MADEYOULOOK
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Extra Extra

MADEYOULOOK, Johannesburg based arts collaborative, have since 2012 tested the authority of colonial style monumentalism, and in its placed offered the potentials for Oral Histories as a rethinking of how we remember and how memorialise.

 

EXTRA EXTRA

EXTRA EXTRA is a public intervention by MADEYOULOOK, premised on printing and disseminating 1600 A1 posters of ‘high art’ images by young, emerging black artists, at no cost to the recipients. The posters were handed out in the inner city at Noord Street Taxi Rank – across the street form Johannesburg Art Gallery. 
The posters, and form of dissemination, reference calendars, magazine posters and flyers, that are regularly given out for free to black consumers. Calendars and magazine posters in particular are the mainstay of visual imagery in black homes.

The intention of the project was to engage forms of black consumption and display of imagery. The posters referenced popular forms of dissemination, often used for commercial means. Posters and calendars are used for decorative purposes in many homes, hung up on lounges and bedroom walls. The posters themselves however sought to share a different form of imagery – that of contemporary art – with this same audience. The posters also included a map to Johannesburg art gallery and in dissemination; each poster that was given out was also accompanied by a personal explanation introducing the gallery – an otherwise anonymous and intimidating space unconnected to its immediate environment. In so doing the project attempted to bring together domestic popular forms of image consumption together with conventional gallery formats, questioning the boundaries of contemporary image engagement and the potential for arts audiences in South Africa.