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the disciplines of art and design, and links artwork and in her exhibition text, by Spivak who, in 1976, notes
product. Hön’s concept is based on the fragment – that “Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out.
the shard, the splintered component – which, via his Since it is necessary, it remains legible.” On this
production and treatment and exhibition, is presented exhibition, Kearney converts suitcases and found
as the whole object, complete and not broken. Thus, trophies of achievement into a work titled Embrace
in effect, Hön’s position might be deemed the space of Failure, which extends on her interest in redefining
in-between. the museum and the object of value. In this way, the
By extrapolating this position, then, allows artist embraces the irony of her positionality in both
one to arrive at an understanding of his process as the museum and in the anti-museum.
that of mediation: from the analogue to the digital; The process that Kearney applies to her work
from the shard to the complete; from the drawing is the act of subversion. By applying museum practice
to the digital print; from the artwork to the product to a space that is not a museum (the suitcase) and to
and then back again. The value of this work might be objects that are not materially valuable and have even
found in its application of the principles of the fourth lost their cultural significance (plastic trophies, and
industrial revolution, a contemporary period where melting ice cast from plastic trophies), the artist asks
interconnectivity and smart automation are the name of us to question our assumptions of authority and
of the game. It is here where Hön’s process is located, assessment. The work thus becomes an advocate –
where the terms analogue and digital are no longer in a manner that is generous and open-ended – for
separate, no longer distinct, and where contemporary the freedom of malleability, fluidity and radical shifts
processes blurred what we thought we knew with what in delimitations.
is to come. There are two components to Farieda Nazier’s
Alison Kearney situates herself within the In_n_Around. The physical component shows how a
museum and, in an ironic attempt to critique those flat rectangle – a basic geometric shape – of silver is
institutions from within, it is a museum under erasure, folded to form what appears to be an item of jewellery.
thus museum. This is an editing device and its function The digital component, made in association with film-
– to bring to the fore the original and also the change – is maker Mocke Jansen van Veuren, is an animation of
her(e) : otherwise Voorskoot Lizè Groenewald
thus also a philosophical device refined, writes Kearney the process that the artist defines as performance. Anna Abengowe and Tuliza Sindi. Christa van Zyl. Azulejaria II. Alison Kearney. Ruth Sacks. presentation of the printed paper on the table-top,
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When we read this work in relation to the artist’s and the warm, wet, dirty, exuberant, organic, three-
broader concerns, it is evident that Nazier’s location is dimensional, living colonies of fungi enclosed in glass
from the vantage point of a post-colonial lens, and her containers. Ndziba uses this aesthetic conflict as the
process is one that sees the act of art-making as a basis for her conceptual exploration of the nature of
performance. Nazier writes, in her artist statement for colonization, where cold economics clashes against the
the exhibition, that her work interrogates performativity guts of life. And herein is the vested location of the work:
as “an action enforced upon agential materialities… in the conflict of the liminal space, the in-between, the
as counter-actions of materiality against the active above- and below-the-surface, the fraught relationship
force… as placement, displacement and positionality between conservation and putrefaction. What happens
through mattering in space… as the interaction of here is that the ruins of colonization are, themselves,
multiple temporal aspects, and… as relationality being colonized by that great equalizer we call nature.
between wearer & worn.” Ndziba uses, as the narrative hook for her work,
There is a post-colonial critique of apartheid the repatriation of dead slave children of Mozambique,
inherent in Nazier’s work, where basic shapes are and her process then becomes a burial, where the
structured in basic ways to give rise to basic forms dead are returned to their home and a cycle completed.
– forms that are reminiscent of apartheid townships However, we know from her installation – and from
and the materials that are used to construct these the very processes of life – that burial is never an end-
place and spaces of built forms and, by extrapolation, point. It may be a ritual marker of sorts – some kind of
the psychological forms. Might it be that the artist is psychological denotation – but it is also the start of a
interested in the performativity of the requirements of new process. Death may be a process of putrefaction,
life as an art form, and as a political act? but it also provides the building blocks for a new form
The tension in Miliswa Ndziba’s Forts of Sand: of growth.
Reimagining the aesthetics of demolition through Thus, inasmuch as the artwork is an indicator of
worldbuilding comes in various forms. On the level a contemporary post-coloniality, it is also a beacon of
of the aesthetic, it is the tension between the cold, hope, and a marker of a new form of evolution, one that
dry, clean, minimal, scientific, two-dimensional may not yet be visible, but that is written in the process
The Museum Under Erasure The Remaindering
of chemistry, physics and life. The artist cites Dentith