Resurfacing subjectivities

Earlier this year South Africa’s Minister of Art and Culture withdrew an artwork that was already chosen by an independent panel of judges for the South African Pavillion at the Venice Biennale.

Elegy by Gabrielle Goliath draws on memory and the subjectivities of violence against women. In a feat of astute art-making, the performative work grounds this subjectivity in material realities of the place and time that engenders this violence.

The work, comprising singers continuously singing a single note one after the other until fatigue stops them, shifts with different contexts. Elegy is both universal and site and time-specific.

Slated to be staged in an international arena, Elegy would have drawn on contexts closer to home and one of the most aching spaces of trauma of our time, the genocide in Gaza.

Goliath is an exemplary artist who works ethically with subject and form. Their work is a call for healing, drawing on the fragility of subjectivity in the midst of a brutal space and time.

Elegy’s withdrawal extends this brutality and extinguishes the power of subjectivity, memory and healing. It is a wound laid bare in the eyes of the world, and an eternal embarrassment to South Africa.

In this edition of Spier Light Art, there is an urgency to capture subjective experience in the midst of a political hegemony’s attempt to annihilate and wipe out our witnessing and acknowledgement. Goliath’s work – whether it is allowed to take its form or not – has captured a moment of zeitgeist.

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Familiar metaphors

Metaphors of lightness and darkness are not lost on South Africans. We revel in the bristling lure of fire in rituals under the full-moon, star-lit Karoo nights, and of candles during protests.

It is heartening, then, that in this edition – as a possible education to those who are the supposed guardians of art and culture – that artists remind us of the value of subjectivities made explicit and visible. Above all, as Goliath would have reminded the world, it reveals our possibilities for action, healing, beauty and courage.

From artist Theytjie’s, Closer to Harm than Home, an evocation of a highly subjective and deeply personal experience of ongoing gun and gang violence on Coloured communities in the Cape Flats to Kenneth Shandu’s When the Sky Falls, this year’s edition of Spier Light Art draws one very close to an experience of subjectivity, located as the works are in pressing material realities.

Theytjie’s work records a self-conscious witnessing, doggedly following a resident on a simple walk home. While that quotidian turns treacherous and harrowing, the Belhar-based artist’s approach reminds one more of repair and resilience.

As the artist maintains, ‘the Afrofuturistic approach acts as a powerful counter-narrative to despair.. reframing the communities affected as living examples of agency and innovation.’

Shandu ‘s work draws from political oversight and the continual invisibilising of poverty in Cape Town. Referencing the perpetual flooding and loss of life in spaces that working class people are forced to inhabit, lit sculptures of umbrellas and a rich soundscape mock the lack of protection and shelter while forced to live above a swamp.

The recurring quality of the sculptural light objects refer to the inaction by Cape Town municipality to address this, leaving this experience of repetitive flooding a solitary, subjective, and unending event. Disarmingly, the light in Ronald Abdou and Zach Stewart’s Burning, emanates from a burning car. The tongue-in-cheek installation, however, is concerned more with the subjective viewing of calamity in the digital age. Multiple viewing points designed as social media frames reference how a simple swipe may extinguish the fire and the catastrophe, inviting empathy and easy detachment at the same time.

Re-commissioned 20 years after its appearance at the Spier Contemporary, Thando Mama’s 1994 (I) (Revisited) provides a review of South Africa's past, present and future. Using video, sound and sculpture, Mama’s work inspires reflection and assessment of these 32 years of democracy.

Going even further back in history to the 17^th Century, Strijdom van der Merwe provides acerbic, curatorial relief. Artifacts reconstructs an archaeological dig, featuring Dutch ceramics replete with the offensive VOC design peeping through the earth. Until one looks closer and through the use of skilful light and design, the artist evokes indigenous San and Khoe forms. Burials and archives take on other meanings.

And to complete this group of works that considers history and our ongoing perceptions of memory and the present with a combination of despair and resignation, Joe Turpin’s neon work Eish! provides a punctuation mark of sorts. Using the colours of the South African flag this precise, deceptively simple work is playful, world-weary, sympathetic and self-conscious all at the same time.

Subjectivities emanating from the sacred abound in the exhibition. Similar in form though not in purport to Turpin, Mawande ka Zenzile’s Ubugqi comprises pure white light, forming the word Ubugqi that burns powerfully, inspiring spiritual pause.

The work is grounded in indigenous Southern African mysticism and invites the sacred in, and, according to the artist, an encouragement to get out of one’s head, stop thinking ‘what does this mean’, and fully experience a moment.

Searching for the sacred in darkness, Safe in the Shadows by Qondiswa James, Nathalie Ponlot, Themba Stewart and Jonathan O’Hear provides a counterpoint.

The interactive installation reclaims darkness as sanctuary. Submerged cairns – made of stone, resin, and salvaged remnants – are linked by root-like conduits that echo mycelial threads and neural pathways. Each cairn shelters a different interior ecology: roots, light, a two-way mirror, a tablet.

Drawing from ancestral traditions with a mixture of objects, the work challenges the equation of light as safety and darkness as danger. The artists propose ‘an ethics of shadow: a resistance to compulsory visibility and memory transmitted beyond surveillance’.

In a similar vein, the utterly compelling audio-visual work Onthou by Sam ‘/XAM’ Fortuin records a recurring dream that begins and ends on the edge of a kelp forest. The sound of the bow accompanies a dream walker in pursuit of ancestral dreamscapes. But this is no pastoral romanticism. Set alongside the Taal Monument and the infamous Rhodes Memorial, Onthou becomes a soft, gentle yet fierce reminder of the importance of reclamation and repair.

The archive as a fecund prompt for threading together spirit and memory also saturates Wezile Harmans Endlovini as a Form of Archive. This work is no romantic hearkening after a past long gone. Foregrounding the pre-eminence of the oral histories of residents over inaccurate state documents, this disarmingly gentle and haunting work wants us to look more closely at the act of Ukundlova, a reference to informal land identification and occupation.

Built from found objects – silk, mutton cloth, thread and wood – the overwhelming sense of the spiritual invokes a shelter and memory site, a space where orality, remembering and owning the authority of lived experience over official narrative transforms spiritual survival into resistance.

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Perceptions of the environment

Florian Bach believes we need to look deeply at what is at stake in our fading worlds. In their installation Spill, industrial lighting sucks out colour and nuance and places under what feels like a microscope, a riverbank at risk.

Surveillance and close observation takes away the seductively mindless comfort of nature. In its place and viewed from above, it is a piece of an unmistakably soon-to-be wasteland that cannot rest, that is to be controlled to be preserved, that needs watching – and here the audience become co-conspirators – for fear of its imminent extinction.

Noa Hall takes a sturdy if a softer edged view, in Sentinel, which presents itself as a documentary, following the Braamfontein Spruit juxtaposed with a shifting industrial grid.

Transitioning through urban and suburban space, the lingering stillness and slow pans, produce instead a lyrical, if melancholic visual essay. Geometry, reflection and shadow transform pragmatic structures into spectral forms, and becomes a meditation on impermanence.

Kunye Colab’s work invites the human and a more optimistic touch into this relationship with the natural environment. The interactive Lumen Vitae (Light of Life) considers the human frame in relation to the cosmos.

Two circles of light, a large one referencing the blazing sun, a smaller one, a living cell, invite us to consider another kind of humbling geometry – the human body and the cosmos, nuclei and galaxies – spirals that bind.

A solitary cone invites interaction. Speaking through it, sound waves affect and activate the smaller circle of light suggesting a possibility for a delicate shift on a cellular level encased as it is in an unwavering, unmoveable larger form.

Paul Thabo Nhlapo’s Fiddlearth is all about perceptions and subjectivities – of change, shifts and movement. Purposeful and astute animation speaks of transience, dissolution, recalibration and evolution.

The work is an invitation in the artist's words ‘to pause and reflect how even in the face of struggle and change, creativity offers a space for healing and collective understanding.’

Beginning with a graphic interplay between colonial and real maps, demonstrating how perceptions can be manufactured, Fiddlearth is a precursor to a range of other works that invite us to dive into our subjective selves and take a closer look at the seemingly commonplace and mundane.

Renée Holleman provides an extraordinary and robust retake on weeds as subject. In Under the Overgrowth is No Small Measure Of Sunlight, weeds which Holleman calls ‘nature’s pioneers… first responders preventing erosion, remediating soils, and providing food and shelter for insects and animals’ moves from outlying pests to exemplary saviours.

Delicate, detailed and fragile miniature structures placed on an open land, lie bare for a takeover. Not without some mischievous irony, as well as finding holes in our commonplace perceptions, Holleman draws our attention to the inclusive nature of biodiversity – how queering the binary may actually enable unpredictable rewards.

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Subjectivities provide beauty, rest and restlessness

Chelsea Holland explores haunting beauty in The Grey Area in the Cape Winelands. The result of an intricate live feedback nodal network system, motion design software simulates dust particles moving in a light breeze.

Light in an invisible cube placed in front of a camera, makes visible a stirringly beautiful, colourful interaction of the particles. This delicate play between the visible and the invisible invites a subtle immersion in and perception of material and intangible worlds.

Archaeologist and architect, Stephen van den Heever and Amy Leibbrandt, round all of these soft-lensed subjectivities with a moment of rest.

Rest for them is active, not a waste of time but a necessary act of radical self-love. Positioned between the trees near the Eerste Rivier, their installation is specifically titled, A moment of rest for you and those who can't’. While an invitation to the audience to rest after viewing the exhibition, the artists also want to invoke people living ‘in informal settlements, war and famine’ – for whom rest remains elusive and tenuous.

Finally, Kerim Seiler’s installation Pneuma, somnambule (Restless Spirit) speaks of subjectivities that never cease wandering and searching. Seiler is pre-occupied with the natural environment as mobile and shifting.

Single beams carrying blinking fluorescent lights come together as a monument, partially visible, interacting with the environment, illuminating and obscuring at once, all in slow motion. It is a poetic work on the transience and shape-shifting quality of our environment, echoing several works that have come before, but also transience of perception itself.

This year’s work provokes deep consideration, softness in form and a modest take on large scale emergencies and urgencies. Immersive and compelling, artists seem to be looking for less bombastic ways of engaging audiences.

This collection of work allows for a nuanced walk though light in myriad forms. The artists provide moments to regale the senses and catch one's breath.

It is a humane Spier 2026, and we hope the works provide cause for connection with fellow viewers, navigating darkened landscapes to happen upon these beacons of meaning and poetry.

We trust too that these perceptions will stay with you and provide fleeting companionship as you seek home, solace and rest.