Minnette Vári

Minnette Vári was born in 1968 in Pretoria, South Africa. She lives in Johannesburg. As Kendell Geers observes in a catalogue essay published in 2004 by Kunstmuseum Lucerne, “Minnette Vári has in her lifetime witnessed the fall of apartheid and all its structures, followed by the new democracy.” In response to this history, Vári has written a history of herself in relation to this trajectory, one that attempts to recover what is lost, to give shape and voice to forgotten or erased memories. Her work conflates self and history,examining how identity arises out of the traumatic past. In her videos and drawings, Vári frequently depicts her own body enduring a disfiguring metamorphosis – she merges with and emerges from nature as well as from the concrete architecture of modern cities. The female “protagonist” of her video works is sometimes archetypal and sometimes spectral, a persona who ingests and is ingested by time. Vári has exhibited her work since the early nineties, participating in such group exhibitions as Banquet, ZKM Karlsruhe; Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, Museum for African Art, New York; the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2007); the 1oth Havana Biennale and The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell and Purgatory Revisited by Contemporary African Artists, MKK Frankfurt. Her solo exhibitions include Chimera at Art Unlimited, Basel; Vigil at Elga Wimmer Gallery with Serge Ziegler, New York; Songs of Excavation and The Eleventh Hour, both at the Goodman Gallery South Africa, and Of Darkness and of Light, a mid-career survey at the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg.

There are currently no artworks by this artist available on Latitudes. Please contact info@latitudes.online if you would like us to source works.