EXHIBITION OPENING SPEECH
Fritha Langerman
This exhibition of full-time and contract staff at Michaelis came about as there was a gap in the gallery programme. Given the recent environmental focus both in theory and studiowork teaching, with photography projects like “earth politics”, the “campus care” drawing project and the environmental elective, as well as our socially responsive projects of the sustainable darkroom and campus wild UCT, my co-curator, Svea Josephy and I thought this would be a good rationale for the exhibition. But there is something about the gap that is significant. Acts of care and change often operate in the margins and fringes – in the interstices between noticing and action. This is the space of slow looking, engaged practice and Haraway’s “staying with the trouble” – acceptance that human and non-human are tentacularly linked and finding ways to co-exist rather than resist or reinvent. It is to work within the available circumstances offered by in-betweenness.
Until recently environmental art in South Africa was very much on the periphery, but increasingly there is a move towards an art that recognizes that the privilege of being human is linked to the environment that sustains us. As the doomsday clock moves past 90 seconds to midnight, we reflect on our present and possibly final moment. While eco exhibitions that “reflect on and respond to” won’t save us as Mary Recinto writes of the 2023 exhibition at the Hayward gallery, Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis, they do contribute towards ideological narratives surrounding the environment. Recognising this, a curatorial gesture has been to inscribe a green line at viewing eye level. Nothing is seen optimally – and the body is asked to engage more difficultly with the act of seeing and how and what we see. While much of the work takes a conventional format within the gallery space, the themes and approaches are diverse. Gretchen vd Byl’s An Algorithm for the Approach (to the Edge) intersects very directly with our green line. Here pairs of protagonists wrestle with the each other, with animals, and with a bleak history and as they move towards the edge of the world – over the horizon of the unknown. Dan Tucker’s meticulously carved unraveled edge of netting also speaks to things being undone, and in a state of collapse.
Interests in aggregation, diffusion and the edge are similarly seen in the work of Jean Brundrit, Svea Josephy and myself. Brundrit constructs lenses of ice to photograph the Antarctic ice shelves – the means of technology subject to the same critical melting as that which it images. Josephy’s cyanotype image is manifest through the documentation of melting ice – solidity holding the image and liquid diffusing it. Whereas my hard-to-see graphite frottage of a moving bed of pine needles evokes an exploded dandelion; a moment of distribution and occupation. Next to this is Gutknot, a cloud form by Fabian Saptouw made of 42.195 km of nylon thread- the length of a standard marathon, encapsulating thousands of hours of knotting and part of his own practice of walking and time-keeping.
Greenwashing, perspective and the politics of the forest is taken up by Dale Washkansy, whose Foresting over the Nakba addresses history of Lubya a site where approximately 2 700 Palestinians lived prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948. This history has been erased under the pine plantation of present-day Lavi. Photographing Google Street view with a medium format camera he creates a vertical stratum of hidden memories and sets this in contrast to the horizontal viewpoint associated with the colonial perspective that naturalises ownership.
Several works draw out ways of mapping. Andrew Juries’ video carefully traces a light -leak with his body, Stephen Inggs’s Flight paths collage a shifting False Bay coastline, and Natasha Norman’s mokuhanga print imagines Naval Hill in Bloemfontein at a time when it was aquatic. Sitaara Stodel maps a fragmentated memory of home from found images of the domestic and Johann van der Schiff’s large-scale photograph forms part of a broader project documenting landscapes in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In Penny Siopis’s Video, She breathes water, a collage of found images collide to the sound of cracking ice. It tells a story of extraction, environmental conquest, sacrifice and destruction, and begs whether there are other histories to be written: ‘a history not all about your might’. Male might is exacted in the sound work by Josh Pearse that contemplates a digital landscape though meditation on the male orgasm.
George Mahashe’s Pavilion project and artists book focuses on Modjadji as seen through a visual archive of photographic images and conversations paying homage to her role as ecological aggregator, historically presiding on all rainmaking practices and ensuring ecological stability.
Nicole Fraser’s photograph presents an interior construction of the natural world wherein indoor house plants frame a painted landscape. This is contrasted with the work of Stephane Conradie and Vanessa Cowling who use real plants in the processing and image construction of their work. Conradie’s eco-printed tessellation refers to the molecular composition of the minerals used to activate the plant colours used in her printed and stained work, while Cowling exposes a cosmos plant from the sustainable photographic garden directly onto expired photo paper, using natural tannins from these garden plants to produce the image.
Pippa Skotnes writes that in the 1970s two giraffes on route to Cape Town from the then Transvaal both died of starvation in the Northern Cape. One hundred and ten years earlier Louis Anthing, a magistrate investigating crimes against the |xam on the northern Cape frontier, reported that not only were the |xam being hunted and killed but the animals were being shot so that those who were not murdered or taken into forced labour were starving to death. On these giraffe bones she has transcribed the full collection of letters from Louis Anthing as they are preserved in the Cape Archives.
The exhibition includes other animal forms. Thami Kiti’s wood carving of the highly endangered African wild dog joins this disarticulated menagerie, together with Cassie Robbertze’s five headed genetically modified chicken, and Gabriele Jacobs’ Stymphalian nest that examines acts of care and gay love through animal forms. Jane Alexander’s sacred ibis invites entry to the exhibition with its dark, apocalyptic landscape, while Dom Edwards’s collaboration with Nicola Dean, Endling, is at the terminal point in the exhibition. This black, flocked creature signals the last of its kind, a final expirational sigh.
As Virginia MacKenny writes of her watercolours based on her own recent surgery and storms at the Cape, “Vital Signs are inter-dependent. Nothing is separate. Everything is connected. Our health is inextricably linked with the health of our planet. As we unravel the connections between things, careless as to what we are dismantling, we jeopardise all life.”
Prints
At the Vital Signs exhibition the public were invited to make souvenir prints of five linocuts images taken from camera traps on the fringes of UCT: a genet, grysbok, caracal, honey badger and porcupine.
This exhibition is in memory of colleagues that we have lost this year: Ayesha Price, Vuyile Voyie, Delise Reich and Fazlin vd Scyff.
