THE HAUNTED sounds of a bamboo saxophone drifted through the half-open door of the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios this morning in an unannounced art intervention conceived by sibling duo Jared Ginsburg and Josh Ginsburg and performed by Stompie Selibe.
Pose and Repose, approximately 10 minutes in duration, was improvised on Thursday morning in the gallery of the Bag Factory by Selibe in response to a minimalist score composed by the Ginsburg brothers. This followed weeks of long-distance collaboration between the artists, exchanging ideas between Johannesburg and Cape Town about how the play might unfold. The work forms part of the group exhibition ‘Sounding Out’, which runs at the Bag Factory until July 18 to broadly explore the intersection of contemporary music and visual art.
Selibe entered the gallery space as a ghost-like character, an echo of ‘The Brotherhood of Breath’, a famous band formed in the 1960s that fluidly comprised free jazz musicians based in London at the time. Selibe stood on a case fashioned as a plinth and performed Pose and Repose - essentially a riff on a composition in which direction relates to orientation in space and breathwork rather than musical notation. The piece began at a measured pace but picked up melody as the performer inhabited the work and made the score his own. When he considered the score complete, he picked up his plinth and exited the gallery.
Pose and Repose was facilitated by the curator but occurred unannounced as per the artists’ intent. It was documented by the gallery’s internal security cameras and the curator’s audio equipment. It forms the first in a series of new work for the Ginsburg brothers.