IO MAKANDAL
Io Makandal (b. Johannesburg, 1987) completed her BA Fine Art at Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT in Cape Town (2010). She currently lives and works in Johannesburg.
Artist Statement
Makandal meanders through materials and themes, working automatically, intuiting objects in space, off-setting and pairing them with unexpected counterparts. The material ‘things’ range from detritus collected off the street to plant matter, to commodity objects, to industrial matter. She is concerned with chance, order and chaos, and how, if she sets up a designated space, the objects can begin to jostle up against each other in a sort of struggle for power. In contrast, the objects sometimes occupy one flat plane, rendered of equal status and value. Marks and colours create visual mind-scapes or an alternative landscape of a subjective inner process. The process displaces the familiar and foreign in memory and place.
This working methodology enacts with a greater concern for the meeting of artifice and ‘nature’; a third landscape textures the concrete geometric structures of urban space. Exploring an urban ecology, Makandal’s work mediates and militates against the effects of urbanism on the environment and human psyche during the Anthropocene. She is intrigued by how humanised activity on earth creates a binary between nature and society and how this dynamic is continually evolving. Her work is a fiction of space and place that illustrates the fluctuation between the environment we create and the natural realm.
Selected Shows
Kalashnikovv Gallery, Duo Exhibition with Lucy Jane Turpin: ‘Io Makandal x Lucy Jane Turpin’ (2018)
Everard Read Gallery (CT), Solo Show: ‘Entanglement’ (2018)
NO END Contemporary Gallery (JHB), Solo Show: ‘To Meet The Threshold’ (2017)
Kalashnikovv Gallery (JHB), Solo Show: ‘Entropy into a Third Landscape’ (2017)
NARS Foundation (NY), Solo Show: ‘Bonus Space’ (2016)
Blank Projects (CT), Solo Show: ‘An Imaginary Solution’ (2011)
Makandal has exhibited extensively in group exhibitions: ‘Drawn In’, TwilSharp Studios, Johannesburg (2018); ‘Winter Show’, CIRCA Gallery, Cape Town (2018), ‘Memento Mori’, Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg (2018); ‘A Contemporary Showcase’, Graham’s Fine Art Gallery (2018); ‘Super Salon II’, Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg (2017); ‘Salad’, Smith Gallery, Cape Town (2017); ‘One Colour At A Time: Contemporary Screenprints’, Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (2017); ‘Snake Eyes’, NO END Contemporary Gallery, Johannesburg (2017); ‘The House’, TwilSharp Studios, Johannesburg (2017); ‘Work / Play’, Candice Berman Gallery, Johannesburg (2017); ‘Winter Show’, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town (2017); ‘Arising African Perspectives’, LKB/G, Germany (2017); ‘Super Salon’, Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg (2016); ‘Enjoyment of the anti-sublime’, Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg (2016); ‘Prologue’, Kalashnikovv Gallery (2016); ‘Material City’, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town (2016); ‘From Whence They Came’, Smith Studio Gallery, Cape Town and Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg (2016); ‘Scramble for Africa’, Kalashnikovv Galeri, Berlin (2016); Barclays L’Atelier Top 100, Absa Art Gallery (2016); ‘In The Midst of Things’, KKNK Festival (2016); ‘Enjoyment of the Anti-Sublime’, Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg (2016); ‘Blank Spaces’, ABSA Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2016); ‘Fifteen Hundred’, NO END Contemporary Gallery, Johannesburg (2016); ‘Sketch’, Smith Gallery, Cape Town (2016); ‘Cross Sections’, Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg (2015); On The Back of His Words’, Constitutional Hill, Johannesburg (2015); ‘No End To This’, NO END Contemporary Gallery, Johannesburg (2015); ‘Death of the Old’, Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg (2015); ‘Open Studio’, Featured Artist at Assemblage Studios, Johannesburg (2015); ‘The Black Cube Sessions’, The Old Post Office, Braamfontein (2015); ‘Conditions’, White River Gallery, Mpumalanga (2013); and ‘Part 1: The Drawing Room’, VANSA Spin Space, Cape Town (2011).
Residencies include: NARS Foundation International Artist Residency, Brooklyn, New York (2016); Ithuba Gallery CC Joburg 1 Hour Residency, Johannesburg (2015); Absolut Artist Residency, Johannesburg (2014); and Suburban Residency, SLICA, Johannesburg (2012).
Art Fairs include: Cape Town Art Fair (2016, 2017, 2018), FNB Joburg Art Fair (2015 2016, 2017, 2018), and Turbine Art Fair (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018).
