• LIMINAL STATES

    Leila Abrahams | David Brits | Driaan Claassen | Jan Ernst | Pardon Mapondera | Gaelen Pinnock | Amy Rusch | Guy Simpson | Abdus Salaam

  • Liminal Spaces explores contemporary material play and the alchemy of transition. It examines the slippage of boundaries and definitions, where ideas are contested, rethought, and redrawn. In this expansive definition of contemporary art, material play and experimentation result in unexpected combinations between the precious and the throw-away: embroidery on plastic, gold on orientated strand board. The elevation of and reverence for everyday objects, in a sense, contemporary alchemy.

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  • Exhibition text by
    SEAN O’TOOLE

  • Is it not the liminal that beckons, a place of paradox and transition?

    Are we not thoroughly tired with the ordinary, obliged to commit blasphemy against the banal? 

    In Cape Town, where geological time and history intertwine, is it not our duty to engage with the forgotten matter and disowned narratives? 

    Should we not be committing ourselves to repurposing blister packaging, transforming plastic carrier bags and ennobling engineered wood?

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  • Is plastic – that unsung hero and scorned villain, that chameleon of our material world – not just polluting our oceans, but redefining reality? 

     

    Being alternately pissed off and bored, should we not express our mourning in objects that astonish and marvel? 

     

  • And what of all those other material possibilities?

    What of household paint that flecks like burnt skin or clay that is excavated from an increasingly ravaged earth?

    In Cape Town, the city of contradictions, is it not time to question and challenge the diverse materiality – clay, stone, metal, wood, plastic, so much plastic – that engulfs our lives?

    Can we not push the boundaries of the synthetic and propel ourselves into an ambitious, experimental dance with security cameras, sprinkler heads and colourless straws, resurrecting artisanal traditions and embracing consumer waste as our muse?

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  • In this materialist agenda, where we embrace the experimental and destructive, can we not create anew from a merger of the freshly packaged and discarded, to forge an emergent narrative from the abundant – and increasingly unspun – media of our time?

    Is this the way to shed light on the obscure corners and make blasphemy against the mundane?

    In a world that hungers for sense, shall we, artists, be the ones who offer the opportunity to make sense of the nonsense at a time when the garbage cans of the city are overflowing with empty champagne bottles?

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  • About Leila Abrahams

    About Leila Abrahams

    Born 1999 in South Africa
    Currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa
     
    Leila Abrahams is an interdisciplinary artist from Cape Town, South Africa. Her practice weaves together aspects of her personal histories drawing from her experiences with grief, mental health and chronic illness. Her decade-long journey with the condition of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus is foundational to her artistic inquiries. Using materials ubiquitous within the medical practice; gel capsules and blister packs, Abrahams gestures at a new vocabulary to approach difficult conversations around invisible ailments. At the heart of her deeply intimate and embodied practice, is a yearning to find ways to navigate her own illness while also creating space for less stigma and more compassion. Through an abstract and minimalist language emphasised by the careful placement of materials, Abrahams creates beauty, harmony and order —which in turn become subtle acts of resistance. She reflects; “My work speaks to the overwhelming nature of chronic medication and the waves of emotion that accompany the experience. I came to accept my medication as something I take daily but that no longer has power over me.” 
     
    Abrahams obtained a BA(FA) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art (University of Cape Town) in 2021. In 2022, she participated in the group exhibition; Within the Fold at Smac Gallery in Johannesburg. Abrahams is the inaugural artist in residence with The Ramp Residency in Cape Town (2022).
  • About David Brits

    About David Brits

    David Brits was born in 1987 in Cape Town and lives there. He graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art (Painting) at the University of Cape Town in 2010.

     

    Brits has, over the past four years, devoted his practice to formal investgations in public-scale sculpture. Equally energised by material exploration and archival investigation, Brits’ practice also spans installation, print-making, drawing, and film.

     

    Recent major public sculpture commissions include the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation, The Speir Arts Trust and the Iziko South African National Gallery. He is the winner of the Rupert Art Foundation’s inaugural Social Impact Arts Prize.

     

    Brits’ recent solo exhibitions include Time is a Flat Circle, curated by Camila Maissune at MovArt Gallery, Lisbon, as well as inclusions in the Matereality group show at the Iziko South African National Gallery, curated by Andrea Lewis, and Synaptic at THK Gallery, Cape Town.

     

    In 2014 Brits was awarded a residency at the St. Moritz Art Academy, Switzerland, under the mentorship of Marcel van Eden and Daniele Buetti. Additional group shows include Words curated by Willem Boshoff at the Nirox Sculpture Park, Johannesburg, Nevermind the M*ss at A SPACE, Helsinki, Kindergeburtstag, held at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. His work has been featured in the academic journal Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture (2015) and has been named a “young artist to watch” by the South African Art Times.

     

    Brits made his curatorial debut with Not My War, an exhibition held at the Michaelis Galleries, UCT. This acclaimed show brought together works by significant South African artists that have reflected on their country’s involvement in border wars in Northern Namibia and Southern Angola during the 1960ies to 1980ies.

     

    Brits’ work is housed in public and private collections in both South Africa and abroad, including the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Collection, the SunFair Collection in New York, and the  Fondation Gandur pour l'Art Collection in Geneva. He is a recipient of the Golden Key Society Award for Visual Art, the Irma Stern Scholarship and the Barbara Fairhead Prize.

  • About Driaan Claassen

    About Driaan Claassen

    Born in Johannesburg in 1991, sculptor Driaan Claassen first studied 3D animation before apprenticing with Otto du Plessis, artist and founder of Bronze Age Foundry. Claassen is currently based in Cape Town, where he opened his own design and fine art studio, Reticence, in 2015. Claassen works primarily in bronze, wood, and wire. Inspired by technology from a young age, he elevates the materiality of his sculptural mediums by merging cutting-edge machinery, traditional craftsmanship, and deep introspection. 
     
    For Claassen, manipulating the physical world has psychological implications. Through the abstracted forms his sculptures take whether solid or fractal, geometric or organic he reflects on the structure of the human mind and thought. He explores the intersection of our consciousness with the outside world, where light and dark meet, positive and negative space, the defined and amorphous, order and chaos. Claassen has created a visual language that juxtaposes shape, colour, texture, and pattern to offer insight into his search for self-knowledge. Claassens work has been exhibited locally and internationally, including at Design Miami, Design Miami/Basel, GUILD Design Fair, PAD London, and Intersect Chicago.
  • About Jan Ernst

    About Jan Ernst

    Jan Ernst's ceramic mural, Convergence, stands as a testament to the power of art, nature and time coming together.

    The work draws inspiration from the intriguing amalgamation of natural forces, and signifies the poetic synergy that takes place when different elements such as water or air or earth harmoniously come together.

    Convergence delves into a more abstract concept, exploring the fusion of time and human relationships. It's a metaphorical representation of where the past and the present meet, akin to the intertwining of generations, and the interactions of people forging a new path forward. The mural takes on a profound role in conveying these intricate and thought-provoking concepts through its artistic expression and questions the possibilities of the future.

    Jan Ernst has employed white stoneware clay as the primary medium for this piece measuring 2.5m wide and 3m high. The choice of material lends a unique, paleontological quality to the piece. It gives the impression of a relic from a forgotten era, reminiscent of fossils or ancient remnants of species, flora, or fauna that have long been extinct.

    The mural elicits a sense of enchantment, drawing viewers into a mystical realm. The intricate details of the ceramic pieces appear ancient, enigmatic, and yet strangely familiar, as if they are from a time long past, or perhaps from a parallel world. 

  • About Pardon Mapondera

    About Pardon Mapondera

    Pardon Mapondera (b. 1992, Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe) is a full-time artist, currently living and working in Cape Town, South Africa. 
     
    Growing up in Zimbabwe, his education was affected by Zimbabwe’s economic and political upheavals, but he persevered and completed his education. He applied at the National Gallery Visual Art and Design (former British American Tobacco School of Art) after being encouraged to do so by his brother and mentor, the well-established visual artist Wallen Mapondera, and successfully graduated in 2016. 
     
    He is represented in a number of prominent collections, both in Africa and Europe, and received awards and recognition for his work. 
     
    In August 2020, Pardon Mapondera was a runner-up in The Emergence Art Prize, which was organised by THK Gallery with support from Rand Merchant Bank.
     
  • About Gaelen Pinnock

    About Gaelen Pinnock

    Gaelen Pinnock is an architect and artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Pinnock uses various techniques to explore and document expressions of power in the urban landscape. 
     
    His work scrutinizes the legacies of failed utopian visions and the shadows cast by laws, societal structures and urban development. He is preoccupied with the patterns that underlie our cities, obscured by the myopia of day-to-day existence: masked by the glitz of developments and the creep of securitised precincts; ignored by the clustering of suburbs and the ebb and flow of traffic; pushed aside by our own fears and prejudices.
     
    Much of Pinnock's work looks at how modern developments and policies in South Africa are entrenching class separation in an urban landscape that is already shaped by the legacy of colonial rule, apartheid legislation and divisive spatial planning. He teases out patterns, sensations, feelings of exclusion and distils his findings into stark, geometric works. These snapshots of a city and a society are aesthetically beguiling, but loaded with undercurrents of deficiency and violence.
  • About Amy Rusch

    About Amy Rusch

    Born 1990 in South Africa

    Currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa

    Amy Rusch studied Motion Picture Production Design at City Varsity, School of Media and Creative Arts (2009 – 2011). The process-based skills acquired, including sculpting, moulding, casting, prosthetic production and special effects make-up have equipped her to work in a number of fields including film, television and theatre as well as on freelance projects and commission-based work with industrial designers, architects, archaeologists, and boat builders.

     

    Amy has recently exhibited an artwork at the Norval Foundation as part of the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize 2023. She has shown work at the Pretoria Art Museum as part of the Sasol New Signatures Finalists Exhibition 2021, and at Iziko South African National Gallery as part of the ‘Matereality’ Exhibition between 2020 and 2021. In that same year she exhibited a work at Zeitz MOCAA as part of their show ‘Home Is Where The Art Is’. In 2022 Amy presented a solo body of work titled ‘Seeing with a Listening Ear’ at SMAC gallery in Stellenbosch.

    Amy worked as a lecturer in the Art Department at City Varsity in 2018 and 2019, and part-time at Peter Clarke Art Centre as an extra-mural art teacher in 2021. Between 2018 and 2020 Amy was represented by SMITH Gallery and exhibited in multiple group shows, as well as at Investec Cape Town Art Fair and FNB Art Joburg.

    She was part of the team who made museum display copies of artefacts from archaeological sites, Blombos Cave, Klipdrift Shelter and Klasies River Mouth. These have been exhibited in the ‘Origins of Early Southern Sapiens Behaviour Exhibition’ at Spier, Iziko South African Museum and at Wits Origins Centre in Johannesburg. They are now on permanent display at Cape Point. Amy has a fulltime studio practice alongside participation in ongoing archaeological projects in the northern Cape and the southern Cape coast.

  • About Abdus Salaam

    About Abdus Salaam

    Abdus Salaam is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist from Cape Town, South Africa. Inspired by natural beauty and spirituality, Salaam reveals a sensitivity to three- dimensional spatial expression and the metaphysical connotations inherent in materials. Contemporary in his mystic abstraction, his work is rooted in poetry, calling from a familiar place to a state of peaceful and intensive longing. Moving freely between mediums - from sculpture to painting, video, photographic 'light paintings', poetry, augmented reality, and music- he creates poetic worlds, from the intimate to large-scale installation.
     
    Salaam is represented in collections locally and abroad, including the Afkhami, Drake and Brundyn Collections. He had two sold out solo presentations at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and Abu Dhabi Art in 2022. In 2023 Salaam was finalist in the Art Figura Prize, culminating in an exhibition in Perla Castrum Museum in Schwartzenberg Castle, Germany. In 2023 he was further selected as the artist in residence for the prestigious Institute of Public Architecture's Blockhouse Residency on Governor's Island, New York. In November he will present a solo presentation in the Focus Section of Abu Dhabi Art at the invitation of curator Riccarda Mandrini.
  • Guy Simpson

    Guy Simpson

    Guy Simpson is a visual artist based in Cape Town, South Africa, who was born in Johannesburg in 1994. He graduated from CTCA (Cape Town Creative Academy) in 2019 with a Bachelors in Contemporary Art, and he currently lives and works in Cape Town at Atlantic House Studios.

     

    Simpson's primary focus is on everyday objects that he found scattered throughout his childhood home in Johannesburg, South Africa. Objects such as light switches, wall sockets, skirting boards, and walls, act as quiet straight forward identifiers in a common and relatable space. Simpson’s simple and matter-of-fact representation of these objects and instruments, using wall paint, acrylic and graphite, create witty renditions of often overlooked and time-worn objects.

     

    Additionally, Simpson is a co-founder of Under Projects, an experimental art space based in Cape Town. He has exhibited his work at several exhibitions, including 4x4 EIGEN + ART, LAB (2023), Untitled 9.99 99 LOOP Cape Town, South (2022), The Spectacle (2020), and Apartment X THEFOURTH (2020).

  • Liminal States: 13 Questions for a Post-Materialist Agenda

    By Sean O’Toole

    Is it not the liminal that beckons, a place of paradox and transition?

    Are we not thoroughly tired with the ordinary, obliged to commit blasphemy against the banal? 

    In Cape Town, where geological time and history intertwine, is it not our duty to engage with the forgotten matter and disowned narratives? 

    Should we not be committing ourselves to repurposing blister packaging, transforming plastic carrier bags and ennobling engineered wood?

    Is plastic – that unsung hero and scorned villain, that chameleon of our material world – not just polluting our oceans, but redefining reality? 

    Being alternately pissed off and bored, should we not express our mourning in objects that astonish and marvel? 

    And what of all those other material possibilities? What of household paint that flecks like burnt skin or clay that is excavated from an increasingly ravaged earth?

    In Cape Town, the city of contradictions, is it not time to question and challenge the diverse materiality – clay, stone, metal, wood, plastic, so much plastic – that engulfs our lives?

    Can we not push the boundaries of the synthetic and propel ourselves into an ambitious, experimental dance with security cameras, sprinkler heads and colourless straws, resurrecting artisanal traditions and embracing consumer waste as our muse?

    In this materialist agenda, where we embrace the experimental and destructive, can we not create anew from a merger of the freshly packaged and discarded, to forge an emergent narrative from the abundant – and increasingly unspun – media of our time?

    Is this the way to shed light on the obscure corners and make blasphemy against the mundane?

    In a world that hungers for sense, shall we, artists, be the ones who offer the opportunity to make sense of the nonsense at a time when the garbage cans of the city are overflowing with empty champagne bottles?