Reverse Forward and All at Once (South Africa)
2021–ongoing
Gabi Ngcobo (South Africa) is an artist, curator, and educator living in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Reverse Forward and All at Once is an inverted cartographic journey where questions of form and formlessness are experienced over time and in space. The project interrogates the systematic problems of ordering knowledge and pushes the boundaries of what it can mean to critically produce within formalized and less formal art spaces. The projects of artists Nolan Oswald Dennis and Nyakallo Maleke form part of Commonplaces, which is partly staged within SCENORAMA, a new collaborative platform at Javett-UP at the University of Pretoria. Both artists approach their work as a form of thinking in reverse or tracing backwards in order to return to a yet unknowable universe. Maleke’s installation titled The Things We Made for the Things That We Did Not Know poses questions around unknown vocabularies, things made for pleasure and joy, things made when moving between spaces and ongoing elements and obsessions that have the potential to carry knowledge. For his work, Isivivane/Superpositions, Dennis takes inspiration from conversations with geologists and geology museum curators to create experimental gestures for a space where dispossession, racialization, and restitution are important parts of how we think about the world in a geological scale: a planetary science also known as repatriation.
Acknowledgments
Patrons
The Haudenschild Foundation
The Lee Foundation
Collaborators
Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA)
Javett Art Center, University of Pretoria (Javett-UP)
LM Diverse