#GallerySessions with Garth Erasmus & Charles Palm

#GallerySessions

Join us for a music performance by Garth Erasmus & Charles Palm live from the Johannesburg Station Panels exhibition!

Garth Erasmus is a visual artist and musician based in Cape Town who plays on mostly self-made instruments inspired by the immersive expression of his Khoisan ancestry. He studied Art at Rhodes University and was an art teacher for twenty years at Zonnebloem Children`s Art Centre in District Six, Cape Town. In the eighties he made a name for himself as an anti-Apartheid artist with a major collection of his work in the Smithsonian Museum of African Art.

As a cultural worker and community activist he is a founder member of numerous community-based arts organisations, for example, Vakalisa Arts Associates, Thupelo Artists Workshop, Community Reflections and Greatmore Street Artists’ Studios. He is a member of the Khoisan activist group Khoi Khonnexion who toured European music theatre festivals in 2018-19 with theproduction House of Falling Bones based on the Namibian genocide of the Nama and Herero people by the German colonialists. He has recently been appointed as a research Fellow at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation.

Garth Erasmus will be accompanied by Charles Palm (on analog synthesizer) for a special program of musical improvisations in response to a project in which he participated in through Burning Museum's intervention Straatpraatjies part of the Any Given Sunday exhibition.

Straatpraatjies is an interpretation of the entangled history of the city’s Arabic and Afrikaans languages and scripts in a synchronistic street art and music collaboration. Burning Museum (Justin Davy, Tazneem Mononoke Wentzel, Jarrett James Erasmus and Grant Jurius) is a collaborative interdisciplinary collective in Cape Town that engages with themes such as history, identity, space, and structures.“We are interested in the seen and unseen, the stories that linger as ghosts on gentrified street corners.” In this intervention the collective collaborated with Saarah Jappie, Atiyyah Khan, Reza Khota and Garth Erasmus.

The anonymous and random public artistic interventions that comprised Any Given Sunday—which originally took place in the city of Cape Town and its townships from 15 May – 24 July 2016— were intended to reflect on the social, economic and political tensions of Cape Town, set against its histories and relevant sites. This covert approach underscored the central intention of the series: as a gentle and submerged way of foregrounding contested notions of visibility and acceptance in the city’s racially segregated spaces.

No bookings required, enjoy a glass of wine and a delicious meal from the café while listening to Garth Erasmus & Charles Palm while lounging on a Happy Sak. A special French café menu is available on the day. When visiting the museum, grab a free copy of the Any Given Sunday publication.