The guests are eating cake.
“This icing is remarkably light,” says the other M. He is wearing a pink shirt the colour of my cranberry cocktail.
“And not ridiculously sweet,” G adds. He is wearing a sheet as a toga in honour of the night’s theme, spring by way of Botticelli’s Primavera.
On Monday October 3rd, the University of Cape Town reopened. It had been shut down for two weeks due to ongoing student protests. United under the banner of Fees Must Fall, the students protested for free tertiary education, a decolonized curriculum, and the return of students excluded during the previous year’s protests. They protested against the outsourcing of workers, against police brutality, and against institutional racism.
There is pleasure in fragments, a curious seduction. The invitation to fill in the blanks. Where fact ends fiction begins. It colours in the spaces, it sings in the voids. I give you only the objects, and their accompanying names, places, and dates, the sequence with which each object was exchanged, one for another. And the rest?
The call of a muezzin accompanies a commercial, a French pop hit from the 80s competes with a Christmas carol. The news begins. Five voices speak in unison, filling the space with their austere monologues. Reports of triumph or tragedy are retold five times, before the voices diverge with their own stories, their intrigues.
An understated and unannounced performance/gesture in an urban shopping mall by Lucienne Pallas Bestall and Sharné Macdonald, with contributions from Thuli Gamedze, Mitchell Gilbert, Anna Stielau, and an anonymous collector
If art is either ‘plagiarism or revolution’, the objects in Some Art History are resolutely the former – illustrating fictions more seductive than the real thing, a preference for reproductions and for mediated experiences.
The fragments presented in this exhibition cannot be flawlessly reassembled, the images of a whole (of a home) constituted are necessarily false – echoing rather than reflecting the original.
