Blue Sequence

What is so clearly also at play in this work, expressed perhaps most poignantly in Dixie’s video work, with its sounds of inhalation and expiration, its use of umngqokolo throat singing by women in the Eastern Cape, its beeping and sighing ventilator, is an acute awareness of the frailty of the planet and the tenuousness of our place in it. Things are turned upside down, to be sure, and this body of work is a site of mourning, death and, in its most optimistic moments, regeneration. Perhaps the most haunting motif in Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things, is the arrival, traversal and departure of the car in the video. The depiction of twin headlights lighting up the dark, approaching as though home is being reached, is a gesture that is – almost unbearably – poetically wistful. The lights suggest a way through, an arrival, but also perpetual departure and loss.

The Dog in the Night: Christine Dixie’s Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things

Bronwyn Law-Viljoen