PRESS RELEASE
BEEZY BAILEY: 1000 Year Dance Cure
Nov 23 – Dec 14, 2016
BEEZY Bailey – 1000 YEAR DANCE CURE
23rd November – 14th December 2016
As one of the inaugural exhibitions in our new gallery, CIRCA Cape Town, Beezy Bailey has prepared a dynamic body of work that includes painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and a performance in collaboration with Brian Eno, Sibonakoliso Ndaba and the Indoni Dance Group.
Like many of his good ideas, the premise for the show emanated from a poem that he wrote whilst in London in a particularly difficult time. The poem ostensibly prescribes the 1000 year dance to the world as a cure for our most lamentable human qualities including racism, brutality, environmental ignorance and negligence. However, as the idea took hold and the work started to manifest, the dance became both a vehicle to explore resolution of personal trials as well as exhorting the world to dance a new dance - to abandon that which doesn’t serve us, and embrace each other in our humanity, and the earth in her service to us. An ambitious and lofty concept to be sure although Bailey, inspired by his mentor, Nelson Makhuba, has always aspired to creating artworks as muti (a balm) for a mad world. Here Bailey, with his usual vigour, presents a mature, considered body of work that at times is quiet and introspective and at others is frenetic and vivid, encapsulating the ambiguity of creative energy and ideas.
The exhibition opens at CIRCA Cape Town, Everard Read’s latest exhibition space housed in a 600 square metre Victorian building overlooking the V&A Waterfront and Table Bay. CIRCA Cape Town, replete with two distinct galleries and a sculpture terrace for monumental outdoor sculpture, reinforces our commitment to continue to provide versatile and exciting platforms to best show off the remarkable work emanating from the best artists in Southern Africa.
