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Beehive Making & Programme of Talks On Bees
Dunja Herzog & Thembalezwe Mntambo
16 March -17 March 2024

Join Dunja Herzog and Thembalezwe Mntambo on the 16th and 17th of March 2024 for a beehive making workshop at Ikhaya Kulture Garden in Khayelitsha, and for presentations and the cross-pollination of ideas with local and international beekeepers, gardeners and artists at POOL in Green Point Park. 

Beehive Making - A Different Way is a free workshop led by Klaas Vlegter, assisted by Dunja Herzog and Thembalezwe Mntambo, and hosted by Xolisa Bangani at Ikhaya Kulture Garden on the 16th of March. In this practical workshop participants will learn how to fabricate low-cost beehives using locally reclaimed and sustainable materials in order to support bees through alternative hives.

The Art of Bees and Gardens is a programme of presentations by local and international beekeepers, gardeners, and artists, conceived and hosted by Dunja Herzog and Thembalezwe Mntambo, taking place at POOL on the 17th of March. Participating practitioners include: social engineer Xolisa Bangani; Indigenous plant specialist Simangaliso Ngalwana; artist and farmer Vuyo Myoli; Beehive maker and beekeeper Klaas Vlegter; earth artist Izabeau Pretorius; archaeoacoustics researcher Neil Rusch; visual anthropologist Aladin Borioli; and artist Simnikiwe Buhlungu.

Artist Dunja Herzog and beekeeper Thembalezwe Mntambo's year long project Hiving and HUMing centres bee logics, temporality and imperatives in support of the agency of bees. Examining the cyclical relationships and sensing capacities that exist between bees, plants and humans the project works towards developing restorative reciprocation. The project is developed in response to prevailing narratives of bees as insects of utility for extraction. Foregrounding bees’ vital ecological function, methods of communication, spiritual significance, knowledge, rituals and modes of sensing, Herzog and Mntambo challenge the rationalisation of bees and beekeeping as extractive. Using swarm logics in both the research and form of the project interdisciplinary collaboration is centred in developing new knowledges. 

Hiving and HUMing invites us to strengthen our kinship and renew sensitivities to the natural world through listening, observing, feeling and through acts of solidarity, catalysing a continuum of eco-systemic symbiosis. 

This project is made possible through the generous support of Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, City of Cape Town, Field Station, Aargauer Kuratorium, Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt, Kulturförderung Basel-Landschaft, Stiftung Erna und Curt Burgauer

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Kammakamma
Abri de Swardt
1 February - 3 March 2024

If the river’s mouth could speak, what would it say? Enacting the possibility of river mouths as storytellers and historiographers, Abri de Swardt’s Kammakamma is the opening episode of the second work in a moving-image trilogy that visually, archivally and sonically explores the Eerste River in South Africa as witness and carrier of submerged narratives. The Eerste River’s nomenclature derives from Simon van der Stel, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) colonial governor who in 1679 annexed land for settler agriculture at the first (Dutch, ‘eerste’) river he encountered after Cape Town, over time erasing the names the river had in indigenous tongues. Structured in an iterative unfolding towards feature length, Kammakamma (2022 – 24) is a synchronised two-channel video projection which transpires along the river through three geographically, temporally and affectively distinct yet interconnected chronicles written by De Swardt, poet and novelist Ronelda S. Kamfer, and historian Saarah Jappie. Its title draws from slippages between the Khoekhoe language terms for water (‘//amma’) and similitude (‘khama’), with ‘kamma’ absorbed into Afrikaans to mean ‘make believe’. Through this interplay, Kammakamma considers the river as a source of shifting stories, and as a saturation point for understanding the effects of climate and catastrophe.

Like Ridder Thirst, the trilogy’s first moving-image work realised in the eponymous solo exhibition at POOL in 2018, the opening episode of Kammakamma interrogates how white supremacy is expressed through, and diminished by, the river’s passage through Stellenbosch. Whereas Ridder Thirst combined the anti-monumental gestures of the Fallist Movement with the agency of queer youth to unravel ideations of the river, the prelude of Kammakamma probes one of the founding myths of Afrikanerdom, and categorical demarcation as such. De Swardt takes on the figure of Hendrik Biebouw, a teenage idler, who alongside three others attacked a VOC watermill attached to the Eerste River in 1707, during which, in an altercation with the interceding Stellenbosch village magistrate, Johannes Starrenburg, Biebouw infamously asserted himself, imbibed, as an “Africaander”. At the time this term was solely attributed to enslaved, manumitted, or indigenous peoples at the Cape, a fact often sanitised from interpretations of the event, meaning Biebouw’s utterance was a transposition. Starrenburg duly recorded the insurgency; by the subsequent census Biebouw is registered as ‘Gone’. For De Swardt Biebouw’s declaration not only is inextricable from the river where it was spoken – haunting its flow – but also from the substance of wine as settler-colonial agent, and from the instability of language itself. Portrayed by the actor and art writer Ben Albertyn, Biebouw is speculatively recast in a purgatorial state sifting sand from sandbags mined around the river mouth from the dunes in Macassar back into the river at the blocked confluence of the Eerste and Plankenbrug Rivers on the periphery of Stellenbosch. Working through notions of watery personification and possession, Biebouw is presented as a fractured, excessive subject contradicting and complicating his own tale of class rebellion, a ghost wading in a feedback loop. Approximating the river, he seeks confluence, feverishly putting forward inundating and porous acts.

Developed through De Swardt’s sonic technique of ‘sunstrokes of voice’ – dense and delirious forms of speech which incapacitate the articulating subject – Biebouw’s unmade, noxious vocalisations in Kammakamma invert figures of speech and conjoin words, jumbling Afrikaans, Dutch, German and Malagasy. Interludes filmed in the wake of flooding show the river as subjected to disaster management and hydro-engineering, as an entrancingly wild and man-made entity. Tableaux drawing from swimming and life-saving manuals introduce the whole ensemble, with the actors René Cloete, Ibtisaam Florence, and Cole Wessels playing protagonists in following episodes, while demonstrating the suffocating, burdensome effects the instrumentalisation of Biebouw’s words continue to have. Through the form of synchronised two-channel projection, De Swardt plays upon the idea of ‘seeing double’, of states of intoxication and parallel temporalities, but more troublingly of perception itself as disorientation.

An accompanying e-publication presents the screenplay of Kammakamma in its entirety, moving episodically from confluence to mouth. Kamfer’s texts, written in Kaaps, use auto-fiction to navigate nuances of disassociation and code-switching. Through the character of Ronelda, a late ‘90s teenager and one of many doppelgangers, the narrative moves between Eersterivier, Faure and Stellenbosch, in an odyssey of everyday pleasures amid illusory systemic change. Jappie’s writing approaches the sacred burial site, or kramat, of the repatriated 17th-century Eastern Indonesian exile and Islamic anticolonial leader, Sheikh Yusuf of Makassar, next to the river at Macassar, through intergenerational, infrastructural, and transoceanic lenses. Elements of memorialisation, pilgrimage, caretaking and polyvocality arise to counter limiting archival inscriptions, and to illuminate traces of the natural environment intertwined with diverse, lived experiences of this spiritual landscape. The publication concludes in an eco-horror chorus for the convergence of oceanic, fluvial and sewage waters at the mouth, in the process of being workshopped by composer Thuthuka Sibisi to embody the breakdown of language. As a collection, the publication entangles various scales and positions, seeking to re-imagine relations between the river and the racially, spatially and economically divided communities along its trajectory by insisting upon the potential of the river as a commons.  

Abri de Swardt (b. 1988, Johannesburg) is an artist based in Johannesburg. De Swardt’s work connects interrelated concerns between queerness, decoloniality and the more-than-human, to imagine forms of affiliation that are critical, fluid and reparative. He positions his work as an expanded form of collage moving between photography, video, sound, sculpture, costume and performance. De Swardt’s work challenges the ongoing effects of settler-colonial whiteness and masculinity, and perceptions of queerness as ‘unnatural’ and ‘unAfrican’, through joining historiography with fiction, auto-ethnography, ecology, desire, and the fantastical. De Swardt’s work has been exhibited, performed and screened at Goldsmiths CCA, London; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg; The Javett Art Centre, Pretoria; Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Forum des images, Paris; the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg, amongst others. Solo exhibitions include: POOL, Johannesburg (2018); MOT International Projects, London (2013); and blank projects, Cape Town (2011). De Swardt was awarded a Social Impact Arts Prize in 2022. De Swardt holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a graduate of the Market Photo Workshop and Stellenbosch University. 

Kammakamma features the actors Ben Albertyn, René Cloete, Ibtisaam Florence and Cole Wessels, and musical direction by Thuthuka Sibisi. Kammakamma has been developed through a Social Impact Arts Prize 2022 and production residencies at the Gallery University Stellenbosch and Nirox. The project forms part of An Accumulation of Uncertainties, a programme of commissions curated by Sinethemba Twalo of NGO (Nothing Gets Organised) and Amy Watson of POOL, as part of the World Weather Network, a global coalition of 28 arts agencies formed in response to the climate crisis.

The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the City of Cape Town, Field Station, National Arts Council South Africa Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme, the World Weather Network and British Council Creative Commissions for Climate Action, wherewithall, and Spier.

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A Practice in Light and Death
Zayaan Khan
14 December 2023

POOL presents A Practice In Light and Death, a solo exhibition by Zayaan Khan. In this body of work Khan engages death as a space of imagination, connection and conjuring, and grieving as a transformative trauma and an act of bearing witness to history's injustices: losses of land through colonial invasion, forced removals, death, genocide, land grabbing, ecocide, gentrification, and epistemicide. Drawing on Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics (2019), geopolitical decisions of “contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death” and how that progresses “the relations between resistance, sacrifice, and terror”, we understand some deaths are by political design.

This is true beyond-the-human, from the invisible microbiopolitics of microbial worlds to the colonial mercenary mass extinctions still seen in the violence of conservation that separates the social from the natural. Death is conceptualised as big, of human loss, mass martyring or the destruction of entire ecosystems, yet death also transpires in the small, from tiny insects to microbial ocean dwellers out of sight. Khan reminds us that we are always more-than-human, through processes of ingestion and digestion we are deeply connected with food webs, we share the same organisms in our microbiomes. Networks of cultivation and microbial collaboration come together in our bodies with their own cycles of life, death and microbiopolitics. Holding the spectrum of life and death, a collection of fermented foods teaches gentle deathmaking towards having foods more alive in their death with trillions of invisible bacteria. Through light and iron salts Khan works with the interplay of the visible and the invisible, creating cyanotype prints that are at once commemorative and celebratory. Process led and using intuition as a means of affective research the exhibition functions as a moment of honouring.

"Iron in the blood, iron in the paper. An accumulation of iron, no matter the source, all smells the same. Blue or red or maybe it’s my imagination? Now the cyanotypes smell like blood, like the trauma is embedded in them. There are so many that it’s hard to ignore. I see threads of terror from Gaza to here, a kind of means to hold the weight of the grief, to bear witness is to process the grief and have the stories burn into your eyes, into your soul so you carry them in your heart. I bear witness every day, every night. In the same way that we work to move grief through our bodies from the land, the stories of the genocides that happened here in the Cape, now buried in the rocks and mountain and sands and seas. In every offering I make, every visit to the mountain, to the sea, every time I dig, every time I bury, it’s always there. So I maintain my process and practice in light and death and work towards creating space to share that with others, to unravel it just a bit that we can find ways of supporting each other." Excerpt from Zayaan Khan's recent Substack.

Zayaan Khan is a transdisciplinary artist and storyteller engaging relations of land, food and seed, forwarding sociopolitical, ecological and spiritualpolitical perspectives. Through research, experimentation and activism, her work interrogates the liminal spaces that inform our collective heritage. Recent projects and group exhibitions include Seed as Relation, Beni Aïssi village, Benslimane, 2019; Soil as an Inscribed Body. On Sovereignty and Agropoetics, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2019; Unsettled, 14th Dak’art Biennale, Dakar, 2022 and The weight of a stone,  Blank Projects, Cape Town, 2022. Khan is currently undertaking her PhD at Environmental Humanities South, University of Cape Town, South Africa. 

Zayaan Khan's text DeathLife (2021), commissioned by POOL, can be accessed here

This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the City of Cape Town, Field Station, National Arts Council SA Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme.

Field Station is a pilot initiative enabling transdisciplinary arts-based programming at Green Point Park with the participation of collaborators working at the intersection of art, design, environment, community and critical urbanism. It is presented by Arts and Culture X Green Point Park - City of Cape Town.

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Between the Ballast and the Pine
Nina Barnett & Jeremy Bolen
21 September 2023

Nina Barnett & Jeremy Bolen
Between the Ballast and the Pine
Opening Saturday 21 October 2023, 14:00 - 17:00

Green Point Park
East Gate Entrance
Corner Vlei Road & 
Helen Suzman Boulevard 
Cape Town 

Opening Hours:
Wednesday - Saturday 11:00 - 16:00
Or by appointment. 

Public Programme:
Guided Walk and Screening: 22 October, 15:30 RSVP here
Artists' Talk: 24 October, 12:00 RSVP here
Outdoor Screenings: 18 November 2023, 18:00 
 

POOL is pleased to present Nina Barnett and Jeremy Bolen's exhibition Between The Ballast and the Pine, realised at Green Point Park as part of a collaboration with Field Station. 

According to physicist Niels Bohr's theory of complementarity, the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles is always in relation to, or affected by, the instruments through which they are observed. Observing mechanisms and observable phenomena are entangled - the nature of an object is interconnected with whom or what is looking.

In the exhibition Between the Ballast and the Pine, Barnett and Bolen apply Bohr's logic to comprehend colonial terraforming. This process has given rise to a "new natural" that is in a constant state of evolution as flora, objects, and phenomena traverse through time and space. However, these remain inexorably linked to their origins in a dissonant reality. The artists probe contexts such as the prolific and water-thirsty pine trees of Cape Town, the merchant and slave-ship ballast rocks of Savannah, Georgia, and the mine dust of Johannesburg. Working with analogue and digital projection in an immersive installation Bolen and Barnett work sensorially to enable viewers a more somatic encounter giving weight and experience to these material flows. In considering the impacts of material displacements and invasions, they indicate the impossibility of objective observation without implication. 

Barnett and Bolen have worked in collaboration since 2015. With a focus on forms of visibility and knowledge production, their work and research spans a wide array of phenomena, from neutrinos to dust storms, and often incorporates researchers and practitioners from fields outside of art including physics, anthropology, mathematics and architecture. With an emphasis on modes of sensing and sensory archives, they employ filmmaking and installation strategies that create immersive and interactive experiences for participants. Their collaborative work has been exhibited widely with recent exhibitions and screenings in Johannesburg, Lima, Mexico City, Bilbao, Chicago and Seoul.

Between the Ballast and the Pine follows on from the exhibitions The Weight in the Air, Origins Centre Museum, and On Breathing, Adler Museum of Medicine (both 2022). The Weight in the Air observed the sensory implications of particulate and radioactivity, On Breathing examined the somatic legacy of Johannesburg's mine dust, while Between the Ballast and the Pine considers the material flows and invasive legacies of colonialism.

Between the Ballast and the Pine forms part of a research focus undertaken by POOL which investigates the diversity of engagement artists have developed to climate crisis - be it as the anthropocene, the capitalocene, or the chthulucene; as well as newer articulations emerging and being shaped across specific contexts.

Field Station is an Arts and Culture X Green Point Park - City of Cape Town project. The pilot runs through to June 2024. It is managed by Afriworld.

The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the City of Cape Town, National Arts Council South Africa Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme, the World Weather Network and British Council Creative Commissions for Climate Action, and wherewithall.

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On Breathing
Nina Barnett & Jeremy Bolen | Adler Museum of Medicine
7 September - 30 September

Artist Walkabout:  Saturday 11am, 10 September 2022

The Adler Museum of Medicine
Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital
York & Carse O'Gowrie Road
Parktown
Johannesburg

Open hours: Monday - Friday, 9am-4pm

The Adler Museum of Medicine and POOL present, On Breathing, by collaborating artists Nina Barnett (ZA) and Jeremy Bolen (US), an exhibition exploring Johannesburg’s relationship to the act of breathing. Mirroring internal airway tunnels with the networks dug under the city in search of gold, the exhibition thinks through the process of breathing in relation to notions of pressure, particulate, filtration and flow. The mechanics and rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, and the transference of one gas molecule for another are considered within the context of Johannesburg’s mine dust and polluting particles; respiratory viruses and pandemics. Within this framework, the exhibition asks: Can the history of the city be understood through what floats invisibly in the air, and settles in the lungs of it’s inhabitants ? What does it mean for geological dust, created in a distant era, to affect the internal tunnels of a human system?

Utilising a variety of medical instruments  from the archives from the Adler Museum, Bolen and Barnett have created sculptural installations merging objects including iron lungs, ether masks and resuscitation equipment with blue gum trees, mine dust, extraction residue and radioactive bricks. In altering the presentation (and so the understanding) of these objects, the artists bring attention to their physical form and presence in relation to Johannesburg’s particular atmospheric environment. 

On Breathing links the global human-created environmental crisis (of which the Johannesburg gold mines play a part) to the materiality of the air that we breathe and its interior effects. This relationship is significant, the effects of which can be seen in the recent COVID-19 pandemic (in which breathing is the primary mode of viral infection), as well as the history of silicosis in the city.   

Barnett and Bolen have been collaborating since 2015. With a focus on forms of visibility and knowledge production, their work and research spans a wide array of phenomena, from neutrinos to dust storms, and often incorporates researchers and practitioners from fields outside of art including physics, anthropology, mathematics and architecture. With an emphasis on modes of sensing and sensory archives, they employ filmmaking and installation strategies that create immersive and interactive experiences for participants. Their collaborative work has been exhibited widely with recent exhibitions and screenings in Johannesburg, Lima, Mexico City, Bilbao and Chicago.

The Adler Museum of Medicine partners with academic entities, faculty, and students, in order to incubate deep learning through the co-creation and implementation of curriculum, and support innovative research and public engagement. South Africa's unique connections between health systems and people, between health history and advocacy, and health disciplines and the arts, provide both an imperative and a foundation to the Museum's purpose and place in the Wits University Faculty of Health Sciences. 

On Breathing forms part of a research focus undertaken by POOL which investigates the diversity of engagement that artists have developed to climate crisis - be it as the anthropocene, the capitalocene, or the chthulucene; as well as newer articulations that are emerging and being shaped across specific contexts.

This exhibition is made possible through the support of the Adler Museum of Medicine, wherewithall and edition~verso. 

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An Accumulation of Uncertainties
Collaboration Sinethemba Twalo | NGO (Nothing Gets Organised)

Nina Barnett and Jeremy Bolen, black earth study club, Shane Cooper, Abri de Swardt, Thulile Gamedze, Donna Kukama, Neo Mahlasela, Bettina Malcomess, Kesivan Naidoo, Sanele Ngubane, Natalie Paneng and Tabita Rezaire.

An Accumulation of Uncertainties utilises speculative and historical fabulation to think with and on the weather. Interrogating what Kristen Simmons (2017) terms “settler atmospherics of power” the project broaches the imbricated entanglements between bodies and atmospheres, historical and contemporaneous relations between humans and non-human forces, emotions and sensations that shape and are shaped by various understandings of weather beyond its meteorological associations. Bringing seemingly disparate colonial narratives in affective proximity with each other, the project attempts to stage a speculative inquiry on the relationship between bodies, the environment and affect.

The project sees practitioners working across disciplines with an emphasis on collaboration, experimentation and reciprocity. Including existing and newly commissioned works, the project and its associated public programme can be accessed both online and/or in resonant sites across Johannesburg. 

This project is realised collaboratively by NGO – NOTHING GETS ORGANISED and POOL and forms part of the WORLD WEATHER NETWORK, a global coalition of 28 arts agencies around the world formed in response to the climate crisis.

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The Weight in the Air
Nina Barnett & Jeremy Bolen | Origins Centre Museum
22 March - 30 July 2022

The Origins Centre Museum and POOL present the exhibition, The Weight in the Air, by collaborating artists Nina Barnett (ZA) and Jeremy Bolen (US). Using Johannesburg as a site from which to consider the ecological, the (post)colonial and the cyclical, the exhibition offers a series of immersive, materially complex installations encouraging viewers to consider what is present in the air we inhabit.

Johannesburg is built for (and among sites for) gold extraction. The mines have defined the landscape - giving rise to the architecture and industry built from the extracted wealth, and to the apartheid system, the destruction of viable land and clean water, and the yellow mountain-sized piles of dust that mark and constitute the skyline. This dust, even when invisible, gives form to a history of colonialism and its destructive local cost. It moves freely through the porous air - settling on surfaces and within lungs. This dust is the catalyst for the exhibition, which considers ways of sensing or knowing matter as particulate in the context of this city. In thinking through Johannesburg’s dust and its physical, symbolic, radioactive impact; the exhibition brings attention to how particles retain a record of where they have come from, and have the potential to send material messages between far reaching places.

See review of The Weight in the Air here 

Nina Barnett and Jeremy Bolen have been collaborating since 2015. With a focus on forms of visibility and knowledge production, their work spans phenomena from neutrinos to dust storms incorporating research from disciplines such as physics, anthropology, mathematics and architecture. With an emphasis on modes of sensing and sensory archives, they employ filmmaking and installation strategies that create immersive and interactive experiences for participants. Their collaborative work has been exhibited widely with recent exhibitions and screenings in Johannesburg, Lima, Mexico City, Bilbao and Chicago.

This exhibition is made possible through the support of the Origins Centre, Klingspor Abrasives, edition~verso and Georgia State University.

The Weight in the Air forms part of a research focus undertaken by POOL, which investigates the diversity of engagement that artists have developed to climate crisis - be it as the anthropocene, the capitalocene, or the chthulucene; as well as newer articulations that are emerging and being shaped across specific contexts.

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Tentacularly, knotting, & world-making
Nolan Oswald Dennis, Abri de Swardt, Zara Julius, Zayaan Khan & Andrei Van Wyk
20 October - 5 November 2021

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Holding Water
Ocean Thinking
25 October - 31 March 2020

Bianca Baldi, Jonathan Cane, Shane Cooper and Thandi Nthuli, Zayaan Khan, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Abri de Swardt and Sinethemba Twalo

A programme of workshops, reading groups, film screenings and installations and artist presentations that think the oceanic from land-locked Johannesburg, commissioned by POOL and the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South, WiSER and further supported by Business and Arts South Africa and Ellis House Art Building.

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, the largest city in the world not located on a major body of water. But this dry city is oddly oceanic. With half of the cargo received by the ports at Durban and Cape Town landing at the container terminal in Johannesburg, it is known as the largest dry port in the world. Its geological history is as a prehistoric ocean floor, and its urban fabric runs along a continental watershed, with rainwater running from its side to distant coasts. Johannesburg may also, in the future, become waterlogged again, as a dry island amid rising seas or sunk into acid mine water. From the ruined Three Ships restaurant at the Carlton Hotel to the South African Institute for Maritime Research (a shadowy apartheid-era paramilitary force), the old SAS navy base in Wemmer Pan and the model of the Dromedaris in Santarama Miniland - Johannesburg is littered with oceanic allusions.

How to think the ocean from this dry city, and how to think the city oceanically?

The Oceanic Humanities for the Global South WiSER and POOL are collaborating on a research and exhibition project focused on the politics and poetics of oceanic flows, from the perspective of land-locked Johannesburg. POOL’s ongoing ‘Ocean Thinking’ project postulates that a large part of the political, social and economic reality of the post-colonial global South has been and continues to be produced in and through its relationship to the ocean. Oceanic Humanities aims to decolonize histories of oceanic space while providing new approaches to literary and aesthetic understandings of water. Their collaboration draws together academic, literary and cultural studies with practice-based research.

The project tests the framing of academic, artistic and exhibition practice through destabilising temporal and spatial rhythms that constitute the anticipated forms of exhibitions and lectures through a series of programmed events that are staged between new and full moon cycles, and across past and future oceanic geographies.

The public programme includes performance lectures, screenings, live musical performances, immersive installations, live readings, and public city walks lead by artists and scholars, as well as a two-day workshop at WiSER, Wits University, Johannesburg.

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BEAMS
Nina Barnett & Jeremy Bolen
1-31 July

Research Residency

Theoretical particle physics, and particularly neutrino research, happen at the edge of knowledge - a space of projection, extrapolation and the theoretical. This way of thinking is also relevant when considering the impact of the distant past (deep time), the relation between equidistant and intersecting presents, and the emerging future of the earth (the anthropocene/capitalocene). Nina Barnett and Jeremy Bolen, in collaboration with POOL, present Beams, a year-long project beginning with a July residency at POOL and culminating in a May 2020 exhibition that will explore past and future time, the impact of visibility, and the edges of knowledge.

Beams will attempt to extend our sensorial capabilities and in doing so bring attention to what extending our senses may allow us: collective experience, belief, an understanding of our surroundings. To this end, Barnett and Bolen intend to extend their research into a multidimensional exhibition that includes an array of extra-disciplinary collaborations with practitioners from the worlds of science, activism and the humanities.

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3 Dreams Of The Sinking World
James Webb
13 April-22 June

3 Dreams Of The Sinking World is a filmic meditation by James Webb on the Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg. An icon of wealth and luxury when it was built in the 1960s, and a symbol of Johannesburg’s modern global aspirations during the height of apartheid, the hotel was never financially successful and was finally closed in the 1990s. The building remains closed, in a state of suspension, while the city around it has changed. 3 Dreams of the Sinking World consists of a sound installation and a five channel film installation of footage taken inside the hotel in 2015 and 2018 respectively. The exhibition includes recorded audio narrative pieces commissioned by POOL especially for the exhibition.

Webb’s filmic vignettes reveal a gradual scopic study of the architectural and infrastructural elements that remain as they intersect with peeling design elements, dead facilities, and exhausted organic matter. The first installation presents footage from a drone camera tracking an expired palm tree that has been abandoned on the former rooftop pool and entertainment area of the hotel. The second moves to the core of the building with a camera slowly tracking back along the corridor of the 26th floor in a movement that references the famous "corridor" scene from The Shining. The final piece contains footage that follows Shoes Mthembu, a security guard, as he descends 30-flights of stairs inside the hotel. Lit only by a torch, Mthembu leads the viewer from the roof to the basement. Intersecting all the filmic vignettes is the sound of Johannesburg as filtered through the physical husk of the building - recordings made by placing a series of microphones, including sensitive contact microphones to tap into the vibrations of the walls and windows, throughout the hotel.

Commissioned narrative responses are recorded and voiced by Lindiwe Matshikiza and broadcast alongside the films in the exhibition space. These responses are realised by poet Khanya Mashabela, scholar and critic Athi Mongezeleli Joja, and curator and writer Mika Conradie. These pieces allow for an expanded reading of the Carlton Hotel, awaking the suspended character, history and psychology of the building through narrative, personal accounts and political theory.

This project was conceptualised in 2015, and first exhibited at the Norrtälje Konsthall, Sweden, in 2018. The artist would like to thank TransNet, and Benji Liebmann and Helén Hedensjö for their logistical and curatorial assistance respectively.

James Webb is an interdisciplinary, conceptual artist whose work ranges from site-specific interventions in public spaces to large-scale installations in galleries and museums. Informed by his studies in advertising, comparative religion, and theatre, he often makes use of ellipsis, displacement, and détournement to explore the nature of belief and the dynamics of communication in our contemporary world. Webb’s practice employs a variety of media including audio, installation, and text; referencing aspects of the conceptualist and minimalist traditions. Recent solo presentations include the Art Institute of Chicago, United States of America, 2018; Norrtälje Konsthall, Norrtälje, Sweden, 2018; Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, France, 2016; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, United Kingdom, 2016; Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway, 2015; blank projects, Cape Town, South Africa, 2014; CentroCentro, Madrid, Spain, 2013; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2012; and MAC, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 2010. Major group exhibitions include the 13th Biennial of Dakar (2018), 4th Prospect Triennial of New Orleans (2017), Documenta 14 (2017), 13th Biennial of Sharjah (2017), 12th Bienal de la Habana (2015), 55th Biennale di Venezia (2013), the 3rd Marrakech Biennale (2009), and the 8th Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2007). Webb’s work has been acquired by numerous international collections, and his projects have been written about and published in “Xenagogue” (Hordaland Kunstsenter, 2015) and the forthcoming monograph “…” (blank projects, 2019). Born in 1975 in Kimberley, South Africa, Webb lives and works in Cape Town and Stockholm.

This exhibition is supported by the National Arts Council of South Africa (NAC).

REVIEW ON ARTTHROB BY NOLAN STEVENS

REVIEW ON BUBBLEGUM CLUB BY MARCIA ELIZABETH

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Starter Room

1 March - 30 March

SHANE COOPER & MANDLA MLANGENI | NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS | ZAYAAN KHAN

Starter Room is a lab and mediateque in which plant relations, structures and substrates are framed as potential sites for social, political and biological transmission and through which unheard and unexpected histories and knowledges might be accessed. The name “Starter Room” is inspired by the cultivation of wild yeast that is supported and fed through a fermented mixture of flour, water and naturally occurring bacteria, originally used to make bread rise before the invention of commercial instant yeast. Motivated by the fomenting intersection of microbial and macro ecologies in which plants, cells, spores, and rhizomatic extensions develop, Starter Room is organised as a scene of public encounter through which discursive acts, relations, knowledge production and sharing take place. 

The project considers the following:

Submarine microbiology, fauna and flora

Theories of bacterial resistance

Bacteria and plant cells as political agents

Matter and life forms organised around and through plant matter (soil, minerals, waters, insects)

Organic decay, ghosting and afterlives

The scales and rhythms of plant progression

Cultivation and colonialism

Classification and naming of plants and their relation to the environment

Macro and micro histories of processing, eating, tasting and digesting plant matter

Gardens as archival thickets

Plants and microbes as witness

Pharmacopeia and herbalism

Economic and diplomatic botany

Urban agriculture

Food security

Plant migration 

Indigenous knowledge and alternative medicine

Starter Room is supported by the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) in association with the Nedbank Arts Affinity.

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Theatrum Botanicum
Uriel Orlow
4 September – 24 November

Using the media of film, photography, installation and sound, and working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum considers plants as both witnesses and actors in history, and as dynamic agents—connecting nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity—across different geographies, histories and systems of knowledge, with a variety of curative, spiritual and economic powers.

The works variously explore botanical nationalism and other legacies of colonialism, plant migration and invasion, biopiracy, flower diplomacy during apartheid, the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates on Robben Island prison, as well as the role of classification and naming of plants. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carrol describes how the project looks to the botanical world as a stage on which these histories interact as agents: The project developed out of a research residency undertaken in 2014 and evolved through successive trips between 2015 and 2017 in which Orlow undertook extensive research in archives, and collaborated with traditional medicine practitioners as well as those with legal and botanical expertise, traversing Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.

The project has evolved over several iterations including: The Showroom, London (2016); EVA International (2016) curated by Koyo Kouoh; the 2017 Sharjah Biennal 13 (where it won a major award); and Kunsthalle St Gallen, Switzerland (2018). The South African iteration sees the project return to its geography of origin, giving local audiences and practitioners - some of whom helped shape the project - an opportunity to critically and generatively respond to the body of work. The project will be hosted between POOL and the Market Photo Workshop, in Johannesburg, the Institute for the Creative Arts (ICA) in Cape Town and the Durban Art Gallery. This project forms part of a special programme of Pro Helvetia Johannesburg, the Southern African liaison office of the Swiss Arts Council, celebrating twenty years of collaboration and exchange with the region. For more information go here.

REVIEW IN THE MAIL AND GUARDIAN BY KWANELE SOSIBO

REVIEW IN RIOT MATERIAL BY ROBIN SHER

REVIEW IN ARTTHROB BY NKGOPOLENG MOLOI

REVIEW IN BUBBLEGUM CLUB BY CHRISTA DEE

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PALM PALM Palmar
Curated by Mika Conradie
18 July - 22 August

YTO BARRADA | SIMON GUSH | MADEYOULOOK | SEBASTIAN MEJIA | LUCAS ODAHARA | KARIN TAN + SKYE QUADLING

PALM PALM Palmar is a project and exhibition that looks at the imported palm tree as a vector for producing narratives and imaginaries within colonial and postcolonial Johannesburg. Imported from island “utopias” across the Pacific Ocean and South-East Asia during South Africa’s Apartheid regime, the palm trees of Johannesburg complicate city imaginaries by blurring temporal and geographical frames and desires. How do we understand the appropriation of the palm as a colonial paradisical dream? How do we recuperate the palm tree from this violent dream, within the entangled becoming of a postcolonial city? Can the tree speak?

PALM PALM Palmar involves producing propositions around place making, entering the question of spatial and historical organisation through flora. Shifting focus from the architecture of a built environment towards the architecture and infrastructure of colonial tropical imagination, landscaping regimes and plant structures, the project looks at how meaning and history has been produced under human-plant relations and what the role of specific plant-life is in assembling or eliding popular narratives.

The title of the project, PALM PALM Palmar brings attention to the linguistic history of the word “palm”, which is also a term for a tricksters’ “sleight of hand”, or “to palm” something away. “Palmae”, as they are called in Latin botanical classification, are also named after the opened surface of the human hand which is not only a flat plane area, but also what is referred to in medical terms as palmar – “of or pertaining to the underside of an appendage”.

“Palm” is thus a gesture, a territory and a direction. 

This exhibition is supported by the National Arts Council of South Africa (NAC).

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Ridder Thirst
Abri de Swardt
26 April - 17 June

Ridder Thirst by Abri de Swardt explores the restorative agency and limits of queer youth, facing white supremacist denialism with an inventory of its continued effects. The exhibition, comprising new work in video, photography, sculpture, sound and performance, marks the South African artist’s first solo exhibition in Johannesburg and the launch of the Ridder Thirst 12’’ LP.

As the exhibition’s starting point, De Swardt turns to photographs of Afrikaner student couples captured at the First River in Stellenbosch in the sixties and seventies by Alice Mertens. The Namibian-German ethnographic photographer was the first tertiary tutor of the lens in South Africa and Lecturer in Photography at Stellenbosch University from the mid nineteen-sixties.

Mertens’ images capture a moment of historical incongruity, as De Swardt notes: “whereas today’s Fallist movement exposes the fallacy of the generational designation ‘Born Free’, Mertens’ white ethnography spotlights students ‘Born Just Before’ or ‘Born Into’ apartheid”. The exhibition takes its title from De Swardt’s video, Ridder Thirst (2015-2018), in which the artist fantasises the Stellenbosch river into disappearance, perceiving that “if the ocean is the space of coloniality, the river is that of settlement”. By snaking from the mouth of the First River at Macassar Beach – a former separate amenity for people classified as ‘Coloured’ under apartheid, and named after the 17th century Eastern Indonesian exile, Shaykh Yusuf of Makassar – to Stellenbosch, named after Simon van der Stel who set it aside for settler colonial burghers distancing themselves from the Dutch East India Company at the first river he encountered after Cape Town – the work takes the span of the river as marker of extreme socio-political discrepancies.

For De Swardt, these geographic tensions cannot be extracted from the shifting status of tertiary education, specifically the teaching of photography as a discursive framing of subjects. As such, the artist approaches the sites of Mertens’ images along the banks of the river, inserting motion-tracked contemporary media from Die Matie student newspaper and advertising for the aspirational clothing brand Stellies amongst others, as mediations on spatial traumas which raise questions of land ownership, and of landscape, in relation to the lens. Here the vagaries of the archival gaze is met with the insatiability of eroticism as De Swardt occupies and inverts the ‘straight’ canons of documentary photography and essay film, asking how we can unlearn historic images that seek to define us.

In his photographic series, Streams (2015 - ongoing), De Swardt relocates a darkroom to a riverbank, staging differentiated technologies of queer visibility as intransigent to notions of water as ‘natural’, and photography as ‘neutral’, phenomena. De Swardt is drawn to the ‘Stop Bath’ in film processing - when images ‘stop developing’, a procedure which could be understood as the violence of fixing the fluid emergence of an image.

This exhibition is supported by the National Arts Council of South Africa (NAC).

Abri de Swardt (b. 1988, lives and works in Johannesburg) is an artist and writer who works across video, photography, costume, sound, sculpture, and performance. He is concerned with the difficult visibility and audibility of queer and Southern subjects as proxies of what Michael Taussig terms “effervescent”, “no sooner emerged than” disappearing, the “exact opposite…of monuments”. De Swardt holds a MFA in Fine Art with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London (2014), and a BA in Fine Art from Stellenbosch University (2010). De Swardt has realised solo exhibitions at White Cubicle, London (SPF Matthew Barney, 2015); MOTInternational Projects, London (Catapult Screensaver, 2013); and blank projects, Cape Town (To Walk on Water, 2011). ​​Recent exhibitions and screenings include writing for the eye, writing for the ear, The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg (2018), These Rotten Words at Chapter, Cardiff (2017), Blend the Acclaim of Your Chant with the Timbrels, Jerwood Staging Series, Jerwood Space, London (2016), Bloomberg New Contemporaries, One Thoresby Street, Nottingham, and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Sightings, KZNSA, Durban; Poetics of Relation, Point of Order, Johannesburg and LiveInYourHead, Geneva; and Men Gather, in Speech…, Cooper Gallery, Dundee (all 2015). Forthcoming exhibitions include Coded Encounters, Gallery Graça Brandāo, Lisbon, and a residency at Rupert, Vilnius.

REVIEWS AND ARTICLES ON RIDDER THIRST:

REVIEW ON BUBBLEGUM CLUB BY GEMMA HART

REVIEW ON KLYNTJI BY FRANCOIS LYON-CACHET

ARTICLE BY BAVISHA PANCHIA ON AFRICANAH.ORG

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(rhythmanalysis) from within, without, and against

1 October - 30 November

KESIVAN NAIDOO | SILO ANDRIAN | CARLO MOMBELLI | NELISIWE XABA | EDUARDI CACHUCHO | MADEYOULOOK | NAADIRA PATEL

In “Elements of Rhythmanalysis”, Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre introduces a method with which to connect  space and time in the comprehension of everyday life. Lefebvre puts forward that the figure of “a rhythmanalysist is capable of listening to a house, a street, a town, as one listens to a symphony opera”, and positions the body as the first site of political rhythmic understanding – a metronome that moves between the “natural” and biological force of circadian rhythms and the repetitions and cycles of capitalist production and political struggle. As a tool of analysis, rhythm opens up connections between psychological, biological, sociological and political forces, cutting across and intersecting divergent systems of knowledge and understandings of time. Thinking through daily rhythms provides an opportunity to test how disciplines and practices sit in the world, how perceptive and responsive a practice is to occurrences and events in locales and as part of global networks, allowing us to explore how both power and resistance permeate the everyday. Rhythmanalysis is also a testing ground for the production and political work of counter-rhythms and arrhythmic tempos that might disrupt the banal repetitions of power structures, structural inequalities and hierarchies. 

POOL is interested in the potential of rhythm as a destabilising force, where rhythm might be used as a form of resistance against disciplining social structures and knowledge boundaries and as a tool for rethinking and re-applying artistic practice. As such POOL has, since 2015, been developing and conceptualising a research project investigating the potentials of rhythmanalysis as a tool for artistic production and thinking, unfolding artistic and institutional practice as a rhythmic organising form and propositioning it with contrasting cycles, pulsations, utterances, mobilities and readings. A major field of practice within our research around counter-rhythms is jazz, a simultaneous form and platform for re-negotiating realities, resistance, world making and collaboration. Acknowledging that the South African art world has very few spaces for collaborative art making, thinking and curating, we look towards jazz as a form that embodies improvisation and risk-taking as a methodological starting point. Jazz is a form of liveness that expects and produces negotiations between various players “on the spot”, so to speak. This negotiation also extends to listeners (the audience) who take on a certain responsibility to “keep time” – constantly catching it, dropping it, or holding it – along with the musicians. The listener is thus implicated in the liveness unfolding around them. Through shifting the rhythms of modernity and through producing counter-rhythms or a-rhythmic interventions (through protest, music, jazz, improvisation, dance, foot-dragging, or withdrawal) we can read resistance, and produce modes of social organisation.

This project commissioned South African visual artists and musicians to produce new artistic works that respond to the political, social and collaborative potentials of rhythm. The work was presented in a series of public moments including workshops, film screenings, live jazz performances and readings.

This project was supported by Pro Helvetia Johannesburg, National Arts Council of South Africa, Concerts SA, and Institut Francais - South Africa