Io Makandal

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b. 1987 Johannesburg, RSA

Io Makandal is an interdisciplinary artist based in Johannesburg. Working primarily with drawing, photography, sculpture and installa- tion, her practice is concerned with process, transformation, entro- py, and ecologies in relation to the human environment in a time of climatic shift. Makandal holds a BA Fine Art from Michaelis, UCT, Cape Town (2010) and Masters (2022) Wits School of Art, Johannesburg. Her art practice involves practice-led research, workshops and interventions.

Her work is a part of several private and corporate collections, namely Spier Art Trust, Nandos, Wits Art Museum Collection, Dimension Data Collection, London, Group Five, Johannesburg, Laurent Dumas private collection, Paris, and Brain Joffe private collection, Johannes- burg. She is the award recipient of the Social Impact Art Award 2022. She is the selected artist for the A Feral Commons Global Co-Commission by Alserkal Advisory (2023).

“I am intrigued by how humanised activity on earth creates a binary between nature and society and how this dynamic is continually evolving. I see my work as a fiction of space and place. It illustrates the fluctuation between the environments we create and the supposed natural realm. I am interested in processes, matter, intersectional spaces, hybrid environments, relational realities, pataphysics, autopoiesis and third landscapes in the time of climate change. This working methodology enacts with a greater concern for the meeting of artifice and ‘nature’ in a time of an urgent and emergent need to stay with the trouble. The concept of the garden, how nature is controlled and the construction of landscape are also central themes in my work. 

Through a process of continuous collecting and growing things, I create what I call tactile drawings made up with material things that range from detritus collected from the urban environment to organic matter, to commodity goods, to industrial objects, which are imbued with certain societal, cultural and autobiographical meaning. 

The installations become constellations of matter in space, suspended for a moment in time - contemplating humans’ relationship to things, production, waste, and consumerism. I am concerned with chance, order and chaos and how, when I set up a designated space in time to elevate the mundane material it can begin to jostle up against each other in a struggle for power. In contrast, another aspect of my methodology embodies the form of drawing. Drawing in space as well as drawing on paper, abstracted and rendered equally, marks, codes and colours create visual mind-scapes and alternate landscapes, and implied realities.”

The medium of drawing in its various forms, as virtual spaces, tactile installations and traditional methods of drawing in the abstract, is central to Makandal’s practice. This approach is further informed by the material residue of human activity in urban spaces, as a result of the continuous endeavour toward progress which ironically manifests entropy. In Life In The Entropics, Makandal’s second solo show with the gallery, the artist ruminates over the substance of what life is evolving into based upon the habitats we have created, and projects a fictitious environment of the Entropics – a space to place somewhere, in one’s mind, on the event horizon.