The sketchbook I made for this project was produced in my spare time on a research trip into the arid desert of the South African province of the Northern Cape, a flat landscape of vivid red sand, umbrella-shaped thorn trees, and intensely blue sky. There hasn’t been much opportunity in the last year to play visually, so the main rule I gave myself whilst making this sketchbook was not to take anything too seriously. Each double-page is based on something that happened during the five-week trip: finding strange seeds outside my door one day after a fierce wind; having an HIV test in solidarity with some friends at a local hospital; my sister Ingrid coming from Cape Town to visit for a weekend.
Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa
I am an artist and teacher, with an interest in history, and ecological philosophy. In the mid-90’s I withdrew from the artworld for a decade to focus on setting up radical cultural groups, the best-known of which are the Suburbanists. Over the last few years I have begun working within the artworld again. My new work re-imagines historical contacts between Africans and Europeans, re-thinking these twin inheritances as someone who was born in the 1960s during the height of apartheid. My work has been exhibited on many occasions, including on the Venice Biennale and on the Havana Biennial, and in many venues, including at Kiasma in Helsinki, at the Iziko South African National Gallery, and at the National Ethnographic Museum in the Netherlands.
