Jean Meeran
Jean Meeran was born in Pietermaritzburg and grew up in in Durban, London and Cape Town. He has also lived and worked in Amsterdam and New York. Jean studied film at the University of Cape Town and Amsterdam's Binger Institute, and film and art at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He works both independently and as part of the collective Team Tarbaby. Jean is inspired by historical moments of insurrection and insurgency and by individual characters within these moments: disruptors, artists, revolutionaries, misfits, hedonists and rebels. His practice is also influenced by the absurd, surreal, mythologic and ordealist. As well as by his friends and fellow artists. He uses film, photography, writing, digital painting and drawing, and apparel based art as his media. More recently Jean has used political rhetoric as a medium, in the written and spoken form. His career lies principally between gallery, cinema and activism, with forays into performance and publishing. He has worked in feature film making, both documentary and fiction, while simultaneously making film and video art and photography, shown at galleries and film festivals.
Included here is his first exhibited video artwork "The Brown Europe Pageant/ Rounds One to Three", an anthology of films, which ushers in the imagined social movement named Roots Anarchy. This movement mobilises a fluid treatment of identity to oppose the brutal fixing of identity that is the cornerstone of Apartheid, racism and colonialism. All his subsequent work in various mediums can be understood within this paradigm. The process often entails paratrooping into various subcultures and making art within them. Stripperoke is an example of this, a photographic series capturing an acute moment in South African subculture, an homage to the nightclub photography of Billy Monk.
Included in this submission is the trash film "The Pro" which Jean made in the In Bed with Artists Residency. Another trash inspired film of his "South African Psycho - A Feminist Gem Hidden in a Load of Trash" is also included in this submission. These films use a playful, improvised, non-linear, often trashy aesthetic, in very much a collaborative spirit, with other artists. The films intend to disrupt linear narrative, and even disrupt the concept of characterisation itself, both of which he views with a great deal of suspicion, not so much in the fictional realm but in real life, where they are employed in the creation of stereotypes and the reinforcement of the status quo. The artist aspires to an ever shifting and fluid idea of an individual’s character, a non-linear narrative of an individual’s experience, and an elusive status quo.
Read More
There are currently no artworks by this artist available on Latitudes. Please contact info@latitudes.online if you would like us to source works.
