Lady Skollie | Groot Gat | 2023 Standard Bank Award Winner Exhibition

16 June 2023
Lady Skollie exhibits at South Africa’s National Arts Festival in Makhanda as the 2022 Standard Bank Young Artists Award Winner for Visual Arts.
Groot Gat, the exhibition to mark Lady Skollie’s win as this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Arts, debuts in June 2023 at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, South Africa. The body of work will tour across the country - bringing powerful art and important ideas to diverse communities.
For this body of work, Skollie looked to Boesmansgat (‘Bushman’s Hole’), a submerged freshwater cave in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. Before this deep body of water was expropriated by colonisers, it served as a well and fishing hole for the indigenous community. Today, this largely unused sinkhole is known as a free-diving destination. In Skollie’s newest works of art, the hole becomes a metaphor for tackling the complexity of Brown identities in South Africa.
“If you’re Brown in South Africa,” the artist comments, “you have to deal with a big void, a hole, a gap, a forgetting within your own culture and within your own remembering. You’re defined by a hole in your own history that you have to fill up with your own stories and traditions, or even by making your own new traditions.”
Skollie uses her art to try and fill this giant chasm left by history, oppression and colonialism. To this end, for her Standard Bank Young Artist Award show, she’s created a fantasy realm where, on the other side of the deep Boesmansgat, the San, the Khoi, the Griqua and all Brown people on the southern tip of Africa have bloomed without being interrupted by colonialism and forgetting.
Here, she says, “Their cave drawings are not faded or scratched or vandalised, but are giant and bright, just like my paintings.” Guarding this imagined world is a figure in homage to Bushman artist Coex'ae Qgam (also known as Dada). Qgam's paintings were a powerful expression of her people's connection to the land, their spiritual beliefs, and their daily lives. Her role in Skollie’s work is rich in significance - and contributes to a “place” where Brown culture is intact. Here, people know where they come from and where they’re going.
Once the run at the National Arts Festival wraps up, the show will travel to the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Standard Bank Art Gallery in Johannesburg. “I have always wanted to win this award and am so excited about this show traveling,” Skollie comments, adding: “We’re also pushing very hard to get it to Kimberley and Gqeberha, so that all kinds of South Africans can see the exhibition.”
Lady Skollie (Laura Windvogel-Molifi) is an artist and activist from Cape Town, South Africa. She graduated with a degree in History of Art and Dutch Literature from the University of Cape Town in 2009, and trained in printmaking. Since graduating, her work has been exhibited widely across South Africa, and at a number of international solo and group exhibitions and art fairs.
Videography: Earl Garth Abrahams
Animations: Caitlin Weare
For more information on the exhibition, please contact Nkuli Nhleko at [e-mail] or Stephanie Le Roy at [e-mail].

[@haruki.setshedi]

The day i meet Lady Skollie 😮❤❤❤❤ I'm gonna go crazy 🎉🎉🎉 Thank You Everread Gallery for this.

[@jeanniemckeown6707]

This was an incredible exhibition - very grateful I got to see it at the National Arts Festival 2023 ❤