Minnette Vári

(Pretoria, South Africa 1968)

Visual artist. Her work combines self and history, examining how identity emerges from the traumatic past. In his videos and drawings, Vári frequently represents his own body undergoing a disfiguring metamorphosis: it merges 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 person who ingests and is ingested by time. Vári has exhibited his work since the early nineties, participating in group exhibitions such as Banquete, ZKM Karlsruhe; Personal Affections: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, Museum of African Art, New York; the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2007); the 1st Havana Biennial 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 in South Africa, and Of Darkness and of Light, a mid-career survey at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.

Participates in MediaLab with the Oracle installation (1999). A emaciated, naked woman eagerly devours viscera on which images of violence are displayed, taken from television news and related to the history of South Africa in the 20th century. This work presents a complex view of the analogy between food and information. On the one hand, it refers to the conflict that collective memory generates in the construction of the individual. On the other hand, this work invites us to reflect on the nutritional value of ingesting images full of cruelty that flood the collective imagination daily, through the mass media, on a global scale. With this, in addition to the explicit violence of the images, it questions the structural and implicit violence in the current dynamics of communication.