Contributors to the project include:

Project development and co-ordination: Ami Clarke (Banner Repeater) and Jamal Nxedlana (Cuss Group).

Web designer: Zamani Xolo

Event sound system/lighting: Kalashnikov gallery.

Jamal Nxedlana

Jamal Nxedlana is a creative entrepreneur living and working between Durban and Johannesburg. He is the co-founder of South African digital art collective Cuss Group and co-founder of the fashion label Missshape, at which he currently works as creative director. Nxedlana’s cultural production is often influenced by popular culture and it is this interest that has led to his involvement in television, film and advertising as a freelance researcher, reporter, content producer and trend consultant. Nxedlana’s latest venture, the Bubblegum Club is a creative brains trust consulting brands on youth culture trends and design.

Ami Clarke

Ami Clarke is an artist and founder of Banner Repeater: a reading room with a public Archive of Artists’ Publishing, and project space; opening up an experimental space for others, on a working train station platform at Hackney Downs station, London. Ideas that come of publishing, distribution, and dissemination: how the performance of language increasingly impacts upon daily life, are shared in her practice as an artist and inform the working remit of Banner Repeater.

Banner Repeater

Banner Repeater is an artist-led reading room and project space, founded by Ami Clarke in 2009, situated on Platform 1, Hackney Downs railway station, London. The reading room holds an archive dedicated to artists’ printed material and provides an important bibliographic resource. The project space has an ambitious exhibition programme of new art work installed in a highly visible and accessible location and a vigorous programme of talks, events and performance.

About LAB: an exhibition in three parts at Ithuba Arts Gallery

British Council Connect ZA, in collaboration with Ithuba Arts Gallery, has invited three innovative, independent or artist-run visual arts spaces in the UK to realise LAB, a three part exhibition, in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The Programme

LAB brings together three innovative, independent artist-run spaces from the UK to take over the Ithuba Arts Gallery. Acting as a hub for collaboration and connection between British and South African visual arts scenes, this exhibition considers the possibilities opened up by working cross-culturally.

British Council Connect ZA invited the director of Ithuba Arts Gallery to visit the UK to research the visual arts scene and build relationships with independent or artist-run visual arts spaces. Through this process the gallery identified AutoItalia SouthEast (London), Banner Repeater (London) and Eastside Projects (Birmingham) as partners to work with on this exhibition.

These three spaces then travelled to Johannesburg to learn about the local artistic context through studio visits with artists, site visits of the city’s major public, commercial and independent visual arts spaces and tours of the city’s architectural landmarks. The exhibition you see here is the outcome of this engagement with Johannesburg and its creatives. It is divided into three unique yet connected components.

About Ithuba

Since its inception in 2011, the Ithuba Arts Fund, founded by the Citiq Group, hassupported 22 artists. The project is focused on providing a platform foremerging artists based in and around Johannesburg. http://www.artsithuba.co.za/