In Review

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.

No land can stand unoccupied. And occupation is at the discretion of those in power. Even if that occupation requires spaces to be forcibly empty; like acres of unused lawn, or the underside of highways, or park benches with polls which prevent people from stretching out. All space is contested.

The glib, jaded self-reflexivity present in Paulsen’s language is essentially the same as that which might crop up on one’s Instagram feed daily. It is a language that has been developed in the crucible of the internet and social media, with the capability of conveying complex ideas through the film of an assumed shared cultural understanding.

Jared Ginsburg’s Interludes plays with that stuff and the limits it describes. The title of the show holds two meanings in concert, referencing an intermission between acts but also a smaller secondary action taking place during that period. In Ginsburg’s terms, an interlude is a pregnant sort of pause…it’s waiting for something to happen while also holding that something at bay.

The record breaking numbers of Strauss & Co’s sale that took place last week in Cape Town tell a tale of a buoyant market place where established precedents are continually met by receptive buyers and fueled by savvy sellers. As a way of framing some of these highlights I want to make some art historical observations in order to illustrate the character of growth that the secondary market place is currently enjoying.