Spier Light Art, over its six years of its existence, has provided a space for a range of artworks that use light as a central aspect of their form. Set on a farm that inspires with its rolling, lush landscapes, Spier Wine Farm is generative and mindful in its sustainable practices, and also space vexing because of its colonial history.

The exhibition occurs within a large enough frame to inspire a range of experiences. Here, artworks have emerged as playful, evocative, bombastic, subtle and participatory, involving audiences in constructing the work itself.

The last editions of the event have provided a road map for ways in which light art in all its mercurial shapeshifting can draw our attention to a subject beyond its materiality, surprise our senses, evoke awe, laughter and intrigue, debate emotions, and touch us below our surface sadness or hurt.

This year’s works, with the sheer variety of light instruments and aesthetics, will no doubt extend that road map. However, unlike other years, there is an abiding propensity for content, and a recurring theme has emerged from the collection. A vast majority of the works speak to ideas of scaffolding, infrastructure, building and construction – less about affect and more around what produced it and what can change.

Most of the artists this year seem to be concerned with backend and processing, as if tuning into a collective consciousness of making and reconstruction. There may be some political and social genealogy in this.

Exactly ten years ago an upsurge of emotion erupted in our country as a public monument, shrugging off its supposed benign presence on a university campus, becoming a vivid sign of the continued and unchecked presence of coloniality. And by extension a symbol of the persistence of abnegation and vulnerability of the majority of our people in this country.

Ten years ago, the Rhodes Must Fall movement began as a singular performative response to a monument and became a global movement. The courage of students to point out the neglect of care and undermining of hope emerged in many respects as an urgent shout to the gatekeepers, policymakers and capital holders of our country not to ignore the overwhelming, unabated landlessness and poverty.

It is not without significance that this has been followed by what seems like a propensity for looking more deeply into cause as well as effect, for depth and for building.

Scaffolding implies reconstruction amidst disparate elements, literally throwing light on areas that are dark, on relationships, collectives, and collaboration. A search for congruence rather than fragmentation, and for a backend that is more generative, discursive and not prescriptive, a backend that can enable us to find relationships within a society that weighs us down, and to surface with confidence. Five large scale installations lead in this vein.

Using light in several forms, ‘Infrastructures of Freedom’ by the LightUp Collective considers the depths of structure in informal settlements, and engenders a participatory celebration of human potential to collaborate and recreate.

Working with similar subjects, ‘Camp’, by the renowned visual artist Serge Nitegeka, considers displacement and makeshift structures built by refugees, at once a testimony to precarity and survival. As opposed to ‘Infrastructures of Freedom’, in ‘Camp’, where strategically installed light radiates elusive hope, audience members experience at a distance the dogged will to live.

From Switzerland, as part of a partnership with ProHelveia, Florian Bach’s ‘HALID’ brings together six spotlights containing high-pressure discharge lamps that illuminate a large wall. As an artist interested in ‘decrypting’, South African-born Bach creates an installation that unpacks and subtly reveals the brutal reality of surveillance systems, made particularly stark when set against the lush, green landscape.

In the centre of the fourth work, scaffolding itself and a constructed pavilion help us explore the intricate beauty, allure, collapse and decay of South African cities. Clark, Juterbock and Prins’ ‘City Lights | Izibani Zedolobha’ affords us an immersive exploration of the workings of a city. It is that movement inside a shell, rich with visual materiality, that talks to our capacity to delve deeper into finding solutions and possibilities for all.

Finally Haffejee, Lamola, Essa and Mbadi’s ‘Come Dance With Me’ uses kinetic scaffolding of several five-metre tall figures – made out of a light-weight, semi-transparent fabric – to appear as if they are dancing. Air blowing up continuously from below keeps this scaffolding soft, sinewy and moving. The invitation to dance by the artists is seductive, and we hope the audience will see this as a celebration of hidden histories, of women and labour.

Legacy as scaffolding that is both positive and negative – and in need of transformation – runs through other works. Several consider historical matter as a contemporary concern, a marker to relook and shift focus.

In its architectural, skeleton of form, referencing the broader Cape Winelands, ‘Ghost Landscapes’ by Tarmahomed and Naran, provides through sets of relational aesthetics a way to invite the past and reform present and futures. The historically submerged histories of farm workers and land, land that they have relinquished throughout history, form the basis of Swiss artist Sophie Guyot’s ‘Everywhere’. Coming from a history of small-scale farmers in Switzerland, Guyot uses a workshop process to engage farm workers and develop the artwork collectively.

Gina-Rose Bolligello continues this crucial work in ‘Contemplation: The Working Farm’ – a mixed-media piece that looks at legacy as a means to make choices of still fragile futures. Film, photographs, transparent, layered images printed onto Perspex, wine barrels, dust and soil are all deconstructed and reconfigured.

Artists wrestling with history work to find the object that captures unease, complexity and paradox in history, and to arrive at some kind of metaphor for this, layering Jess Bothma uses the historical figure of the Trojan horse, replete with wings and flames. ‘Dark Horse’ is a light sculpture that navigates the many sided, subjective modes of reading history, its fragility in its recreation but its potential and necessity for conjuring hopeful futures.

Like Berco Wilsenach’s ‘In Die Sterre Geskryf / Written In The Stars’, which takes our vision beyond scaffolding and structures of personal, political and social visions into a sense of depth and boundlessness, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s film ‘Polyhedra’ provides us with a scaffold of dazzling and poetic cosmology. Screened in the open air, with the sky itself as background, the Milky Way in time lapse, shifting expanses of earth and stars all take us into the polyhedral structures of the infinite.

Many of the artists provide structures as a launching pad for a dizzying wealth of ideas. Castle and Brady’s installation ‘Repast ll’ is an exhaustive collaborative work that creates atmospheres to key into the elusive relationship between memory and nature. Karla Nixon’s visually rich work and whimsical ‘Pssst, look at my feed’ provides fiercely relevant commentary on social media, and Elgin Rust and Jane Appleby’s distilled and meticulous light sculpture, ‘Cloud’ made out of discarded plastic bottles, considers waste, water and environmental precarity.

French artist Antoine Schmitt rounds up these meditations on whimsy and gravitas, in his evocation of two infinite streams of pixels, drawn to each other and annihilated at the same time, titled with tongue firmly in cheek, ‘Fatal Attraction’.

Spier Light Art began all those years ago, with a very clear mission: to reveal the potential for this particular artform to engage, play, illuminate and elevate, working with its unique character and potential. There is clear signal in this edition that artists are going much further, using the form as a springboard to more, as a way to connect with a collective need to build from the inside, to provide firm scaffold to sit in time and history, and to look beyond pressing darkness, up into the open sky, towards hope and sustenance.

In this year’s Spier Light Art, artist Hallie Haller has a sign next to her work, with the words:

You are the first technology.

A network of intention and hope that spills out into production and perception.
You. You are the land maker.
In the quick night, this is your chance to make it over.
Take it somewhere good.

Haller’s words epitomise this year’s extensive and robust Spier Light Art Exhibition. Since our democracy South Africa has intermittently offered the world hope and something of a model for human rights. It is an imperfect and flawed model but since Nelson Mandela’s evocative, inspiring inaugural speech in 1994, our country has nevertheless shown itself to be at once despairing and wildly enervating.

Our artists unashamedly combine inspiration, innovation, excellence of form and social conscience. It is what we do well. So while informed by our struggles and sluggish transformation, they bring inspiration and renewed wonder so that we as Haller exhorts above, we play as innovators and land makers in the quick night.

Nowhere is this more potent than in the deceptively wry Flood Light by Abri de Swardt a sculpture of a collapsed, massive floodlight on the banks of the Eerste River, glitching and glowing both anxiously and mournfully, speaking to the ecological state of the present while signalling our distraction from it. The artist draws from writer Toni Morrison’s reminder that flooding is a misattribution of a natural process, that in flooding, the river is remembering where it used to be.

Naadira Patel and Sarah de Villiers’ Assembling Lines is a magnificent reflection on processes of extraction, production, distribution and trade, in a time when conversations about achieving net-zero carbon emissions are at risk. They do this by inserting into the lush green landscape the rudimentary language of the LED screen, reminiscent of advertising screens, and the ticker tape displays of stock market updates, shifting our gaze to an alternate language of value and ethics, prompting viewers with questions of sustainability practices, and “ethical consumption”. One of four works from previous iterations of Spier Light Art, Marco Chiandetti’s Beacon also uses the site specificity of the farm as counterpoint, to reflect on broader issues of immigration, resilience, and the cultural interplay that defines our interconnected world.

These works will live amongst works that hold up and honour ecological presence: Jenna Burchell's Songsmith will complement UK based artist Stevie Thompson’s ravishing Mycelium a mesmerising display of colour and light using thousands of thin fibre optic strands to represent the huge network of mycelium often growing right below our feet. Similarly Berco Wilsenach’s Written in the Stars and Kamil Hassim’s impressive Event Horizon immerse the audience in what is understood as vast, unknown spaces that are atmospheric and in constant flux. These enormous presences in our lives are used by the artists productively, to imagine and bathe in the infinite.

Hallie Haller’s work Machine Swim asks us to actively participate in the source of sentience, our own bodies. So when confronted by a machine, how can we use this encounter to affirm our own aliveness and reclaim renewal.

Reclaiming non-binary identities, Goldendean’s VESICA PISCIS draws from a geometric shape that is formed by the intersection of two circles of the same radius, with the centre of each circle on the circumference of the other. This extraordinary, deceptively simple light art work asks us to reflect on how existence is not a binary but rather a spectrum of intersectional experiences within our humanity. The artist evokes Amrou Al-Kadhi poignant question:

‍If subatomic particles defy constructs all the time, why should we believe in fixed constructs of gender or any kind of reality?

Mthuthuzeli Zimba dragged a shack on wheels from Khayelitsha township all the way to central Cape Town. A video of this pilgrimage forms part of a light installation comprising a relocated shack. The work, Moriti wa Kganya interrogates displacement in both space and body complemented by other profound works around a continuous grapple with land and living presence. Kenneth Shandu’s haunting work, Invisible comprised of intricately made and lit wire-sculptures honours workers who labour unseen and rarely acknowledged. Charles Palms’ work made for the Slave Bell on the farm, The Boogeyman, returns, also working with great care and skill with our contentious history. In Themba Stewart and Qondiswa James sprawling work, Keep the Lights On, they create an impressive array of impressions of homes across a typical South African city. Using wood, tiles, cables and light fixtures, each roof structure represents a different socio-economic typology typically present in the geography of a city. It is ultimately light here that serves as a marker for how bodies are held.

In an inimitable way too, artists use hope and play to work through difficult subject matter. Mhlonishwa Chiliza coming from the rural town of Umzumbe has created a modest yet evocative sculptural light art work which in the face of a litany of lack of delivery is nevertheless an enduring symbol of transformation and new beginnings. Mpho Jacobs’ Let’s Play a cheerful animation of game play, using the format of video games, considers feelings of alienation at not being able to speak Afrikaans in a Stellenbosch educational institution. Comprising a series of short, looping animations that draws one to play but not without difficulty and heartbreaking failure, the work effectively combines play and reflection.

Zurich based artist DD Son's sculptural light art work open/closed (restaurant kids), works to similar effect, critical comment and charm. Using visual cues from pop culture, the science and advertisement industry, Son unpacks the mechanisms of desire and fetishisation in our post-industrial age of branding and personalised marketing. Using video as her medium Rhoda Davids Abel’s Brie of the sing-sing birds also lightly combines startling, wry and playful imagery with themes of gravity – displacement, family, intergenerational legacies and identity.

Ultimately this combination of playfulness with subjects that inspire participation and reflection abounds: Swiss artist Sophie Guyot’s The Meaning of Meaning is an extensive work using traffic lights as its main material. By combining these simple luminous pictograms, she creates new semantic structures supposedly to address an unknown intelligence ‘out in the universe’, and questions how these signs address us. The slowed down soundtrack, using festive music, combined with familiar contemporary ring tones, plunges the installation into a kind of melancholy conducive to reflection. The installation thus reveals light playfulness but a deadly serious intent of the artist’s activity: although it looks around into the space of the beyond, it primarily addresses earthly fears and hopes.

And finally, renowned light artist Alan Alborough’s sculptural work ‘ZZZZ’ plays in with the use of this word in our social media interactions. As the title suggests, the first evocation is one of relaxation and unconsciousness. However, this state of sleep as this witty light art work will evoke is also

A poetic or euphemistic word for death
To be in, or as, in the state of sleep is
To fail to pay attention

The works combine wonder, participation and thought that distinguishes this exhibition of light art as a space for the celebration of a wide range of forms of light that allows for moments of escape and fantasy and moments when we may touch sides with the world outside, lest indeed, we fall completely asleep.

Since the inception of Spier Light Art, as much as light was deployed as a medium that would deepen or enliven and enhance the art work, artists also probed a vast range of subjects in intricate ways. Particularly of late, the pandemic as well as other precarities led to the creation of works that were introspective and  conceptual, drawing from atmospheres of reflection and reset as our society was assailed by several global and national trials.

This year these precarities have not simply disappeared - what 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 do play with and lean into form more deeply, on the materiality of light itself and its manifestations, shifting this sprawling outdoor exhibition into an experiential adventure of the many possibilities that light may be moulded into, from place holder, and a marker to a thing of wonder in and of itself.  So while themes do abound and hold the gravitas and centre of this collection of work, light is deployed in a myriad of evocative ways, an invitation to experience a range of forms and in some instances leading us to reflect on some of the pressing issues of our time.

Embracing this sense of entering a wonderland of light art that beguiles is Georgia Munik’s Orpheus a captivating beacon within the exhibition, a brilliant, intricately made neon sculpture marking a literal and metaphoric edge between darkness and of light.  Swiss artist Sofie Guyot’s  Infinity also draws our attention to the vastness of an evening landscape – this work made from LED lights, provides a reminder of the persistent and triumphant human imagination in the midst of pessimism. In the same vein Christina Fortune and Queezy’s seductive and fabulous Corset Intransit, a literally lit sculpted corset hung aloft a body of water, is a victorious homage to the human spirit in its unabashed, triumphant queerness.

The 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 which is played out across the sculptural structure. This playfulness around subject – in this case on transience and afterlife - through compelling form is a strong feature of this year’s work. In 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, complimented 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 in 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, The Trap,  which hones in on our perverse over-consumption as humans. Christine Dixi’s haunting triptych of work set against a horizon of hills and valleys that surround the Spier Estate, Ghostprints for the Infanta-Echoes, reflects on the human endeavour to perpetually move the body across and under seas, and across the skies, subtly revealing how technologies have paradoxically both helped and exploited sentient beings of all kinds – progress littered with sacrifices and scarification on land and seascape.

Using light, image and sound, four works layer our understandings of coloniality through richly contemporary evocations over time, link pasts, present and futures. 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 invisibilizing of rich and honourable traditions.

Judith Westerveld’s expansive work’s 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.  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. And image and a dense and layered soundscape in  Tseliso Monaheng’s mesmerising Sonic abstract its subject of migration, playing with the familiar and the unfamiliar, with suggestion and invective.

In the curation of light art works in an open environment, together with the challenges of weather, ecological and material sustainability, we are mindful of the range of viewers that traverse the various spaces on the estate.   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, for light art that may intrigue further and possibly inform. 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  as we can see above assailed us with the detail and complexities in form and construction, making it possible for inspiring curiosity and eliciting play for play sake while going beyond into spaces for reflection and conjecture.

And then there are the owls. Many of them. Eyes glowing and watching from several trees. Serai Dowling and Ralph Borland endearing Zizi (Shona for owl) is a collection of forty  life-size Scops owls one of the world’s smallest owls. Simple hand-made 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.

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

During the global pandemic we learned to normalise uncertainty while we experienced firsthand the fragility and resilience of life, our personal connections and our social relationships. We found joy in subtle moments, celebrating the opportunities to bond with one another and to check in with ourselves. Spier Light Art takes this moment in the pandemic both to reflect and to depart – gazing back while looking forward.

After an overwhelming response to our call for artworks, we have carefully selected works to create an environment that acknowledges our collective joy, commemorates our individual triumphs, and honours the human spirit’s powerful impulse for regeneration.

Enabling us to look further than our everyday realities,  the selection of works from some of the most extraordinary artists in our country – and beyond our borders – presents narratives of land, difficult histories, and our relationship with the earth, calling for different, more caring and fuller futures.

The vast selection of work complements and holds together these reflections, manipulating form, light and colour to seduce the senses and invigorate the imagination. By shifting scale, changing our perceptions of materials, and exploring the interplay of light and colour, the art manifests exuberance – for the sheer joy of it.

We’re confident that these light artworks will soothe and inspire, helping us all to navigate this vital moment in time, which is an important turning point in so many respects.

COVID-19 changed so much of how we feel and think about the present and future. The pandemic has assailed us with uncertainty and a kind of darkness that can be overwhelming because it is not limited to place or time. It is worldwide, and ongoing.  

How do artists, amongst the most precarious in our society, make sense for us at this time? What tools do they give us, as they have always done in such calamitous times, to see through this? How can we play? How to dream? How to speak of such disturbance and yet see the power and potential of art, to inspire community and visions of solidarity and hope?

These questions have occupied us as they have most of the world’s artists and curators. This year, SPIER LIGHT ART does not want to forget, go beyond or desperately dream in spite of. We want to acknowledge the grief and the pain of our physical, spiritual and economic worlds. We want to acknowledge, also, that we are not all in this together. In any storm, some have boats and some have rafts and some simply only have themselves to keep above water. Although COVID-19 is a common storm, it affects us all differently – especially so in a deeply unequal society like ours. What is universal, though, is our need for light and lightness. And so, SPIER LIGHT ART features both attempts to walk through struggles as well as glimmers of pure beauty and opportunities to play.

In bringing together this rich selection of works, four curatorial strands have emerged. Strand 1 explores history, memory and futures; strand 2 deals more directly with the pandemic as well as a call for resilience and survival; strand 3 deepens the thoughts on precarity, fragility and transience as it relates to all sentient beings, embracing animism and the human; and strand 4 considers light as igniting our impulse to dream, play and explore imagination. These strands serve as a gentle guide through the experience as you move through the common storm.

We hope that the generosity of work attests to an abiding and reassuring ability in our society to create and build even when so much is attempting to take hope and optimism away.

We want to thank Spier for providing the opportunity for the lights to be proverbially ‘switched on’ again. We are thankful for this opportunity to help provide a reprieve (however small or temporary), and for such nourishment to exist at a time when bouts of darkness have become a daily experience in our worlds.

Light not only illuminates but shapes how we think, how we feel, how we relate to our environment and to each other. Increasingly, this medium has been used and explored by artists to new heights – evoking exquisite metaphors, playful experiences and emotive symbols.

Light art as a form and light art festivals have thus become a powerful addition internationally to our ever-expanding experience of art in the contemporary world. All of this was very evident at last year’s Spier Light Art –the very first exhibition devoted to such work in the country.

The artworks showcased at this year’s exhibition create a unique journey across Spier Wine Farm which is both awe-inspiring and thought provoking. Playful interventions respond with humour and wit to physical attributes of the estate, while other light installations allow for meditative interaction. A range of works reflect on South Africa’s complex and brutal past, and the persistent inequalities that frame our day-to-day reality. Many of these artworks ask for your participation in order for them to come alive – whether through touch, or other physical interaction, using your phone or even simply lying on a couch bathed in light. Watch out for these. We trust that these various experiences of light art and the range of themes, a clear expansion and extension of last year, will continue to intrigue, fascinate and nourish you.

Light art installations are intractable and mercurial by nature. Transcending the confines of their materiality, they are defined more by what they choose to illuminate, reveal or hide than what they consist of. As we encounter these works, our gaze is taken on an imaginative journey that encompasses what the light defines, extends, circumscribes or diffuses.

Some of the installations illuminate the experience of an ethereal sky or a still lake, some play on the ability to see or not to see. Some are whimsical, flitting or ironic. Some may be glimpsed from a distance and in passing. Some may require more time. These experiences – of walking and pausing, catching a glimpse or settling down to absorb – invite us to be introspective, adventurous and playful in turn. Exhibited across the Spier estate, each offers an opportunity to experience the complex, multi-hued, multi-faceted texture of our environment and ourselves – now lit, now in shadow, simultaneously. ~ Jay Pather and Vaughn Sadie