Introduction
Gallery MOMO was established in 2003. It is the only 100% black-owned contemporary art gallery in South Africa. The Gallery showcases and represents contemporary South African and international artists. MOMO leans towards all forms of visual art that stretches boundaries, nurturing a global platform for our continent’s extraordinary creative impetus.
Gallery MOMO’s potential as a strong platform for presenting a substantial portfolio of South African and international contemporary artists has been fully realized with highlights including significant exhibitions by South African artists living abroad. Additionally, the gallery’s experience extends across all disciplines of the arts with a strong emphasis on performative arts as well as arts-in-architecture and arts for utilitarian urban design. In the last four years the gallery has been involved in prestigious projects including Freedom Park, the South African Embassy in Berlin and numerous corporate collections, such as the JSE, Standard Bank and Investec to name a few. The gallery runs an artist-in-residence programme that generates collaborations between South African based artists and their international counterparts. The Gallery MOMO Residency Programme produces 20 residencies annually.
What is your point of view on the financial side of the photographic market today?
The jury is still out on the on-going debate about the photographer as an artist or technician. There has been a gradual shift of not just relegating the art of photography to the familiar genres of portraiture, documentary photography, high fashion photography and so on. Photographers have become recognized as artists in their own right. There has been innovative advances in techniques and exciting manipulation of materials in contemporary photography.
Within the context of marketing photography, collectors still prefer to buy a painting or a sculpture as they are not too confident about the cumulative value of a photographic work over the years, particularly
if the artist is an “unknown.” The market is still in a very slow growth stage. There have been some significant photographic collections in the past few years, among them the Walther Collection. Also the inclusion of photography in major auctions have contributed to a growing interest in collecting photographic art.
Artists exposed
Patricia Driscoll, Alf Kumalo, Mary Sibande, Andrew Tshabangu, Ayana V. Jackson
Gallery Momo
Stand : D16
52 7th Avenue, Parktown North
2193, Johannesburg Afrique du Sud
T. +27 11 327 3247
