We are ancient meaning-making beings living in an accelerating world. For thousands of years, we have turned to nature, story, image, ritual, mythology and art to understand existence: to preserve memory, to consider who we are, and to give form to what exceeds explanation. From the camera’s arrival onwards, technology has changed how art is made and how the world is seen. Today, its influence reaches into every area of human life, prompting us to reconsider how we see the world, and what it means to be human.

 

“The two forces that have done the most to shape who we are as human beings … are technology and revelation.” - Huston Smith, quoted by Bill Viola 2009. 

 

The Space Between,  brings together artists whose works hold different ways of seeing, remembering and making meaning. Their practices remain distinct, yet their placement sets questions in motion.


What connects AD-Reflex’s layered train stations, made with Perspex and LED light, to Sarah Ballam’s exquisitely painted bodies of water? In one, movement suspends us between departure and arrival; in the other, water unsettles the boundaries between land and water, certainty and change, the physical and the psychological. Can a place crossed and a body of water both become spaces of passage.

 

What might Mfundo Mthiyane’s mythic, inward realities share with Daniel Solomon’s landscapes moving between analogue and digital image? What shifts when inner worlds meet landscapes shaped by changing modes of representation?

 

Nhlanhla Nhlapo’s landscapes hold family memory and ancestry. What kinds of time and memory enter the room alongside transit spaces, shifting water, refracted glass and reassembled technologies?

 

Simon Venter’s portraits and Anton Smit’s Nubian Heads return us to the face: at once a particular presence and a possible threshold into the self. What changes in the act of looking when the face is encountered in these different ways?

 

Across the exhibition, landscape carries memory; history enters the present; water unsettles form; mythology gives shape to interior experience; portraiture returns us to the individual; movement challenges permanence; light alters perception; machines begin to resemble organisms; and physical and virtual realities begin to occupy the same space.

Their juxtaposition is deliberate. One work changes the way we encounter another. Relationships emerge between materials, histories, experiences and ideas that may not initially appear connected. Meaning is not prescribed; it is allowed to surface through proximity, association and the act of looking.

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