In Passing

We are happy to announce that as recipients of Bag Factory’s Young Womxn Studio Bursary, Hemali Khoosal and Cheriese Dilrajh present In Passing, a joint exhibition exploring fleeting encounters. Both their individual and collective works will be on show at Bag Factory Artists’ Studios from 28 August to 17 September 2021, with a walkabout on 04 September.

Cheriese thinks about what has traveled between waters and landscapes in relation to discovery and the maternal. She narrates personal, present and past histories by interweaving saris, installation, collage and projection.

As things are spoken and gestured into being, Hemali grasps at fragments of what passes her by. Her video installations, paintings, and prints carry blurry and disorienting distortions, nostalgic visions, and rhythmic hands in motion. Gesture is explored as a channel of communication and an everyday metaphoric language.

As a duo, the artists started an oral histories project based in Fordsburg and Mayfair. Through recording conversations with people from these areas, they explored the layering of experiences of displacement. Their audio-visual installation focuses on the dynamic between ex-residents who were forcibly removed during the Group Areas Act, and people who have migrated from other countries more recently. The project reveals underlying past histories and current realities.

Exhibition opens: Saturday 28 August 2021, 11am — 2pm

Bag Factory, 10 Mahlathini Street, Newtown, Joburg

Walkabout: Saturday 04 September 2021, 11am

Bag Factory, 10 Mahlathini Street, Newtown, Joburg

Exhibition runs until: Friday 17 September 2021

About the artists

Hemali Khoosal is a socially engaged maker best known for her video installations surrounding identity and belonging. She graduated from Wits School of Art, in her home city, Johannesburg. Hemali enjoys exploring how humans perceive themselves in relation to others. Her art is collaboratively oriented and draws from conversations and interactions with people. Using a variety of mediums, she explores her interests in gesture; language; migration; and intergenerationally inherited and overlooked forms of knowledge. Through cross-sharing stories, she hopes her work may hold space for people to find common ground in their seemingly disconnected experiences and internal worlds.

Cheriese Dilrajh was born in the coastal town of Durban on a rainy day in winter. Her formal education is a BA Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand, though her more legitimate knowledge comes from various sources that she has encountered in the streets. Her areas of interest include (but are not limited to) migration, complexity of meaning and the making of new meanings, and experiments with creating culture by sampling fragments of the worlds she encounters. Often these worlds are birthed by inherited history, the creation of imagination, and confronting and disrupting violence through sensory, audio, visual, written, multitudinal forms, social practice and cultural work (as well as occupation and disruption). She believes radically in dreaming and engages multiple viewpoints that are a becoming of herstory.

About the bag factory artists’ studios

The Bag Factory is a non-profit contemporary visual art organisation in Newtown, Johannesburg. With a pioneering 30-year history of providing a supportive infrastructure for artists, the Bag Factory is unique in combining art making with cultural debate and art exhibitions, thereby creating a fertile international environment for experimentation, innovation, and cultural dialogue between creatives in South Africa and the rest of the world.

We provide studio space to a cross-generational community of Johannesburg based artists, and we host a prestigious international artist and curator residency programme. We present regular exhibitions in our gallery that showcase new work by emerging artists to the wider public, and we also support the professional development of artists and curators through workshops, mentorship, and the prestigious David Koloane and Cassirer Welz awards.

All our programmes are accompanied by a public programme that encourages greater understanding of contemporary visual art and stimulates interaction between artists and the local community. We are affiliated with the international Triangle Network.

Contact us for more information, get in touch with: Zanele Kumalo Communications Manager Bag Factory Artists’ Studios zanele@bagfactoryart.org.za Tel. +27 11 834 9181 Cel. +27 83 381 8746 Bag Factory | www.bagfactoryart.org.za | info@bagfactoryart.org.za | +27 11 834 91.