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Fun Five Fun Story
Celebrating the young and vibrant street culture across Africa, the exhibition Fun Five Fun Storyincludes wild fashion design and performance, film, photography and installation art. The artists are young people who represent a new generation of Africans that want to take on the world, their work is both energetic and with attitude.

Fun Five Fun Story is the sixth Guinness Contemporary Art Project and has been developed in collaboration with Pascale Marthine-Tayou, an artist-curator from Cameroon. The five artists included in the exhibition come from every corner of Sub-Saharan Africa - Cameroon, Burundi, South Africa, and Madagascar.

Through this exhibition Pascale Marthine-Tayou introduces African art to Sydney as contemporary and international rather than traditional and ethnographic.

All five artists will be in Sydney to install their work.

�It seems appropriate to initiate our dialogue with Africa with a contemporary project because it has been the dilemma of globalism that too often the West has welcomed the colourful and exotic �other� but not made the transition to full participation, said Anthony Bond, General Manager Curatorial Services, Art Gallery of New South Wales. �Having said this, these artists are clearly influenced by their journeys to and from their native countries�, continued Mr Bond.

Since 1995, Guinness Australasia has sponsored the annual Guinness Contemporary Art Project at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This commitment to contemporary Australian and international art has resulted in an innovative program of exhibitions. The 2000 Guinness Contemporary Art Project: Fun Five Fun Story will be on display at the Gallery from 15 November 2000 to 7 January 2001.

A catalogue of the exhibition, created by Pascale Marthine-Tayou, will be available in VHS video format.


ARTIST INFORMATION

JO�L ANDRIANOMEARISOA creates funky fashion out of found material. Rather than luscious silks he uses glad wrap, cardboard rolls, wire, mostly throw away stuff that can be found in any part of the world today including Madagascar. There will be a fashion parade on the day of the opening on two catwalks that become sculptures in their own right. The striking costumes will subsequently be part of the installation. The catwalks also double as giant speaker boxes for his sound work.


MOSHEKWA LANGA is a painter, video and performance artist from the Republic of South Africa (RSA). His video projections often document repetitive actions possibly slowed down to give them a dreamlike quality. The rhythms of the work are invariably erotic suggesting the regularity of breathing and body movements. He will be creating new work for Sydney.


ZWELETHU MTHETHWA also from RSA, has been documenting people�s homes in South African households. His first international exposure was with a series that showed the pride of township dwellers in their tiny houses. They were lined with posters and other found imagery in place of wallpaper. The images exposed poverty but celebrated invention and individual capacity to rise above it. In this exhibition the photographs focus on the pregnancy of one woman who carries on running the home often deserted by her husband who is always going off to church events.


AIM� NTAKIYICA from Burundi makes elegant installations using waste materials. His work alters spaces or creates new ways of seeing old spaces. They are essentially site specific. In this exhibition he will create a corridor to divide the space based on the existing architecture. Screens made from four kilometers of old videotape will define this corridor. The audience will be invited to push through this screen to enter a narrow space which will for a moment be isolated from the museum it may be an odd sensation like Alice passing through the mirror only to re-emerge into the gallery surrounded by the sights and sounds of the other artists.


PASCALE MARTHINE-TAYOU from Cameroon is the curator of the exhibition and has been making a video tape which will take the form of a catalogue that will be on sale in the Gallery shop. This video will also be on show in the exhibition. Pascale has participated in numerous international biennales including the 1998 Biennale of Sydney and in 1999 Anthony Bond the Art Gallery curator of the exhibition included him in TRACE the first Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art in the UK.

On view:15 November 2000 to 7 January 2001

Art Gallery of New South Wales
Telephone:(02) 9225 1744 or recorded information
(02) 9225 1790
Hours:7 days 10am to 5pm
Admission:FREE
Media Information and Interviews:Eva Choc
Telephone 9225 1734
Facsimile 9221 3185
Email evac@ag.nsw.gov.au