New Media Talk Series #26 | Emmelie Koster & Lindokuhle Sobekwa

New Media Talk Series #26

Emmelie Koster & Lindokuhle Sobekwa in conversation

Pop-up Gallery – No Man’s Gallery In Tehran

Tuesday June 7,2016
6:30 pm
New Media Projects
The availability of public funds, private patronage, arts education, academic discourse, the international art market, mass audiences or even basic exposure to an artistic environment differs in each country. Whether the artist can access those resources influences the opportunities he will have when dependent on that market. The concept behind the No Man’s Art Gallery exhibition series is focused on making the artist less dependent on their local art world, and more so on a global one. The project makes use of the pop-up gallery concept, an ephemeral gallery with no fixed space, no white walls, no perfect lighting. Emmelie Koster, director and curator of the gallery will explore how the pop-up gallery space can help in mitigating the circumstances that might limit in artist in their own art scene. Lindokuhle joined No Man’s Art Gallery in 2014 for the pop-up gallery in Cape Town. He will share his experiences as a South African photographer and will speak about his path from following the Rubis Mecenat photography programme at his high school to exhibiting in Tehran, participating in the Johannesburg art scene and assisting photography workshops for the youth.
 
Biographies
Lindokuhle Sobekwa (South Africa, 1995) is a young photographer from Thokoza, South Africa. Sobekwa started photographing in 2012 through a project that was organised in his high school by Rubis Mecenat. Sobekwa rapidly developed his talent as a photographer through Magnum workshops, mentoring and an education at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg. He now focuses on documentary photography. His ongoing series ‘Nyaope, everything you give me my boss, will do’ brought his work to the attention of a wide and international audience and resulted in exhibitions in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Ghent International Photography Festival and international representation by No Man’s Art Gallery. The series is a powerful and intimate portrait of a group of young men that he knew growing up, who lost their way to a street drug called Nyaope.
Sobekwa’s work has been published by various media such as Live Magazine South Africa, VICE, The VICE Photo Issue in a feature together with Mikhael Subotzky and Belgian newspaper De Standaard. Sobekwa is currently in Iran to attend the No Man’s Art Pop-up Gallery, and was kindly hosted by New Media Society during his stay.
 
Emmelie Koster (The Netherlands, 1986) is the director and curator of No Man’s Art Gallery, an Amsterdam based gallery that organizes pop-up galleries in another country every year to enable artists to benefit from access to different art markets very early on in their career.
Koster switched to a career in arts not long after graduating in Law and Economics. Her background inspires her practice as both director and curator, focusing on how market circumstances influence opportunities for artists to create and exhibit their work, and how those circumstances can be mitigated or neutralized when presenting art to an audience. Koster has lead the pop-up gallery projects in various European countries, China, India, South Africa and is now in Tehran for the latest pop-up exhibition. Beside her full time involvement with the gallery, Koster works as editor for the Art Market Dictionary at De Gruyter Publishers in Berlin and as consultant for cross-cultural creative initiatives.