Black lines
- By http://www.whatson.co.za/details.php?id=66886&event=Serge
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Working with sculpture, painting and installation, Nitegeka embraces the poetics of displacement, seeking to give visual form to highly charged emotional and political spaces. Through his materials of choice - wooden packing crates, charcoal, acrylic paint - the artist speaks of processes of fracture, adaptation and survival.
For his exhibition Black Lines, Nitegeka continues his exploration of threshold and the evocative tensions of constructed space through an expansion of his Tunnel sculptures and room-size installations, most recently seen at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, in 2011. Positioned in the middle of the gallery space, the artist's newest construction demands that the viewers manoeuver themselves through the work in order to access the paintings and sculptures on the other side. As awareness of their own physicality is heightened, viewers assume the roles of performers in a choreographed ritual of bodily displacement.
Nitegeka was born in Burundi in 1983 and lives and works in Johannesburg. He completed his undergraduate studies in 2009 and is currently finishing his master's degree at the University of the Witwatersrand. He won the Robert Hodgins Prize at Wits in 2008, and received the Tollman Award for Visual Art in 2010. He was selected for the Dakar Biennale in 2010 and was awarded a Fondation Jean Paul Blachère prize there. Group exhibitions include Space, Ritual, Absence: Liminality in South African Visual Art, at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg (2011), Time's Arrow at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2010) and Beyond the Line at the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg (2008).
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