I've been meaning to post on Daniel's show all week, but I haven't got round to it. Why? Because I actually rather enjoyed it, and it's often a bit more difficult to write about those things, and secondly there were four catalogue essay's which say these things a bit more eloquently. But let me stave ahead now, while it's still fresh.
It was a clever show. Some of the work was superfluous, like the Study With Colour (Dulux Range) piece, the phone card thing, and the maps, which although were beautiful and intense, could have been fewer. The other works though, were spot on. Stone Tablets/ Bitter Pills was an awesome mixture of symbols, a visual metaphor which was quite moving. Exchange, a pool table sitting on a bed of 10 000 Zimbabwean 20c peices, was clever (the 20c peice can be used in a SA pool table, 10 000 of them being equivalent to one R2 coin. It was a fact I myself abused after a trip to Zimbabwe... I played many an illegal game of pool). The crowning piece of the show, however, was Untitled (Zimbabwean Queen of Rave), which I had seen before at Second to None. The work was amazing this time... it was shown in Joao's new space, which was still half finished. Projected against raw rhino board with speakers on scaffolding it had the feel of an old wharehouse club. With Rozalla's Everybody's Free pumping loudly, the combination of ravers and rioters made a lot of sense. It struck right down to some raw feelings: white guilt, escape, freedom, and some other buzz words. In the end, I thought it was quite a tough show to see. The work wasn't easy, it was difficult, political, accusatory and angry. Luckily though, this was tempered by humour and a conceptual unity that built it into more than a lousy polemic.
The catalogue was cool, too.

PS. Thanks to Spelling Bee Champion Ed Young