The Silent Image

Written for Sanell Aggenbach on the occasion of her solo show, The Heart Has Many Rooms, at Everard Read, Johannesburg, July 2019.

“We are too often suspicious of silence, distrustful of its secrets. In its quiet emptiness, meaning is lost and found and never certain. There, in the ellipses written on a page, a rest between notes, a beat, a breath; there, in those pauses. Silence is never vacant; we imbue it with significance, with interpretations and speculations, and in this way, we give to silence the language it denies. ‘Something is always echoing in the space left by words unsaid,’ Susan Sontag wrote in Aesthetics of Silence (1982). To listen to silence is still to be listening, to be hearing something – if only the ringing in one’s ears, ‘if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations.’

Still, we seldom let silence be. We feel compelled to describe and understand the world in words, to delineate its meaning, define its significance. We give to experience the shape of sentences; we order it syntactically. What we might know by sight, we wish to understand, to confirm, in speech.”

View the full catalogue and accompanying essay here.