Exposed threads of unfamiliarity and destabilised meanings, which unravel interpretations that may have felt straightforward at first glance. William Kentridge’s latest solo exhibition, That Which We Do Not Remember, shares in the concrete/abstract dichotomy that exists throughout his far-reaching practice.

Sometimes traumatic histories are easier to work through when they’re the subtext to a story about talking animals. And sometimes talking animals provide more nuanced and empathetic entry points than historical accounts do.

  I arrived at David Krut Projects’ unlikely suburban bureau in Newlands on a wintry night and, parking between two swaying pine trees in the pitch dark, I half wondered whether I’d made a wrong turn. Crunching my way towards a soft murmur that had all the trademark intonations of artspeak, I was glad to…

I walked into a little side room. A woman saw me enter and followed behind with interest. On two tables were two screens. I walked around them and then stopped, standing next to her, watching a Lo-Fi video of a woman throwing plates across a room. A silent minute passed, us strangers standing together attempting to parse the work’s meaning. She turned to me, “Do you understand what’s going on in this exhibition?” suppressing frustration, “I can’t make sense of any of this.”

Immortalised by William Shakespeare’s King Lear, the phrase “nothing will come of nothing” has been on the minds of philosophers for centuries. Its trendy latin equivalent, nihil fit ex nihilo (or just ex nihilo if you’re into the whole brevity thing) speaks of the cosmological debate that goes all the way back to the origins of the universe, and is sometimes used to argue weighty topics like existence and the possibility of a omnipresent being that some like to call God.

It is whiteness which Vossgatter considers – a whiteness reduced, repackaged, strung together along a conveyor belt. As to where these limbs are destined is unknown – they simply hover, mute, as if frozen in place. The simplicity of this spinal installation is unsettling.