The deeper meanings of space and place

Shelter is one of our basic needs for survival as human beings — it has been hot-wired into our genetics over aeons. The new group exhibition at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF), Structures, subtly calls into question the ideas we have about the structures we make, occupy and are subject to. It chips away at the façade of what structures represent for us, to reveal layers of meaning around the questions of space, place and race.

The exhibition includes works by artists, thinkers and architects whose focus has been on the Global South. It is loosely divided into three sections — situatedness, infrastructures and typologies, each including works that directly address traditional architecture and others that approach the idea of structures more poetically.

Each of these sections is in conversation with the other. Additionally, the artworks in each section speak to the overall theme and other works in the exhibition as well. SA architectural historian and lecturer Huda Tayob refers to an interconnected network in her curriculum that has been an important influence on the exhibition. Tayob asks, “What counts as ‘architecture’ and where do we find it?” For her, architecture exists not only in the physical structures that people make but also in how places are immortalised through art.

“Our argument for understanding architecture in part through other disciplines is guided by an interest in that which is silenced in the architectural archive,” Tayob said “We ask students to pay attention to those spaces, practices and subjects that are typically erased when lineages are constructed, or never considered in the first place.”

Some of the works selected and commissioned by JCAF’s executive director and curator of the exhibition, Clive Kellner, have informed how contemporary architecture is thought of and practised, especially in the Global South.

Photographer Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Structures of Survival (2022) has helped bring informal settlements into conversations about architecture on the African continent. For this exhibition, eight photographs show wooden poles jutting out of the ground and others running horizontally on top of them, some slanted and others covered either partially or entirely by corrugated iron sheets. These are the skeletons of shacks in various states of repair, photographed against the stark Namib Dessert in the background.

Renowned visual artist Kader Attia’s low, large, circular sculpture, two portraits and a copy of a Unesco World Heritage certificate take up the entrance to the exhibition. Attia’s Untitled (Ghardaïa) includes a sculpture of the Algerian city on a hill, with buildings cascading down its gentle slope. It is made entirely of couscous. With time, the water and other bonding agents keeping the sculpture intact will dry and begin to crumble.

This is the most poignant question that the exhibition poses its viewers: How permanent is the sturdiness of the structures that surround us? And will the ideas behind those structures withstand their inevitable erosion with time?

This comes close to getting answered with PN 28 “Nas Quebradas” by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica. This sculpture is made up of panels that create a walkway that ascends one way and descends around a corner. The walkway is filled with stones and you’re encouraged to become a participant in the work, walking through it, making the sound of footsteps on gravel and inevitably degrading the work by moving the stones as you walk.

The thread of precarity runs throughout the exhibition. It hits home with Dinokana, however. The sound installation by artist collaborative MADEYOULOOK was the sole artwork representing SA at the 2024 Venice Biennale and is on show for the first time in the country. Molemo Moiloa, one half of Madeyoulook, said “We are really excited to bring it home. We don’t often get to show in SA. We really make our work from this place and for this place, so it’s an incredible gift to be able to share it.”

The work comprises a 20-minute sound installation that is a result of seven years of research on the Bahurutshe and Bakone people who lived in the north of SA. Stories of their continued displacement over generations, what is lost and gained and changes shape in that displacement, form the gist of the work.

But it is not the wars, colonisation and apartheid that are the centre of this work, but what can flourish thereafter. As a metaphor, Dinokana features a curtain of dried-out resurrection plants that, when exposed to water, would transform into green plants again.

To search for and create shelter is innate to all human beings. But the idea of structure in this exhibition goes beyond the physical, and into the structures that govern our lives. To commit to the creation of a structure, whether physical or conceptual, one has to believe that that structure will exist at least long enough to serve its purpose. Historically, the majority of South Africans have not had sturdy ground on which to build physical, psychological, societal and other structures, knowing that these might be razed at the whims of those in power. This exhibition instils a little hope in the exercise of building structure for a world yet to be fully formed.