September 28, 2024 - October 04, 2024
Gallery of the University of Stellenbosch
The colour of Indigo, the colour used for a ‘blueprint’ permeates this exhibition. The architectural refences associated with a blueprint - a means by which architects draw out ‘a plan for the future’ becomes paradoxical in the context of disorder. The impression of a universe out of alignment as a result of the vicissitudes of theCovid-19 pandemic had resonances to plagues of the past. The long association of indigo with trade-routes alludes to the economic routes by which The Bubonic plague and the current pandemic have been spread.
In The Order of Things, the English translation of Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et le choses (1966), the first chapter, Las Meninas, examines the painting Las Meninas by Velásquez, painted in 1656. This essay, etched into copper plates, became the substrate from which a series of prints, artist’s books, a video, and veils have been developed. The text is variously disrupted through absences, gaps, and overlays. The disrupted text is an attempt to find a visual metaphor for the way in which an ordered world, grammar, has been rendered disordered, unreadable.
