The fourth and highly anticipated edition of the celebrated annual Spier Light Art opened on the 18th of March and runs until 18th of April 2022. It is an immersive experience best experienced at night presenting an evocative world of light, sound and video art at the historic Stellenbosch Wine Farm, co-curated by Jay Pather and Vaughn Sadie.
“We have used this opportunity during the global pandemic to look within, connect with loved ones and find joy in quiet moments of calm. But we have also sought ways to embrace the promises of the future. It would be rash not to reflect on what has happened to us all, but it must be tempered with forward-looking positivity. The artworks showcased at Spier Light Art 2022 do just that; they ask us to glance back while looking ahead, learning from the past as we stride into the future,” say the curators Jay Pather and Vaughn Sadie.
Taken from his opening address Jay Pather goes on to share more insights into some of the artists and their contributions to this year’s edition of Spier Light Art.
Pather notes that Spier Light Art is, “many different things to different people… those that arrive aware of the political discourses of land, decoloniality and the contested territory that the Winelands represent while still being a rambling home to this light art festival amongst many other expectations.
From the point of view of the artists, and how they answer to this range of expectations amounts to gestures of seduction and provocation, playfulness and sober reflection all of which comprise the nature and extent of the vast creative potential of our country.”
Pather continues, “…this is one of the few group exhibitions that starts with an open call… often reveals what is in the shifting consciousness of our society at that time, and the artist it produces – and this goes a long way to determining the overall exhibition… it is this core of art works derived from the open call that shifts markedly from year to year. And no matter how various and how different, each iteration does have a particular character.”
Relating to previous editions he comments, “Over the last two years artists have seemed to become more careful about interactive works… there is still exuberance and fascination with colour and form and landscape as well connecting with the political atmospheres of our time, but this is achieved mainly through looking and experiencing rather than touching and activating.
Carefulness and introspection emerge from elsewhere – light artworks are expensive to produce and maintain and indeed sustain in a month-long exhibition and outside in the open air subject to the vagaries of the weather, the topography of the farm as well as audiences.
There are so many considerations for artists working in this particular unique context, that given the added layer of a global pandemic this tentative unfolding is worth noting as a shift from the big and brassy ideas of three years ago.”
Elaborating on the approach to this year’s edition he adds, “As we emerge from hard lockdowns and seemingly moving to a space of living with the pandemic, we believe that the artworks this year, in turn, provide gentle and tentative ways around emergence. So in many respects, these works talk through a quiet unfolding, an unravelling, and a waking up.”
Pather highlights some of the featured works, “The true form of Hedwig Barry’s work Night Crumple on the Werf gets more visible as it gets darker, this emerging more fully at night is a gentle reversal of the expectation of opacity, invisibility and blindness in darkness.
Hedwig Barry, Night Crumple, 2022. Courtesy of the artist & Spier Light Art.
Lady Skollie and James Delaney’s Night Light draws us into a contemporary evocation of a totem, lit from the inside, like a column of fire around which we are meant to gather and what comes through is a fascinating reflection on history, illuminated shapes that emerge as calming and iridescent even as it references a deeply troubled past.
Lady Skollie and James Delaney, Night Light, 2022. Courtesy of the artist & Spier Light Art.
Seth Deacon’s Communion does something similar, revealing exquisite portraits of queer people who have been subjected to unspeakable violence. The artist positions light to offer a temple of reverence, where atmospheres of rich colour and transcendence gently emerges out of violence. In South Africa today, a sense of illumination and transcendence is hard-won.
Seth Deacon, Communion, 2022. Courtesy of the artist & Spier Light Art.
The magnificent Petrified by Blaukind and The Renderheads literally transport the participant into a petri dish, making them part of an experiment engaging them in a performative dance, oscillating between dystopian and utopian futures to Natalie Paneng’s My Secret Digital Garden. Quirky, complex and awkward, it is a work saturated in vivid imagery and colour producing an experience that’s transcendent and trippy.
Blaukind and The Renderheads (David Hecker, Alina Smith and Elzeth Calitz), Petrified, 2022. Courtesy of the artist & Spier Light Art.
Natalie Paneng, My Secret Digital Garden, 2022. Courtesy of the artist & Spier Light Art.
Natalie Paneng, My Secret Digital Garden, 2022. Courtesy of the artist & Spier Light Art.
The Ocean Wants You Back is an encounter in which Jen Valender playfully evokes existing and working at a precarious height, depicting workers cleaning the side of a building, celebrating calm confidence in the face of fragility and vulnerability and potentially going into free fall.
Jen Valender, The Ocean Wants You Back. Courtesy of the artist & Spier Light Art.
As the exhibition move across the stream to a more rustic part of the farm Pather continues, “On the bridge over the stream we walk through Nkosenathi Koela’s haunting sound sculptures and installation toward Lionel Mbayiwa’s work KUDZIVIRIRA MHENI – the work is a play on the welcome mat at the threshold of a home, this one is constructed with salt as a reference to the coarse salt thrown at the entrance of the house to ward off evil and protect it from danger. From here we encounter, in the vast landscape the work of two artists Lhola Amira and Buhlebezwe Siwani who take us through the complex and layered atmospheres of spirituality, land and home In Looking for Ghana and AmaHubo the isiZulu word for ceremonial song.”
Lionel Tazvitya Mbayiwa, KUDZIVIRIRA MHENI. Courtesy of the artist & Spier Light Art.
These and more works from Spier’s permanent collection will be on view from the 18th of March – 18th of April 2022. For more information, please visit Spier Light Art.
