04.02.23
Solo Exhibition at
Kalashnikovv Gallery,
Johannesburg

Exhibition Statement

For his solo exhibition Things appear and disappear the artist Johan Thom utilises the personal experience of loss to explore greater social issues of memory, violence, and death in a (South) African context. The artist presents a new series of artworks including a three-channel video installation, process-based drawings and a performative, sculptural installation.

The central sculptural installation features a brick and a bronze replica of a human skull. Both objects are mechanically automated to swing through the gallery space in a circular motion – the skull rotating clockwise and the brick rotating counterclockwise. The objects fill the room as they float through the air, nearly colliding as they pass each other. This formal conceit sets in motion a series of conceptual associations with the passing of time, civil and societal progress and the everpresent reality of violence and death in South Africa. Taking a cue from scholar and critic philosopher Achille Mbembe, Thom is interested in artistically exploring a non-linear understanding of time and extending it into the micro-space of the personal and the body. In this way the countless memories of loss, violence and trauma historically written into human bodies become a dormant repository of energy that may potentially be unleashed upon the world. Throughout the course of the exhibition Thom will enter the space of the sculptural installation as part of a series of live performances or ‘lesser miracles’.

Thom also presents a delicate series of process-based drawings featuring the human skull as primary subject matter. However, if death figures here it does so as part of a maelstrom of cosmic forces, materials and memories that all only momentarily congeal on the picture plane. The artist employs a broad range of mark-making techniques such as body prints, collage and drawn marks as well as the layering of multiple materials (including blackboard paint, soil, builders chalk, oxides, twigs and leaves and charcoal and burnt ashes). Together these layered surfaces and marks generate artistic renditions of the human skull that, from afar, appear near ethereal and ghostlike, much like X-rays. Upon closer inspection the countless layers and marks that comprise the image become highly visible and even coarse in their very materiality.

Finally, the artist presents a three-channel video installation detailing his performative interaction with three objects: a human skull, one of his late mother’s favourite dresses, and the skin of a Livingstone’s turaco bird dating from the year 1872. Thom states that, “One of my most vivid memories of my mother is a photograph of her as a small child somehow standing with both her feet on my grandfather’s outstretched left hand. Frozen in the moment she appears as if precariously balanced between the forces of gravity and light, youth (hers) and old age (that of my grandfather) and, finally, that of human care and joyful carelessness”. This photographic image now serves as the prompt for a more in-depth artistic investigation into the poetics and mnemonics of death and loss.