In this year’s Spier Light Art, artist Hallie Haller has a sign next to her work, with the words:
You are the first technology.
A network of intention and hope that spills out into production and perception.
You. You are the land maker.
In the quick night, this is your chance to make it over.
Take it somewhere good.
Haller’s words epitomise this year’s extensive and robust Spier Light Art Exhibition. Since our democracy South Africa has intermittently offered the world hope and something of a model for human rights. It is an imperfect and flawed model but since Nelson Mandela’s evocative, inspiring inaugural speech in 1994, our country has nevertheless shown itself to be at once despairing and wildly enervating.
Our artists unashamedly combine inspiration, innovation, excellence of form and social conscience. It is what we do well. So while informed by our struggles and sluggish transformation, they bring inspiration and renewed wonder so that we as Haller exhorts above, we play as innovators and land makers in the quick night.
Nowhere is this more potent than in the deceptively wry Flood Light by Abri de Swardt
a sculpture of a collapsed, massive floodlight on the banks of the Eerste River, glitching and glowing both anxiously and mournfully, speaking to the ecological state of the present while signalling our distraction from it. The artist draws from writer Toni Morrison’s reminder that flooding is a misattribution of a natural process, that in flooding, the river is remembering where it used to be.
Naadira Patel and Sarah de Villiers’ Assembling Lines is a magnificent reflection on processes of extraction, production, distribution and trade, in a time when conversations about achieving net-zero carbon emissions are at risk. They do this by inserting into the lush green landscape the rudimentary language of the LED screen, reminiscent of advertising screens, and the ticker tape displays of stock market updates, shifting our gaze to an alternate language of value and ethics, prompting viewers with questions of sustainability practices, and “ethical consumption”. One of four works from previous iterations of Spier Light Art, Marco Chiandetti’s Beacon also uses the site specificity of the farm as counterpoint, to reflect on broader issues of immigration, resilience, and the cultural interplay that defines our interconnected world.
These works will live amongst works that hold up and honour ecological presence: Jenna Burchell's Songsmith will complement UK based artist Stevie Thompson’s ravishing Mycelium a mesmerising display of colour and light using thousands of thin fibre optic strands to represent the huge network of mycelium often growing right below our feet. Similarly Berco Wilsenach’s Written in the Stars and Kamil Hassim’s impressive Event Horizon immerse the audience in what is understood as vast, unknown spaces that are atmospheric and in constant flux. These enormous presences in our lives are used by the artists productively, to imagine and bathe in the infinite.
Hallie Haller’s work Machine Swim asks us to actively participate in the source of sentience, our own bodies. So when confronted by a machine, how can we use this encounter to affirm our own aliveness and reclaim renewal.
Reclaiming non-binary identities, Goldendean’s VESICA PISCIS draws from a geometric shape that is formed by the intersection of two circles of the same radius, with the centre of each circle on the circumference of the other. This extraordinary, deceptively simple light art work asks us to reflect on how existence is not a binary but rather a spectrum of intersectional experiences within our humanity. The artist evokes Amrou Al-Kadhi poignant question:
If subatomic particles defy constructs all the time, why should we believe in fixed constructs of gender or any kind of reality?
Mthuthuzeli Zimba dragged a shack on wheels from Khayelitsha township all the way to central Cape Town. A video of this pilgrimage forms part of a light installation comprising a relocated shack. The work, Moriti wa Kganya interrogates displacement in both space and body complemented by other profound works around a continuous grapple with land and living presence. Kenneth Shandu’s haunting work, Invisible comprised of intricately made and lit wire-sculptures honours workers who labour unseen and rarely acknowledged. Charles Palms’ work made for the Slave Bell on the farm, The Boogeyman, returns, also working with great care and skill with our contentious history. In Themba Stewart and Qondiswa James sprawling work, Keep the Lights On, they create an impressive array of impressions of homes across a typical South African city. Using wood, tiles, cables and light fixtures, each roof structure represents a different socio-economic typology typically present in the geography of a city. It is ultimately light here that serves as a marker for how bodies are held.
In an inimitable way too, artists use hope and play to work through difficult subject matter. Mhlonishwa Chiliza coming from the rural town of Umzumbe has created a modest yet evocative sculptural light art work which in the face of a litany of lack of delivery is nevertheless an enduring symbol of transformation and new beginnings. Mpho Jacobs’ Let’s Play a cheerful animation of game play, using the format of video games, considers feelings of alienation at not being able to speak Afrikaans in a Stellenbosch educational institution. Comprising a series of short, looping animations that draws one to play but not without difficulty and heartbreaking failure, the work effectively combines play and reflection.
Zurich based artist DD Son's sculptural light art work open/closed (restaurant kids), works to similar effect, critical comment and charm. Using visual cues from pop culture, the science and advertisement industry, Son unpacks the mechanisms of desire and fetishisation in our post-industrial age of branding and personalised marketing. Using video as her medium Rhoda Davids Abel’s Brie of the sing-sing birds also lightly combines startling, wry and playful imagery with themes of gravity – displacement, family, intergenerational legacies and identity.
Ultimately this combination of playfulness with subjects that inspire participation and reflection abounds: Swiss artist Sophie Guyot’s The Meaning of Meaning is an extensive work using traffic lights as its main material. By combining these simple luminous pictograms, she creates new semantic structures supposedly to address an unknown intelligence ‘out in the universe’, and questions how these signs address us. The slowed down soundtrack, using festive music, combined with familiar contemporary ring tones, plunges the installation into a kind of melancholy conducive to reflection. The installation thus reveals light playfulness but a deadly serious intent of the artist’s activity: although it looks around into the space of the beyond, it primarily addresses earthly fears and hopes.
And finally, renowned light artist Alan Alborough’s sculptural work ‘ZZZZ’ plays in with the use of this word in our social media interactions. As the title suggests, the first evocation is one of relaxation and unconsciousness. However, this state of sleep as this witty light art work will evoke is also
A poetic or euphemistic word for death
To be in, or as, in the state of sleep is
To fail to pay attention
The works combine wonder, participation and thought that distinguishes this exhibition of light art as a space for the celebration of a wide range of forms of light that allows for moments of escape and fantasy and moments when we may touch sides with the world outside, lest indeed, we fall completely asleep.
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1. Flood Light
Abri de Swardt
Flood Light’ replicates a floodlight from the Danie Craven Rugby Fields next to the river at Stellenbosch University’s Coetzenburg Sports Terrain. In an imagined realm, it becomes detached from its mast and falls to the floor, eventually washing up at Spier from severe flooding. Glitching and glowing anxiously and mournfully, ‘Flood Light’ speaks to the ecological state of the present while signalling our distraction from it.
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2. Moriti wa Kganya
Mthuthuzeli “Blaze” Zimba
Dragging a shack on wheels from Khayelitsha to Cape Town’s CBD, Zimba films the journey and projects the video onto a shack installation in his piece, ‘Moriti wa Kganya’. Interrogating space and body in relation to light, the work explores subverts and reimagines shack dwellings, using sensors and modern Eurocentric lights to disrupt and politicise life in the shack. The focus of the project is to look at how light can bring a sense of dignity while creating a livable space for people.
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3. Invisible
Kenneth Shandu
‘Invisible’ is a visual exploration of everyday experiences of economically marginalised people in post-Apartheid South Africa. From an economic analytical point of view, society is structured in such a way that some people are privileged while others are not, leading to further disempowerment, especially of homeless people. Reflective wire figures make invisible people visible, capturing their everyday activities in the city of Durban.
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4. Keep The Lights On
Qondiswa James & Themba Stewart
‘Keep The Lights On’ brings awareness to socio-economic (in)accessibility in the City of Cape Town. In low and low-to-medium income communities, public lighting is sometimes so inadequate that it's dangerous for residents to move around in the dark. As the nation battles with rolling blackouts, many in poorer neighbourhoods cannot afford solar energy and back-up batteries. This work calls attention to Apartheid’s spatial planning still in effect in South African cities today, and talks back to the egregious persistence of economic apartheid.
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5. Assembling Lines
Naadira Patel & Sarah de Villiers
‘Assembling Lines’ inserts into the lush green landscape the rudimentary language of LED screens and stock market updates, reflecting on practices of extraction, production, distribution and trade at a time when net zero narratives risk being sidelined as abstractions.
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6. Songsmith
Jenna Burchell
‘Songsmith (The Great Karoo)’, also known as the Singing Stones, transforms 12 ancient rocks into interactive sound sculptures, which proportionately represent the geographical locations – the Cradle of Humankind, Vredefort Dome, and the Great Karoo – of where the artist found each along the extinction horizon. This allows the audience to symbolically walk to experience the installation.
From the Spier Arts Collection
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7. Let’s Play
Mpho Jacobs
‘Let’s Play’ is a reflection of the artist’s experience of studying at Stellenbosch, namely, as a black student who does not speak Afrikaans – and how this led to feelings of social alienation. The artwork features a series of short, looping animations, symbolising the game of being allowed to participate, but with difficulty. The piece explores subtler forms of prejudice that are often overlooked yet have powerful consequences such as how not understanding a language can place groups of people at a disadvantage.
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8. Mycelium
Stevie Thompson
‘Mycelium’ is a mesmerising display of colour and light using thousands of thin fibre optic strands to represent an intricate mycelium network, often growing below our feet. Glowing mushrooms of different sizes and heights change colour while a mycelium carpet pulses and changes hues and intensities, as if the network is communicating with other plants and trees. The display uses a selection of IP65 light sources and different bundles of fibre, along with recycled plastic mushroom caps and carbon fibre rods which are staked into the ground only a few inches.
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9. Beacon
Marco Chiandetti
‘Beacon’ delves into the theme of migration. Placing mercury vapour bulbs inside three crafted structures, the artist uses phototaxis (attraction to light) to draw insects to the surface of the structures, which are replicas of the tents commonly found in camps that house migrants navigating the globe amidst political, economic, or environmental crises. Within these tent-like structures are a series of sapling oaks.The oak tree, historically introduced to South Africa by European settlers for the production of wine barrels, carries its own narrative of migration.
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10. The Light of Hope
Mhlonishwa Chiliza
‘The Light of Hope’ is a sculpture installation that elicits feelings of hope and rejuvenation in response to the country’s social, political and economic challenges. Despite the traumas of recession, Covid-19 and the aftermath of looting, the artwork communicates the belief that healing is possible, inspiring hope, and spreading love, harmony and unity. The butterflies are a symbol of transformation and new beginnings.
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11. The Meaning of Meaning
Sophie Guyot
‘The Meaning of Meaning’ explores the idea of a universal language or method of communication that would enable contact with extraterrestrial beings. Using images and sound – and reflecting on previous attempts at interplanetary communication – the artist offers a different, perhaps more appropriate, language of communication. With traffic lights as the main material, the piece combines simple luminous pictograms to create new semantic structures to address an unknown intelligence and question the way in which these signs address us.
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12. In Die Sterre Geskryf / Written In The Stars
Berco Wilsenach
Star charts and Braille both rely on a coding system to convey information. This visual similarity is explored in ‘In Die Sterre Geskryf / Written In The Stars’, with three spatially separated, but conceptually interrelated, components. Viewers can move through these component parts which, with the help of successive glass panels, arouse notions of infinity, the night sky and the universe itself. This work is shown at Light Art for a second time in loving memory of Dick Enthoven who commissioned this work in 2009.
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13. Machine Swim
Hallie Haller
‘Machine Swim’ challenges the belief that our relationship to machines necessarily delivers ‘productivity’. What about our retina damage from blue lights or carpal tunnel syndrome? How about the posture of submission. The artwork asks how we can exist in relation to the machine, but without being tethered to it. Can we exist in relation to the machine and in relation to the land at the same time?
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14. Vesica Piscis
Goldendean and Shruthi Nair
‘Vesica Piscis’ is a reflection on the atomic nature of power and the relativity of non-binary identities – and how we are interconnected through our relationship to each other. Just as non-binary transgender identities challenge the conventional binary understanding of gender as strictly masculine or feminine, this work encourages us to reflect critically on fundamental truths about love, interconnection and human identities, especially gender identity – how existence is not binary but rather a spectrum of intersectional experiences within our humanity.
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15. ZZZZ
Alan Alborough
‘ZZZZ’ is an onomatopoeia for sleeping or snoring, originally found in comics and often used as shorthand in messaging and on social media. The artist uses ‘ZZZZ’ to contrast the physiological rest periods of sleep, during which consciousness is suspended and metabolic rate is decreased, with the poetic or euphemistic referral to death. To what extent is being in the state of sleep equivalent to our absence of attention?
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16. open/closed (restaurant kids)
D.D. Son
D.D. Son (Zurich) takes the notion of cultural identity as a starting point to unpack the mechanisms of desire and the alienating effects of fetishisation in our post-industrial age of branding and personalised marketing. Using visual cues from pop culture, the science and advertisement industry, and her own biography, she creates works that reflect on processes of assimilation, social mimicry, revealing their objectifying consequences on bodies and identities. ‘open/closed (restaurant kids)’ is a personal work that combines her research, the effect of pop culture and advertisement.
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17. The Boogeyman
Charles Palm
This installation references a letter written in 1760, in Stellenbosch, by an enslaved Bugis/Buginese man. Based on historical records the author’s name was Upas. The letter’s discovery triggered a wave of paranoia within white settlements in the Cape colony, as authorities mistakenly believed the text to be proof of an organised slave rebellion. All slaves associated with the letter were convicted of treason, tortured and killed.
Written in the Lontara script, from the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, Upas’ letter was only recently correctly translated, revealing the sickly author’s attempt to seek medical attention for his illness. The Boogeyman uses characters from Upas’ original text along with bright hi-vis animations to illuminate ongoing systemic inequities and the silent sacrifices of countless individuals on farms, in businesses and households today, here in Stellenbosch and beyond.
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18. The Sound Of My Voice
Tiago Rodrigues
The painful history of the Cape cannot be ignored – and this powerful installation encourages contemplation of the wounds of the past. The work’s title, ‘The Sound Of My Voice’, comes from playwright Brett Bailey’s 21 Gables, in which the character, Sannie, says: “Ring your bell meneer, ring it loud for soon it will be quiet.” The artwork disrupts the narrative of the slave bell, which was historically used to dictate the movements of enslaved workers. Now, it aims to subvert an object that once held so much power by recreating it with a different presence.
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19. Event Horizon (Spectra I)
Kamil Adam Hassim
Born from a collaboration with the brilliant minds behind the SALT telescope, ‘Event Horizon (Spectra I)’ is a testament to the unyielding quest for understanding that drives both the artist and the astrophysicist. The experimental optical installation explores human perception and our relationship to the way information organises itself in the world. It uses defunct astronomical lenses including the main prism of the Cassegrain Spectrograph – part of the 1.9m telescope in Sutherland. In an age when the night sky is obscured by light pollution and the lightwaves of distant stars no longer reach our retinas, the artwork invites us to consider our place in the universe.
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20. Event Horizon (Event Horizon)
Kamil Adam Hassim
Inspired by the deep expanse of darkness and silence that the artist experienced on his first visit to the Karoo, ‘Event Horizon (Event Horizon)’ is simultaneously an exploration of the universe and the inner self. Indigenous cultures of the Karoo linked the stories of the sky and outer space with inner space and the human spirit. This way of imagining did not separate the sky from the Earth or human consciousness but observed all as being part of the same universal continuum.
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21. Brei of the Sing-Sing Birds
Rhoda Davids Abel
‘Brei of the Sing-Sing Birds’ is a bittersweet ‘love letter’ to those that came before us. Combining dream symbolism, fluid interpretations, and gauzy recollections of South African history, this visual poem entangles performative gestures of ancestors from around the globe. These gestures resonate as mythical and fantastical birds that 'migrated' to South Africa but linger in a vivid state of the 'in-betweens' at various landing places. 'Brei' is used in reference to the way people in the Western Cape speak with a uvular r, especially in Afrikaans. It serves not only as a linguistic reference but also employed as a metaphor for being 'knit' together by various different cultures.