Whatiftheworld / gallery

Debut Solo Exhibition

28 January - 21 February 2009

Opening: Wednesday 28 January 18h00 - 21h00

Featuring a special performance by Gazelle at 19h30 downstairs at Albert Hall

Manifest through staged photography, performance, installation, video and sculpture – Ferreira’s debut solo exhibition, The Status of Greatness, is principally concerned with unpacking and actively coercing the mechanics of political and cultural celebrity through the mimicry of historical precedent, fictional narratives and iconic, theatrical persona unique to numerous African states post-independence. Artifice, surface, image, ego, propaganda and myth are exercised, manipulated and embodied in the very fabric of Ferreira’s project with the intent to operationalise and, in turn, subvert the normative machinations of how African political figureheads, depots, warlords, pop stars and cultural icons are self-represented and disseminated through media channels and state-owned systems to the mass populous – and in mass a produced form, for political and social ends. Mimicing the so-called modernist construct of ‘The Great-Man-of-History’ template to further alterior motives is the core premise of Ferreira’s project, and in the process he articulates the means and extents to which greatness and status are a social, political, and historical constructions. Within this delirious docu-theatre Ferreira has made all his own, exists the superego nexus point that is the character Gazelle.

Both avatar and escape-hatch, the character Gazelle manifests all that which Ferreira might not speak of, see, think about or engage with or even have access to. Gazelle is the vehicle through which Ferreira is able to reach the masses, and communicate his message best, simply by embodying it in a literal sense. Both his intent and optic are sincere – at the heart of this body of work is a tangible concern with co-opting the media-centric machinery of representational myth, power, status, celebrity, notoriety, legend and popularity – towards a greater good, and with a benevolent intent. The notion of one individual holding the capacity to exercise certain degrees of power over an individual, group or even a whole society is inherently understood to be a negative relationship, or at the very least one fraught with issues of liberty, equality and exploitation to name a few. Yet, to understand the dynamics of control and in turn, power – be it political, emotional or financial – is to understand that benign patronage, philanthropy and charity are themselves dialectic forms of exercising power. To be able to help someone in need is implicitly to have influence over them, yet in a positive sense. This inversion of the representational mechanics of a malicious corrupt and power drunk icon towards a commonly understood positive end, is in part Ferreira’s narrative. Coercing status, authority, media attention and acclaim at a societal level into a vehicle for social and political change, makes Ferreira’s project a justly and inimitable enterprise.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a limited edition hard-cover gallery publication titled ‘The Status of Greatness.’ The works will also be traveling to Zurich and Basel, Switzerland June 2009 for exhibition.

Click here to read a review of the exhibition in the Mail & Guardian