Installed on the banks of the Eerste River, ‘Flood Light’ replicates a floodlight from the Danie Craven Rugby Fields next to the river at Stellenbosch University’s Coetzenburg Sports Terrain. In an imagined realm, it becomes detached from its mast and falls to the floor, eventually washing up at Spier from severe flooding. Glitching and glowing anxiously and mournfully, ‘Flood Light’ speaks to the ecological state of the present while signalling our distraction from it. The sculpture focuses attention on the many extreme weather events including the Eerste River bursting its banks in the region’s worst recorded flood in over 45 years in 2023.

Abri de Swardt’s work connects queerness, decoloniality and the ‘more than human’ to imagine forms of affiliation that are critical, fluid and reparative. Moving between photography, video, sculpture, fiction, sound, costume, historiography, and performance, De Swardt’s work, which is a convergence of the elemental and theatrical, has been exhibited, performed and screened across South Africa, in Berlin, Paris and Moscow. He holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and has taught at Wits School of the Arts, Rhodes University, and Stellenbosch University. In 2022, De Swardt was awarded the Social Impact Arts Prize.