Colonial Landscape, Falls & Vessels (from Applied Drawings) forms part of William Kentridge’s series of Colonial Landscapes, which were drawn in 1995 alongside the creation of the theatre production Faustas in Africa! The source for Kentridge’s Colonial Landscapes is the two-volume nineteenthcentury publication Africa and Its Exploration as Told by Its Explorers, which illustrated the account of explorations of the African continent by Europeans. Prior to the invention of photography, explorers typically travelled with artists to illustrate their discoveries. The publication is filled with engravings depicting the African landscape. For Kentridge, underlying landscapes is the idea of nature as a “place of social contestation.”

Leonardo Drew is known for creating wall-based abstract sculptural works that play on a tension between order and chaos. The artist typically uses manipulated organic materials to create richly detailed works – seemingly bursting from the walls – which resemble densely populated cities, urban wastelands or organic forms and evoke the mutability of the natural world. Materials include wood, cardboard, paint, paper, plastic, rope, string and tree trunks.
Exemplary works of Drew’s approach can be found  in Number 354. These elongated silhouettes have  the monumentality of a skyscraper, as well as the semblance of an ancient tablet.

Made in Drew’s signature technique, featuring neatly stacked pieces of cut lumber in a dynamic, gridded sculptural relief, they are finished with a matte black wash with a white spinal column in the centre of each panel, which emphasizes vertical rhythm. The white element amidst the black is like a code or a written language – like Braille, a micro-text to decipher. But it is also like a macro view of a densely built city. Drew says: “I think of it as making chaos legible.”

Vibha Galhotra is a conceptual artist whose multimedia oeuvre including sculptures, installations, photographs, videos, site-specific work, and public art interventions addresses the shifting topography of a world radically transformed by climate change, consumerism, capitalism, and globalization. Propelled by the constant negotiation between human beings and their ecosystem, Galhotra’s practice utilizes intensive research and intuitive imagination to investigate the social, economic, and political implications of human activity on the environment. She draws from varied disciplines, including the fine arts, ecology, economics, science, spirituality, and political activism to inform a poetic visual response to the environmental changes and restructuring of culture, society, and geography occurring in today’s world.

The project titled Life on Mars encapsulates Galhotra’s artistic inquiry about the earth’s water resources and the possibility of interplanetary living in the age of the Anthropocene, an epoch dominated by mindless human activities. The research began in 2013 with the Rover Curiosity (of NASA’s Mars Mission) finding evidence of water (and hence the possibility of life) on Mars. 

The crisis of water, already evident in the many water-related catastrophes and acute shortages, has made Galhotra speculate about the future of this vital resource. This particular work is a culmination of her ecological concern for the planet and interrogation of the dystopian notions of living on another planet. Informed by the possibility of a new race amongst nations triggered by space missions, Galhotra’s project postulates a new scary form of colonisation. 

Be Afraid of the Enormity of the Possible  (2015) is a work in neon that furthers Jaar’s preoccupation with provocation and sloganeering, themes informed by his well-quoted statement that ‘images are never innocent’. 

The main focus of Jaar’s oeuvre is the politics of images and their effect on modern society that is in his words “bombarded by thousands of images without warning, without mercy, containing messages of consumption crafted by marketing and communications experts”.

The phrase ‘Be Afraid of the Enormity of the Possible’ is derived from the writings of Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran (1911–1995). This work is part of collections at Toledo Museum of Art and The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College. 

“This is idle, clumsy advice I’m giving you. Nobody could follow it. But I wanted just that: to write about this art [tightrope walking] a poem whose heat would flush your cheeks. The idea was not to incrust you, but to inflame you.” - Jean Genet

Before his death in Larache in 1986, the French playwright Jean Genet taught his lover to reproduce his signature,  so that after his death the younger man could sell his documents and manuscripts successfully. Genet’s lover, Abdallah Bentaga, was a Moroccan tightrope walker. In the end, he died before Genet, a suicide. The patched and repaired layers of circus flooring reflects on both the story of Jean Genet’s lover and on Barrada’s recurring themes of repair and assemblage.

In its entirety, Digest Archive is a multi-channel video installation consisting of 1,001 videotapes that are permanently sealed in polypropylene video sleeves. The ana-logue contents carried on each buried videotape remain unrevealed. The series of painted tapes is arranged on shallow wooden racks that evoke the display aesthet-ics of video rental stores, commemorating a mode of image consumption that has since slipped into obsolescence.

Each painted tape in the Digest Archive features a single verb drawn from the title of a film that was in circulation during the era of home video. Collectively, the verbs describe an embodied subjectivity that has come under increasing threat in the digital era. First debuted on the Sharjah Biennial 14 (in early 2019), the Digest Archive was completed in late 2020 and shown in full scale for the first time at the Akademie Der Künste in Berlin during 2021. Parallel to the production of the Digest Archive, a limited number of smaller unique works was conceived. Each of the smaller works draws on verbs catalogued in the archive, to propose an open-ended narrative via the selection and juxtaposition of particular verbs: In this instance, the five chosen verbs evoke the violence that has been visited upon those who have been subject to colonialism, invasion, occupation, political dom-ination and various forms of expropriation across history: To capture, to divide, to conquer, to control, to possess... For Breitz, the verbs are collectively descriptive of “the things that white people have done and continue to do.”

Zineb Sedira’s immersive installation Dreams Have No Titles was presented at the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. In this installation, Sedira addresses a major turning point in the history of cultural, intellectual and avant-garde production of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond, in France, Italy and Algeria particularly. She focuses on a repertoire of remarkable cinematographic co-productions and filmmaking, in particular activist ones, which had an impact on postcolonial movements.

Shaped by her family experience of emigrating from Algeria to France, her growing up in Paris and eventually moving to London in 1986, Sedira addresses a number of pressing issues ranging from the critique of colonial legacies to the ongoing debate about integration, racism, and globalization. In her practice, she overlaps autobiographical narrative with fiction and documentary to shed light on past and present international solidarities and to pay tribute to the individuals and communities who opened up the possibilities of cinema as a form of emancipation and a tool of resistance.

Mikhael Subotzky is a Johannesburg-based artist whose works in multiple mediums (including film installation, video, photography, collage and painting) attempt to engage critically with the instability of images and the politics of representation. His works are the results of his fractured attempts to place himself in relation to the social, historical and political narratives that surround him

“At the heart of my work is a fixation with revealing the gap between what is presented (and idealised) and what is hidden, coupled with a desire to pull apart and reassemble the schizophrenia of contemporary existence,” he says. 

For the 'Museum Case' series Sue Williamson visited the  site of the area formerly known as District Six in Cape Town, which had undergone forced removals during apartheid. Williamson gathered fragments of various ob-jects that had remained in the area following demolition 
and cast these fragments in small resin blocks.

‘The pieces both celebrate the liveliness of the community that once was, and are also an indictment of a society that allowed a community to be destroyed until there was nothing left but inert fragments. We are used 
to seeing fragments of pre-Columbian clay figures or Roman glass displayed in museums – but in my role as fake 
‘museum director’ I have preserved these fragments of  a community that was very much alive only fifteen years before the piece was made.’ - Sue Williamson

Dennis is a para-disciplinary artist based in Johannesburg. Their practice explores what they call ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization. Dennis’ work questions the politics of space (and time) through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach. 

The works in the Biko.dialogues series simulate dialogues between Bantu Steve Biko (the leader of the South African black consciousness movement) and other liberation theorists from the black consciousness tradition. These works are digital and physical systems designed to perform poetic conversations between Biko and his intellectual and spiritual counterparts based on a series of keywords extracted from the archive’s these now-dead activists left behind, in the form of interviews, autobiographies, academic theory, poems and court transcripts.
The conscious always operates in relation to its own unconscious. These dialogue works are automated systems for approximating a kind of black liberation dreaming. These simple systems take the archive of black consciousness thought as an archive of black subconsciousness. These artworks perform various automatic readings and writing operations on datasets pulled from the archive, in order to algorithmically reach toward a place of collective dreaming.

These systems use the archive of black conscious literature (from these various activists) as source material for a dataset that is algorithmically recombined to produce new dialogues between Biko and his counterparts, which are then printed in real time as an endless receipt. The receipt acts as a record of these impossible conversations. These works also stage another dream, where Biko had a chance to meet and talk and dream together with other activists in a global black radical tradition.

For Van den Berg, both the body and the landscape are sites that carry memories and scars and that evoke desires, which he aims to reveal in his work, often through the illuminating power of light. His abstracted canvases of the South African landscape offer an intriguing interpretation into the act and process of painting. In his paintings, Van den Berg presents a new kind of visual language, one that attempts to break syntax without relinquishing its necessity. In this sense, the artist darts between allegory and abstraction in his works, creating these tensions and polarities that simultaneously arrest and excite the viewer when encountering them.

In this work Van den Berg is also interested in what is happening underneath our feet, in the unmapped spaces of earth and organic matter, from the multiple, tiny cellular processes of de and re-composition to the larger refiguring of earthly substance.