Georgia Papageorge
Africa Rifting: Lines of Fire, Namibia / Brazil
6 May - 5 June 2003
LONDON Main Gallery

 


                

        

Africa Rifting is Papageorge's third major undertaking in a fifteen year period that deals with fabulous, remote African landscapes. In each environment - Gold mine dumps in South Africa, the Sowa Salt Pan in Botswana and Mount Kilimanjaro in the Great East African Rift Valley - she has explored the idea of social and geological rift through the concept of a mutating "barrier" symbol.

Papageorge's extensive exploration of the Gondwanaland Schism, which occurred 135 million years ago, separating the continents of Africa and South America, links symbolically in her work with the concept of internal conflict. She makes powerful contemporary art out of states of spiritual being. She also works closely with scientists from whom she builds her knowledge of the southern supercontinent.

Laurel Reuter writes in the catalogue essay that Papageorge's mature work has always involved schisms, be it the geological coming apart of a
continent or the political suicide of her own South Africa. "Then, through ceremony, she seeks to bridge those vast chasms. In Africa Rifting, the artist seeks to bridge the vast water - the Atlantic Ocean - that rends an ancient continent, Gondwanaland. She began in June 2001 on the African Coast with a ceremony on the great dunes of Namibia, one of the most spectacular landscapes on earth. Then, by crossing the Atlantic to Brazil for a second ceremony, she sought to transcend the barrier imposed by nature in the long forgotten past."

Working on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia and around the coastal town of Torres in southern Brazil, Papageorge has used two basic formations on each coastline to explore the former points of continental connection. Long red banners suspended from four metre stands form a cross or X, which splits in half as a V on each coast. The second formation is made from the same banners joined together and laid along the sand to create a striking 400 metre long line parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. This is the symbolic Rift Line or lava-like line of fire that divides the two continents.
 
Elemental forces combined with circumstances, fate and the historical date on which the installations occur, give the work a significance beyond any original planning. The visual connotations become amplified, if not transformed in spirit. The installation of the cross and the long line in Torres, Brazil, took place on 11 September 2001, as the sun finally dawned after ten days of rain. By the afternoon the cross installation against the blackened city backdrop of Torres, with gale force winds tearing at the red banners, became a metaphorical embodiment of the violence that occurred in America that day.
 
Photography and film vividly record the installations. The exhibition includes a profoundly moving video film, a magnificent series of lamda print photographs as well as 1.8 metre tall "drawings" on canvas with mixed media and red cloth, mounted on board.
 
Work from earlier land art projects has been acquired by the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington DC, the State Museum of North Dakota, the Pretoria Art Gallery and numerous corporate and private collections in the USA, UK and South Africa.