José Vermeij, For (sea) change debate, 2024
Kristen McClarty, Trace of a red tide, 2023
For(Sea)Change
The Printing Girls (Group Show)
Allison Klein, Andie Rodwell, Ann Ludwig, Ann-Marie Tully, Ashton Ballantyne, Beth McAlpine, Casandra Jacobs, Christine Scheid, Clare Menck, Cloudia Rivett-Carnac, Daniela Van Aswegan, Ellyn Pretorius, Elrie Joubert, Elzanne Louw, Emma Willemse, Esther Simonis, Fiver Locker, Fleur De Bondt, Isabella Kuijers, Jana Kolodziej, José Vermeij, Kay Fourie, Korien Sander, Kristen McClarty, Laurel Holmes, Leonora Venter, Lindsay Quirke, Lisa Cloete, Lyn Van Greunen, Lyrene Kuhn Botma, Madeleine Van Manen, Mandie Immelman, Mandy Conidaris, Mandy Johnston, Marelise Van Wyk, Mariette Momberg, Megan Shipman, Mimi Van Der Merwe, Minitza Van Der Walt, Natasha Norman, Nellien Brewer, Nicky Liebenberg, Nicolette Geldenhuys, Paula Aucamp, Purnaa Deb, Sanmarie Harms, Sanet Visser, Sharon Sampson, Stephanie Frauenstein, Susanna Hesse, Theona Truter, Theresa-Jo Wessels, Vas Putter, Yolanda Warnich.
Main Gallery: 10.10.2024 - 21.11.2024
In an era in which we face unprecedented threats to planet Earth and urgently need to re-evaluate our place in it, art activism can be a powerful catalyst for social change. There is growing recognition that the ‘wild’ of art, its playful unboundedness, its existence in the spaces between things, has a vital part to play in addressing the environmental and socio-political crises we are facing globally today.
The dominance of scientific rationalism in Western thought has allowed for outstanding technological advances. But it has also contributed to the devastating environmental breakdown we are experiencing in the twenty-first century. This philosophical bias has coincided with a growing objectification or ‘taming’ of wild nature, reflected in the rapid development of new industrial technologies, in the name of ‘progress.’
These new and ever more efficient methods of plundering the natural world meant trampling on the rights of indigenous peoples, who have always lived in harmony with nature and regard it as a sacred realm. In many indigenous cultures, human beings are seen to belong to nature rather than the other way around. For example, because life emerges from water, many Nguni cultures consider water itself to be the medium of the soul.
In Western culture, the soul is by now a deeply unfashionable concept. Thomas Berry argues, in his introduction to Cormac Cullinan’s groundbreaking study, Wild Law (2002), that as we have steadily objectified and destroyed the life systems on Earth on which human beings depend, there has been a concurrent erosion of the wild, unbounded inner life too. One could say that this depletion of moral being, of the sublime, life-giving, creative part of human nature, is mirrored in the destruction of nature: the pollution and acidification of our oceans, the poisoning of our soil, rain and air through continued burning of fossil fuels. It is also reflected in the increasingly uniform virtual worlds we inhabit: the culmination of a dissociated ‘Western materialist monoculture of the mind,’ to use Cullinan’s expression.
The printmakers represented in For(Sea)Change either consciously seek out the sublime, and give material expression to it in the fragile medium of paper, or expose the perilous consequences of ignoring our place in the broader scheme of things. The precarity of these works on paper suggests our human vulnerability, but these artworks also bravely reimagine our broken world: as a rewilded place, a place of restitution and regeneration, not only of our degraded ocean and environment but of our damaged and spiritually alienated selves too. Reaching towards the post-human, they acknowledge the harm human beings have done and look to the interconnectedness of human cultures with other material cultures in the world, both living and non-living.
These are powerful contributions to creating a more equitable, courageous and compassionate world, one in which we acknowledge that we live in a vast and interdependent community. In the wild sea of the collective unconscious, no man is an island. It's time for change.
This exhibition was made possible thanks to the support by The City of Cape Town.