Curatorial Statement

Since the inception of Spier Light Art in 2018, light has been deployed as a medium to deepen, enliven and enhance the artworks, while artists have probed a range of subjects in intricate ways. Particularly of late, the pandemic and other precarities have led to the creation of introspective and conceptual works, drawing from atmospheres of reflection and reset as several global and national trials assailed our society.

This year, these challenges have not disappeared – with Eskom and loadshedding providing brutal irony to curating a project about light, and adding to the challenges of what it takes to live in this contemporary world. However, in this 2023 collection, artists play with and lean into form more deeply, exploring the materiality of light itself and its manifestations. This shifts this sprawling outdoor exhibition into an experiential adventure of the many possibilities that light may be moulded into, from placeholder and marker to a thing of wonder in and of itself. So while themes hold gravitas and centre this collection of work, light is deployed in myriad evocative ways, inviting an experience of forms and, in some instances, leading us to reflect on the pressing issues of our time.

There is a sense of entering a beguiling wonderland of light art, with Georgia Munik’s Orpheus providing a captivating beacon within the exhibition; a brilliant, intricate neon sculpture marking a literal and metaphoric edge between darkness and light. In the same vein, Christina Fortune and Queezy’s seductive and fabulous Corset Intransit – a lit sculpted corset hung aloft a body of water – is a victorious homage to the human spirit in its unabashed, triumphant queerness.

A complex and striking sculpture of light, Rendering by Claire Manicom and Graham Webber invites the viewer to interact with a camera that detects and reflects their silhouette on a massive matrix of light, mirroring their every move, a seed for the algorithm that plays out across the sculptural structure. Playfulness around subject – in this case transience and afterlife – through compelling form is a strong feature of this year’s work. In a similar register, formal concerns and aesthetics are deployed with precision in Serge Alain Nitegeka’s video work, Black Subjects. Here though, gently kinetic human figures, complemented by the pristine grounds of the wine farm, draw us poetically into dark pasts.

Leading focus to our constantly perishing environment, a perennial theme of Spier Light Art, Adelle Van Zyl’s Rainforest Machine prototype 2 is a fantastical lo-fi simulation that repurposes second-hand, everyday equipment, using nostalgia to elicit acute feelings around deforestation and climate challenges. Kenneth Shandu tightens this focus in his light sculpture installation, Still Waiting?, which hones in on our perverse overconsumption as humans. Christine Dixie’s haunting triptych of work, Ghostprints for the Infanta-Echoes, is set against a horizon of hills and valleys that surround the Spier farm. The work reflects on the human endeavour to move the body over seas and across skies, subtly revealing how technologies have paradoxically helped and exploited all sentient beings. It is progress littered with sacrifices and scarification on land and sea.

Using light, image and sound, four works layer our understandings of coloniality through richly contemporary evocations over time, linking past, present and future. Martina Skupin’s sharp and concise neon work switches between the word ‘Afrikaans’ in its regular script to its Arabic script, commenting on its blended and impure origins as well as the language’s marked prevalence in a range of communities beyond race. Thania Petersen's lush and tactile video work, Baqa, sees the artist entirely embalmed by various layers of cloth representing different Sufi orders, commenting on the brutal invisibilising of rich and honourable traditions.

Judith Westerveld’s expansive work, Message from Mukalap, is built around a unique sound recording of a man named Mukalap speaking in the now extinct Khoe language !ora. The message was recorded around 1936 in South Africa and, in 1938, played at the Third International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Ghent, Belgium. Westerveld writes: “In his message, he calls on a European audience to, just for once, listen to his beautiful language, and to listen to him, and send a message in return.” There is no evidence of Mukalap ever receiving a response from the Congress. In this work, speaking in Dutch, English and Afrikaans, as well as fragments of !ora, Westerveld attempts a response.

Tseliso Monaheng’s mesmerising sonic abstract, dense with imagery and layered soundscapes, explores migration, playing with the familiar and the unfamiliar, with suggestion and invective.

And then there are the owls. Many of them. Eyes glowing and watching from several trees. Serai Dowling and Ralph Borland’s endearing Zizi (Shona for owl) is a collection of 40 life-size Scops owls – one of the world’s smallest owl species. Simple handmade electronics light up the invisible, and expert use of wire creates form out of formlessness. They are delightful and grim reminders at the same time. The artists write, “Delight is the cornerstone of human resilience in the face of remarkable daily onslaught.” This combination of qualities certainly runs through the 2023 Spier Light Art.

Curating light artworks in an open environment, together with the challenges of weather, ecological and material sustainability, means we are mindful of the range of viewers that traverse the farm’s various spaces. Outside the confines of a sacrosanct and controlled white cube gallery, the open spaces provide challenges for viewing since the audiences are largely unpredictable, comprising everyone from the curious toddler to the viewer searching for more than visual stimulation, seeking light art that intrigues and informs.

There is also something unique and special about light art exhibited with a sense of site specificity – finding the right environment on the Spier grounds to hold the work. This year’s artists certainly helped us find these balances. Many of the works assailed us with the detail and complexities in form and construction, inspiring curiosity and eliciting play for play's sake, while going beyond into spaces for reflection and conjecture.

Coming out of these last few years, we are indeed grateful to have arrived here.

2. Ghostprints for the Infanta – Echoes

Christine Dixie

In the aftermath of the pandemic, ‘ghosts’ haunt our landscapes in an illogical world where fish share the ocean with satellites and space probes from unknown galaxies. Ships float through time and space, connecting the 21st and 17th centuries, with our bodies, faces and eyes – doubly invisible. In the night sky owls hunt across pages of an open book, as bats mark their space with soundwaves. The text, from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things merges with the night sky of owls and fish, which defy all reason. Constellations seen from the southern hemisphere connect star to star; the horse Pegasus beckons to leaping Pisces; a hunter, Orion, aims an arrow at the running dog, Canis Minor; and Leo, the lion constellation confronts the pincers of the crab, Cancer. Between the sea and the sky, the open book reveals that in the midst of this dispersion is an essential void.

4/11/16. Zizi

African Robots (Ralph Borland and Serai Dowling)

Zizi – the Shona word for owl – is a wire-art, solar-powered night light for children. In the dark, its eyes light up and a brighter light on its chest provides a reading lamp. Open up Zizi’s wings and charge it on a window sill. Zizi is based on the small Scops owl, found across Southern Africa. It really is this small, about as tall as a soft-drink can. Zizi introduces children to the natural world through a friendly guardian in the dark. Made from wire art – a creative means of subsistence for artisans in Southern Africa – Zizi delights and enchants, reflecting human resilience and ingenuity in the face of stress and economic hardship. The installation is produced by Serai Dowling.

6. Singing Stones

Jenna Burchell

Songsmith (The Great Karoo) is part of award-winning artist Jenna Burchell’s ongoing project wherein she restores broken objects and sites by embedding into them golden instruments called ‘songsmith’. The resulting sound sculptures and interventions respond to human contact by revealing songs about people, places and events as they fall into, and rise from, the vicissitudes of time. Burchell’s work is about preserving the fragile and ephemeral nature of memory and experience – often by fusing the digital with the natural world to create archives wherein the historical is subverted with narratives from the periphery.

From the Spier Arts Collection

8. Baqa

Thania Petersen

Sufi practices, which were brought to the country from Indonesia during colonial times, have enabled the survival of Cape Muslims. The rituals, explored in the film, Baqa, connect practitioners to the Divine, helping them to overcome trials and tribulations, providing a pathway to an inner and abstract universe. These practices, both historical and contemporary, offer insights into Islam in the Cape. Offering protection to minds and hearts from becoming weak, these rituals enable the practitioners to remain steadfast. “Throughout generations of oppression it was ritual that allowed us to connect to our past and express love for the Divine whilst also serving to allow us to live with pride and dignity against all odds,” Petersen says.

10. Rendering

Curiosity Project

Rendering is inspired by John Horton Conway’s mathematical model, Game of Life, in which an infinite grid of cells exhibit two states: alive or dead. The initial grid configuration evolves based on two simple rules: a dead cell with three neighbours comes to life, and a living cell with fewer than two or more than four neighbours dies. Will it fizzle out or keep growing without limit? Despite its simplicity, the outcome is impossible to predict, demonstrating a fundamental mathematical truth: we will never be able to know everything – there will always be true statements that are unprovable. Rendering, then, explores two main conceptual themes: how an action can affect an environment further than what can be conceptualised; and how, through a simple algorithm, a depiction can be distorted past what is recognisable as the initial image.

13. Molimo O Nko E Metsi

Tseliso Monaheng

Molimo O Nko E Metsi is an abstract visual and sonic response to Monaheng’s memories of growing up in Lesotho and visiting his grandfather in the mountains. Combining two mediums, the artwork extends the boundaries of imagination, peeking into the past and meditating on the future. It represents beauty, futurism, love, ancient wisdom – at once traditional and African, a citizen of the displacement that Southern African people have suffered since Mfecane War times. The work negotiates migration politics by placing the rural in the urban, questioning belonging and identity. Cows – significant in many cultures – abound in Sesotho proverbs: moshanyana se llele ho lisa, likhomo li kopanya malapa, as well as the title of the work, which translates to ‘the god with a moist nose’.

15. Moedertaal

Marinta Skupin

As an Afrikaans speaker, Skupin is intrigued by the role that Afrikaans plays in shaping her consciousness – her own and collectively in South Africa. The first written Afrikaans appeared in Arabic script, as part of Muslim teachings in the Cape Malay community of Cape Town. Moedertaal invites viewers to appreciate the appearance of the word ‘Afrikaans’ in conjunction with its transliteration into Arabic script. By accentuating language-as-image, Skupin aims to provoke a sensual and mediated response required by writing. The artwork contributes to the contemporary discourse of Afrikaans’ future, creating a new paradigm to consider the continuation of the conversation, focused on expanding our notion of the language and reimagining a way forward. Skupin wants viewers to think about Afrikaans in the context of its origins and evolution. Moedertaal is installed on one of the oldest farms in the country, which is poignant, and its placement alludes to the relationship between the landscape of the Cape, the pervasive socio-economic and cultural structures that evolved here, and the emergence of Afrikaans in this milieu.