Bev Butkow portfolio Dec 2022

embodied-entanglements/entangled-embodiments

2020 Site-specific installation

Bag Factory Artist Studios, Newtown, Johannesburg

All images © Bev Butkow. Photos: Anthea Pokroy, Bev Butkow, Thekiso Mokhele

I had the privilege of travelling to Stockholm about 6 years ago. I was bowled over by the creative scene, quality and proliferation of museums and the level of innovative and boundary-breaking creativity I saw in the artworks. For me, this stands in stark contrast to South Africa’s art ecosystem which is primarily commercially driven and provides few opportunities to expose conceptual/ experimental/ innovative creative processes that stand out of the mainstream. Despite a wealth of talented artists and incredible level of creativity, South Africa has relatively few institutional spaces, and lacks meaningful structures for critique or publishing of art writing. South African collectors and institutions currently focus on identity politics and the important work of reinserting POC and other marginalised people back into art history.

My path is different. I recently completed my creative research MFA which commits to ongoing “unbecoming” through themes of performativity, envitalised materials, the creative labour of the artist-woman body, and the nature of embodiment. I am now consolidating and refining my learnings, interrogating my creative process by delving deeper into these concepts. I question how we walk upon this earth through a series of C words: Creolization – Collaboration – Cacophony – Calamity/Catastrophe. I am experimenting with creolizing weaving and painting as a radical disruptive “unbecoming” that creates the conditions within which my envitalised materials may assume agency as equal co-contributors/ collaborators to my creative process. I search for ways in which this cacophony of materials can mobilise around coming environmental and social calamities. I will continue to focus on these processes in Sweden.

Within my career, I am working towards presenting my work in non-commercial and institutional settings, and am just starting to enjoy international opportunities. I relish the opportunity to engage with Swedish curators, writers and academics on my work, with the aim of propelling my creative process forward. I envisage setting up my studio in Sweden as an experimental laboratory that welcomes like-minded creative collaborators to throw caution to the wind with me to challenge boundaries. Sweden’s deep history in textiles and fibre art is of particular interest, and I would engage with it meaningfully.

While South Africa holds influential sway in my thinking and creative processes, it would be beneficial to distance myself from its immediacy for a time. I would try to make some sense of it from a distance. My husband will come to Sweden with me should I be given the privilege of being selected for a residency.

I create multi-layered immersive installations which function beyond the white cube’s conventional state of quietude, activating the exhibition space with the movement of people, sound, light, while encouraging viewers to touch, engage, and experience. These installations remove the viewer from daily reality and consciousness, immersing them in opaque fantasy-like worlds.

In witnessing people engage with my work, something came alive for me, shifting what I think things can do. In this space of immersive alchemy and wonder, the artistic object transcends reified form and begins to perform, play, and respond to the people and environments it encounters. Beyond being seen, these forms are felt, stimulating a sensory bodily response within the viewer, enticing viewers to touch. They bestow a performative power, so that space becomes embodied, and things and ideas are a performance in which past creative labours are brought into the present, remaining active as they are felt viscerally in my forms.

Through my installation practice, I paint in space, viewing weaving as an act of painting in three dimensions with materials and colours. Mine is an ongoing conceptual and material cycle of unravelling order, followed by attempts to make sense of disorder. I make-unmake-entangle-unravellearn-unlearn-arrange-rearrange, until material forms emerge. I call the entangled, free-form, woven, painted, dimensional, constellated forms that I make embodied-entanglements/entangled-embodiments, or eXe. They are ephemeral, never settling into solid reified form, yet are grounded in physical materialities––the rhythmic gestures of my artist-woman body, physical making practices and the cacophony of surplus/scrap materials I work with in homage to my grandmother’s hoarding.

statement

eXe hold material, personal, and social metaphors.

Through my labour and time, eXe transform into multi-layered sculptural masses that celebrate the small, ordinary, and even mundane fragments of everyday life. eXe expand dimensionally into the world-flows, contradictorily asserting my right to claim space as a woman while equally questioning my accountability to my space and context. I consider the ways I walk upon the Earth – as an individual, in community and in relation to all other earth-beings, and Mother Earth herself. My deep immersion in making process attempts to deconstruct and recreate new forms of relating and co-existing in our complex contemporary world.

Unsettled, eXe teeter in a fragile equilibrium between holding together and unravelling. Their connection is as fragile as a mere piece of string.

Perspectives and relationships change constantly, depending where you look from. This multi-layered multi-dimensional complexity – with its hints of detritus and chaos – mirrors an unravelling of the social order. It fuels a never-ending search to pin down something that can never settle into solidified form or reach an end point.

It is uncontainable. In continual process. In flow.

Meaning is fugitive.

Click here for a video presentation on my practice

Immersive installations

embodied-enTANglements/enTANgled-embodiments (Part 2) Made with Heidi Stroh, Thandiswa Maxinyane, Cynthia Maxinyane, Menard Hunga 2021

Site-specific immersive installation Origins Centre Museum, Wits University, Johannesburg

Multiple Perspectives

Please click here to experience the immersive interaction with this installation

Jiga-Jiga

2022

Studio installation

Galvanized wire, fabric scraps, ribbon, cord, pencil wall drawing, volume Size variable

Paintings/creolizations

Forms/ assemblages/ constellations/ entanglements

lines of flight

Made with Heid Stroh

2022

String, plastic cord, wooden slats, embodied traces of time/labour/exertion/conversation/instruction

Approx dimensions 150 x 150 cm

Unfurling in flight

Made with Heidi Stroh 2021

Dressmaking

It’s My Superpower and My Curse 2021

Made with Cynthia Maxinyane, Sharon Maxinyane, Menard Hunga Galvanised roofing wire, fabric offcuts, ribbon, fabric rope, imitation pearls, cable ties, insulation tape, feather dusters, wool, repurposed oil painting, plastic beads, plastic cord, glass beads, plastic shopping bags, plastic mesh, expanding foam, cardboard box, embodied traces of time/labour/exertion/ conversation/instruction approx. 200 x 120 x 120 cm

A suggestiveness Made with Pinky Moyo 2020 glass, plastic, wood and metal beads, artificial pearls, fishing gut, string, embodied traces of time/labour/exertion/conversation/ instruction approx. 110 x 83 cm

Challenge the bounds of acceptability

Made with Marguerite Sanders

2018

Plastic mesh, repurposed canvas, fabric, ribbon, metal washers

Variable size – approx. 106 x 92 x 20 cm

A moment of memories Made with Heidi Stroh 2022

Ribbon, plastic lawnmower cord, jewelry wire, dressmaking scraps, imitation pearls, string, wool, plastic beads, galvanized wire, embodied traces of time/labour/exertion/conversation/ instruction 88 x 137 cm

Biography

South African artist Bev Butkow (b. Johannesburg 1967) arrived late to the arts, first holding a paint brush at age 43. She quickly became obsessed. As a self-taught artist, she embraces an instinctive and incidental way of working, forging a unique path through her imaginative experimentation and exploratory playfulness. Re-orientating from her career in finance, she obtained a Master of Fine Arts with distinction from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 2022 under scholarship from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She has exhibited at the Dakar Biennale, Wits Origins Centre Museum, Wits Art Museum, 1-54 London, Cape Town Art Fair and Art Joburg. She has presented at numerous conferences, participated in academic workshops and is published in academic journals.

Butkow’s process-based practice is grounded in ritualistic making-practices and everyday materials, yet her handwoven semi-sculptural assemblages assert an ephemeral other-worldly presence. Tension, contradictory complexity and hybrid approaches to making pervade her process, which unfolds on multiple levels beyond the physical forms she makes. She uses mediums of weaving and installation to question the spatial logic of traditionally well-behaved forms, speaking to the potential of unhinging our collective knowledge, particularly around what it means to be a female.

Grounded in her responsibility as an artist, maker, communicator and social actor, Butkow is deeply committed to social engagement and education. She co-founded a library in rural Limpopo and dedicated over a decade of service to the Board and management committee of 11 schools. Multiple complexities of personhood and place – her diverse life experiences and perspectives, artistic and corporate careers, academia, cultural influences of her traditional Jewish upbringing, community engagement, and roles as mother and wife – find form in her artistic and scholarly practices. Based in Johannesburg with her husband and four children, the city is key to her creative process. So to is her creative home, the Bag Factory Artist Studios, whose collaborative ethos mirrors an essential component of Butkow’s practice.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected biennials/triennals

2022 14th Dak’Art Biennial, titled 'Ndaffa / Forging / Out of the Fire, Dakar, Senegal

2022 Contextile Textile Talks, Portugal, curated by Lala de Dios

2021 Every Woman Biennial, London

2021 Interwoven Worlds, ACASA Triennial, Online

2020 IX Bienal World Textile Art- Chile, Online

Solo exhibition

2021 embodied-entanglements/entangled-embodiments, MAFA show, Origins Centre Museum, Wits University

2015 m/other, Lizamore & Associates, Johannesburg

Selected group exhibitions

2023 Galerie Christophe Person, Paris (forthcoming)

2022 Rich in Fibre, curated by Dineke van der Walt, KKNK, National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn

2022 Tomorrows/Today, curated by Nkule Mabaso and Luigi Fassi, Investec Cape Town Art Fair

2021 Bag Factory 30 Years: So Far, The Future, FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg

2020 Darkest Before Dawn: Art in a Time of Uncertainty, Ethan Cohen KuBe, New York

2020 Tactile Visions–Woven, Curater Prof Sharlene Kahn, Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg

2018 The Art of Lithography: a collaborative expression of LL Editions, Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg

2018 Sister Sister, National Arts Festival, Makhanda

2018 Tobetsa: a huddling, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

2016 Thami Mnyele Fine Arts Awards Top 100 exhibition, Kempton Park

2016 District Six 50th Commemorative Print Exchange Portfolio Project, District Six Museum, Cape Town

Awards, grants & selections

2021 BodyIQ2021 Symposium, Berlin

2021 Wits School of Art RINC recipient

2021 Finalist, Nature/Nurture Competition, Brooklyn, USA

2020 Grant Recipient, Art: An Essential Need, artandaboutafrica

2019 Scholarship Andrew W Mellon: Governing Intimacies (GI) Project

2019 African Studies Journal writing retreat

2018 Africa’s top 20 new and exciting talent, Joburg Art Fair

2016 Johannesburg Council Chamber Totem Public Art Competition

2016 Post-Its, Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, Supported by Sokol Foundation, Hayman Foundation, University of California at San Diego, Los Angeles and Davis

2015 Merit Award, SA Taxi Foundation Art Award

2015 Fresh Produce, Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg

2015 Winner, Assemblage Postcard Project competition

Residencies

2020 Nirox Sculpture Park, Cradle of Mankind, South Africa

2019 L’Air, Paris

Academic Publications

2020 [...] Ellipses Journal for Creative Research

2022 Image & Text Journal

Gallery representation

Guns & Rain

Art Fairs include 1-54, London, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Latitudes Art Fair, Art Joburg, AKAA Art Fair, Paris. Group exhibitions at a variety of project spaces, including Point of Order, Nirox Project Space, P72 Project Space, Bag Factory, National Arts Festival, District Six Museum.

Curriculum Vitae - cont

Formal education

2022 Master of Fine Arts with distinction, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, under supervisor Dr Jessica Webster

2016–2017 Honours in Art History with distinction, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, under supervisor Dr Nicola Cloete and Stacey Vorster

1985–1991 B.Com, B.Acc, CA(SA), H.Dip.Tax, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Conference presentations

2021 Virtual Hugs 2021: Creating from precarious edges, , University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

2019 Material Narratives: Representations of public and private histories in cloth conference, University of Johannesburg

2019 Wits School of Arts Postgraduate Research Showcase, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

2018 Tobetsa: a huddling, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

2016 South African Research Chair in Southern African Art and Visual Culture conference

Informal education

2020 Drawing meditation with Katherine Bull

2019 Narrative Writing under Dr Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon

2019 Research trip, TextileLab, Tillburg, Netherlands

Ongoing Mentorships with:

Nina Barnett, MAFA, University of Illinois, Chicago

Usha Seejarim, MAFA, Wits University, Johannesburg

Kim Lieberman, MAFA, Wits University, Johannesburg

2018 Paper making at Phumani Paper Archive Mill, University of Johannesburg

2016 WiCDS Decolonising Feminism

2016 School of Arts conference, UNISA

Selected community involvement

Ongoing Established and ongoing support for a children’s library in Ponelopele in Botlokwa, Limpopo

2015–2021 Board, Management Committee member for 11 schools in Johannesburg

2015–2021 Chair, IT Steering Committee for 11 schools in Johannesburg

2020 Artmask for Kindness project

2018–2019 Bag Factory Project Selection Committee

2018 Mentor - David Koloane Painting Award winners

2018 Collaboration - Save the Children South Africa

Contact details

bevbutkow@gmail.com

+27-83-378-1981

Instragram bevbutkow

Bag Factory Artist Studios 10 Mahlatini Street Fordsburg Johannesburg, 2092