Flights of Fancy | A Group Show | THK X Boschendal X Norval

Beyond the obvious cultural syncretism, Dagnogo’s paintings offer several levels of interpretation: a hybrid of aesthetics, mediation painting, and a reconciliation between the human and the sacred. His works, a tribute to the banality of the everyday, question identity, the relative and differences. They include the Sacred as an inner necessity to question human tragedy and our relationship to the world. Memory, consciousness, recollection – the obscure images challenge each other, collide or sometimes isolate themselves.

As with a superimposition, Dagnogo tries to invent and re-enchant a contemporary mythology that emphasizes domestic paradoxes and the contradictions of a world both more civilized and more violent, more respectful and less tolerant, which makes him react with brushstrokes.

Dagnogo has exhibited extensively worldwide. His most recent international exhibitions include solo presentation at Gallery OH in Dakar (2020), and group presentations at H-Gallery, Paris (2020); Galerie Véronique, Paris (2020); and the Abu Dhabi Art Fair (2020). Additionally, he participated in the the 11th and 12th Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal (2014 / 2016); the first Biennale of Kampala, Uganda (2014); and the 5th Maiden Tower International Festival, Baku, Azerbaidjan (2014). He has also participated in numerous artist residency programs, including the Art Omi in New York (2014). Some of his works are included in public and private collections, such as the Lisser Art Museum in Sassenheim, Netherlands, and Kuwait’s Museum of Modern Art.

Pierre le Riche (b.1986, Port Elizabeth) is a conceptual artist with a practice spanning many mediums and techniques, and widely recognised for his dynamic use of string and textiles. He uses thread as structural element – both a connection point, an unravelling, and a space demarcation – and evokes a complex set of ready-made associations through material and colour use: exploring permeable gender roles and liminal identities. Weaving a complex set of associations, the threads running through his practice tap into a rich seam of metaphor and ambiguity.

He has participated in many projects and exhibitions in South Africa and abroad, and has worked with the likes of Cartier, Daimler, Power Play, and Trenery. He has recently showed adaptations of his Rainbow Room installation in the United States of America and the People's Republic of China; both being part of traveling exhibitions.

Le Riche holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Cape Town's Michaelis School of Fine Art.

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Johno Mellish (b. 1991) constructs his photographic mise-en-scènes by combining history, memory and imagination. Sourcing imagery from both traditional media channels and vernacular photographs, he composes fictional narratives which mirror our post-truth, fragmented, and data-driven society. 

He completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Photography at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2017, after completing a B.A at AFDA Film School. Represented in collections both locally and abroad, he was selected as a focus artist during AKAA 2019 in Paris, where academic Ashraf Jamal described his work, “Mellish is a visual DJ, a master of the remix. If his images seem novel and ‘unexpected’ it is also because, in his world, everything is up for grabs, everything can be reassigned a ‘new’ or different meaning. This process is not only a matter of shifting perspective, it is also the result of the deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari) and defamiliarisation (Brecht) of the images. In Mellish’s photographs nothing possesses its essence, everything – the images content and reason for being – is, in effect, anti-and-post-essential. ”

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Evans Mutenga (b. 1987) is a visual artist currently living and working in Harare, Zimbabwe. He is a graduate of the National Gallery School of Visual Art and Design in Harare.

He uses paper not as a surface but as a material that he tears, manipulates, inks, rubs off and coats. He creates almost abstract portraits by playing with the layers of paper thus transformed.

Since 2013 he has exhibited at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, the Gallery Delta. Between 2016 and 2018 he participated in the FNB Joburg art fair, Investec Cape Town Art Fair and attended the John Mafuangejo Printing Studios in Namibia.

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Jake Michael Singer (b. 1991) experiments with a broad range of disciplines from photography to works on paper and commands an exquisite mastery of sculpture. Drawing inspiration from the emergent behaviour of flocking birds, where the individual is subsumed in the whole; and meditating on the timeless monumentality of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, his Murmurations series speaks to our time. Meticulously constructed, using up to sixteen thousand meters of marine grade stainless steel for a single sculpture, the Murmurations series establishes his position as one of the leading young sculptors from Africa. 

Singer has held solo shows in Africa and America, and has been part of over 60 group shows since graduating in 2013. He was recognised by the Eduardo Villa Foundation Grant both in 2016 and 2017, the youngest sculptor yet awarded this. His work features in private collections in South Africa, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

He has completed residencies in Johannesburg in 2014 and Amsterdam in 2017, and he has further completed two large-scale public sculptures in Johannesburg: Dawn Chorus, part of the RMB Collection in the Think Precinct, and Roarke’s Evacuation Plan, a landmark on the Jo’burg skyline.

In 2020, he launched the Emergence Art Prize with THK Gallery, which was supported by RMB. In 2019, his work was included in Still Here Tomorrow To High Five You Yesterday at Zeitz MOCAA. He was also featured in Iziko Museum’s exhibition Matereality. His largest sculpture to date is on exhibition at the Norval Foundation sculpture garden. In October 2021, Singer completed Bennu Stassis, a site-specific installation in a former Hamman in Istanbul dating from 1477.

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