Jane Alexander

Jane Alexander is one of the most significant South African artists working today. The artist's hybrid mutants speak to the porous borders between humans and other forms of animal life. Alexander acts as a nonjudgmental surveyor mapping the forces, interests, and passions at play in human behavior. Her sculptures, installations, and photomontages are firmly rooted in her South African experience yet they also transcend their locality, revealing the disparity felt every day around the world between the rhetoric of peace and decorum and the human capacity for oppression and violence. While the figures are, in many ways, emblems of monstrosity, they are oddly beautiful. Alexander's hybrid mutants inhabit a universe where the grotesque and the familiar entwine. These artworks have a formal and technical excellence and deliver a potent emotional message, sending warnings about historical consequences, and carrying hints of things to come.Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope), edited by Pep Subiros, features essays by Ashraf Jamal, Kobena Mercer, Simon Njami, Pep Subiros, and Lize van Robbroeck; writings by Jane Alexander on her art practices; and selected excerpts on Alexander's work by Lucy Alexander, Okwui Enwezor, Ingo Gildenhard, Sander Gilman, Ashraf Jamal, Julie McGee, John Peffer, Ivor Powell, and Michael Sadgrove.