Exhibition opening: Iteration 1: Khesaseedi…, or was it Mothorolle?

“What is it?” 
“Don’t you see?”
“I don’t see anything.”
“You don’t see the snake. There, that is the tail. The head is on the ground.”

“All I see is air turbulence, a tiny twister, a disturbance of air caused by heated earth,…”

Associate Professor George Mahashe and -defunct context invite you to the opening of and Iteration 1: Khesaseedi…, or was it Mothorolle? an exhibition that approaches “cultural” and “scientific” imaging as conduits for critical meditations on the politics of observation. It draws on Santu Mofokeng’s seminal essay ‘Ancestors/Fearing the Shadows’, where he recounts a conversation with his sister, who calls him outside to observe a “transit” on a windy day in Diepkloof, Soweto. Where she perceives a snake, he sees only a whirlwind. Through this tension of description, Mofokeng navigates between the scientific impulse to identify and elucidate, and the difficulties associated with an attentiveness to forms of knowing that transcend empirical rationale. 

Iteration 1 assumes this divergence as a proposition, charting parallel pathways through which plural ways of seeing might emerge. 

Opening on 10 September, 17:00-19:00, at the Michaelis Galleries at the University of Cape Town, the exhibition features works by Bogosi Sekhukhuni, donna Kukama, Ian Purnell, Kamil Hassim, Rohini Devasher and Estampa with texts by Santu Mofokeng and Raqs Media Collective.

Image credit: Henry Draper, ‘Orion Nebula Inverted’ (1880). In ‘—defunct context: Ambivalence to Important Work’, p. 52-53. Source: Harvard College Observatory Plate Collection.