Scope and Contents

This review essay is subtitled African Conceptualism in Global Contexts and features the works of Willem Boshoff and Rachid Koraichi. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents In an introductory essay, Stephen Bann writes that "artists like Willem Boshoff and Frederic Bruly Bouabre clearly demonstrate the fertility of language-based investigations on African soil: Boshoff prepared for his work with dictionaries by lengthy exercises in concrete poetry." Okwui Enwezor contributes an essay "Where, What, Who, When: A Few Notes on "African" Conceptualism." Bann adds that "Willem Boshoff's conceptual practice is an elaborate effort dedicated to the study of ignorance, that is, pushing to the point of dissolution the idea that the world is knowable. Imprisoned by South African authorities for his refusal to serve in the military (the micrographic work, Kleinpen I, was produced in prison as a way to maintain mental equilibrium)... Boshoff finds in obscure and obsolete words a way to construct a map that denies sight but empowers knowledge...His study of linguistics and Wittgensteinian philosophy led him to explore other ways of rendering words into pulsating...

Scope and Contents

In her review of the exhibition at the Miami Art Museum, Turner writes, "African artists have proved especially adept at using language in beautiful but provocative ways...Willem Hendrik Adriaan Boshoff of South Africa, who condenses handwritten and typewritten text into minuscule characters, such as his 1979 work written while in prison as a conscientious objector to apartheid. Some of his tiny letters are legible, while others are defiantly obscure. In ways both good and bad, they become a metaphor for the range of art in "Global Conceptualism." The work described, the manuscript for "Kykafrikaans," was lent to the exhibition by the Sackner Archive. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.