021 Archive of Forgetfulness', Goethe-Institute, Johannesburg, South Africa
2021 ACASA 18TH Triennial Symposium, Art Institute of Chicago, USA
2021 Misava, Afro-Pixel Festival, Misava, Dakar, Senegal
2020 I-d Global Design Graduate Show, London, United Kingdom
2020 Rock Starra, Kampala Biennale, Kampala, Uganda
2020 Misava, Fa’kugesi African Digital Innovation Festival, Johannesburg, South Africa
2019 Design Indaba Emerging Creatives 2019, Cape Town, South Africa
2019 Performing Critique, Point of Order (Wits Art Museum), South Africa
2019 The Counter Space of Pop Culture in Zaire, TMRW Gallery, Keyes Art Mile, South Africa
2019 The Big Brother Prognosis, Latitudes Art Fair, Johannesburg, South Africa
2019 Wits Young Artist Award (Finalist and Merit Award Winner), Point of Order, Johannesburg, South Africa
For more information contact Charl Bezuidenhout at charl@worldart.co.za or 021 423 3075