Vex & Silence
A group Exhibition curated by Priest
Date: 5 April 2018 – 25 April
142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Rosebank, JHB
Participating Artists:
Mxolisi Vusimuzi Beauchamp
Ilené Bothma
Cobus Haupt
Willemien de Villiers
Rhett Martyn
Susan Opperman
Wilhelm Saayman
Christopher Steenkamp
“Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born. The home of our fathers was that African highland reaching north from the Cape to the Lakes of the Nile. Here we came about — slowly, ever so slowly — on a sky-swept savannah glowing with menace.”
―Robert Ardrey
It was Foucault that proclaimed ‘the death of man’ and of the humanist project. The proclamation, a critique of a collective human voice, hegemonic and anthropocentric with the human and ‘his’ ideals placed squarely at the centre of the Universe, a Universal measure and a Universal mode. This “allegedly universal ‘Man’, in fact, is masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a recognized polity” (Irigaray 1985; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). It is here, in the disillusionment and plurality of post-humanist voices that this exhibition has found itself, or better, aims to lose the narrow definitions of the ‘self’.
