IQOQO Sessions: Visual Art
Tue Aug 1, 14:00 - Tue Aug 1, 15:00
True Design, Keyes Art Mile, Rosebank
ABOUT
IQOQO Sessions is a series of nine inspiring talks hosted by IQOQO and taking place on 1, 2, 3 August 2023 at True Design in the Keyes Art Mile, Rosebank. IQOQO Sessions is a satellite event of Joburg Decor & Design Week, which is a new amalgamation of three very successful events: Decorex, Design Joburg, and 100% Design.
Each Session tells a gripping story full of big ideas about how a leading young creative in South Africa arrived at their groundbreaking early-career moment. In the process, these aspirational and educational tales reveal the networks and opportunities that exist in South Africa and the world that they were able to access in order to reach their dreams.
What journey did a filmmaker go on to develop their first feature? How did a fashion designer come to stage their first debut international fashion show? What led to that artist’s first major exhibition? How did a game developer create their game or that architect their first award-winning building? What is the story behind their passion for Virtual Reality? Or how did they end up working in animation?
ABOUT LADY SKOLLIE
Resoundingly San, she uses ink, watercolour and crayon to defy taboos and talk openly about issues of sex, pleasure, consent, human connection, violence and abuse. Her work is simultaneously bold and vulnerable, expressing the joy and darkness of the erotic and the duality of human experience.
Lady Skollie has been named in OkayAfrica’s 100 Women, an annual list that honours women across 10 different fields for their contribution, achievements and influence.
She was born Laura Windvogel-Molifi, but this artist has achieved renown through the persona of LADY SKOLLIE – a pseudonym she explains as follows: “I want to be a mouthpiece. I’m that dirty auntie skollie who says what you’ve been thinking but never admitted to ... coaxing things out of you with a bright and sunny disposition. Humour is a vehicle for social change.”
There is thus a committed activism underlying her treatment of a range of subjects – in particular, the ‘forbidden fruit’ at the intersection of lust, greed and power, and the deployment of sex as a weapon. Linked to this is her protest against gender-based violence, expressed in images that depict women as shackled, yearning to be free.
Lady Skollie’s earlier work also engaged in the subversion and appropriation of the European / Western art canon. She remains playfully resistant to the art establishment, describing herself as “someone who never fit in” and “an art school dropout” when she was younger.
There is an implicit critique here of the whiteness of the art world – skollie, she suggests, is a word that has been used “to describe a person of colour in a place where they are unwanted by its white inhabitants”. Lady Skollie has also explored histories of mistreatment and misrepresentation of coloured communities in South Africa.
She has had solo exhibitions at leading local galleries like Everard Read and has enjoyed residencies at institutions ranging from the Bag Factory in Johannesburg to Eastside Projects in Birmingham (UK). She continued to design 1 million units of a R5 coin for South Africa depicting the long serpentine lines of the first democratic voting lines in 1994. Most recently she has been seen in a different role – as an interviewer with her fellow artists for the DW television show Afrimaxx.