Traces in the Still Air, an installation by Lerato Motaung transliterates the unseen space grief and loss occupy in the recesses of memory as a new identity is carooned. This is the first installation-based exhibition from the artist whose artistic practice continues to examine interplays between individual and collective stories and is centrally concerned with the personal experience.
In the installation of repurposed tyres, industrial chains and crushed bottles, 2020’s inaugural Emergent Art Prize winner recalls youthful innocence and how its once impassable virility becomes a labyrinthine-drove of ever present spectres. In his conception of the installation, the artist revisits his childhood playground Katlehong. Along with friends, he would frequently cross train-tracks to go frolic at an adjacent park whose swings the installation swings are modelled after.
The 33 tyres that make up part of Traces in the Still Air are cut into seats to make swings. They are suspended from the roof of the 13 Viljoen street warehouse in Lorentzville where the installation is exhibited. Some swings hang less than a few centimetres off the ground while others are anchored so high up they almost cling to the roof. A heap of broken glass bottles lies somewhat isolated in the midst of the tentatively playful renditions of childhood moments-cum-memories.
The park of Motaung’s youth has since been the Hlahatsi shopping centre. To actively engage memory and nostalgia often comes with the impulse to take reminiscence a step further as though residue were a locality to inhabit. This is not an entirely off-mark inclination as what has been will seldom vanish without a reminder of its sojourn. It remains as a fractal of a present. Memories of joy, grief, youth and all that has come and gone, are flickering vessels composed of tenuous reconfigurations collecting and adhering themselves to the makings of some yet to be realised self’s presence.
The artist considers the impossibility of living without loss and grief and, in a way, the gruesome impracticality of living behind perpetually rose-tinted glasses. Early joys and growing pains present quandary human experience as they mutually refuse time’s dismissals; insisting on a claim for their part in the forming of the man that is.
While the events that invoke grief come to pass as an inevitable consequence of time’s passage, their residue lingers as memory’s ether. The experience of loss and the concomitant sense of grief endured also intimates the fuller experience wherein tenderness, love, and the gentler apparitions of human existence too reside.
Through memory, loss and grief do not only evidence themselves, they provide witness to the joy, innocence and love that confirm and assure them. It is in this place of cumulative becoming that the installation meanders. It initially seems that a bias towards memories of joy and general mirth allows one to somehow tenant the potential risks posed by the present’s potential to shatter the composure of a temporal self.
Perhaps these memories carry the weight of grief, loss’ memory, as a sturdy hope that remains throughout ceaseless marooning of the past as necessitated by the self becoming. No memory really ever sits independently of another. The giving way of aversion to grief (as expounded by the piled shards of glass below), however, is always imminent as the composite nature of a full existence becomes self-evident. In this way grief is not relegated to being a stationary relic of time. In the conspiring way of time and memory’s dance with the present, we witness the complicity of all things in forming a basis for identit
From an artist largely known for his painterly and sculptural work, Traces In The Still Air cuts the look of a refreshing segway in the 33-year old artist’s ongoing practice. The exhibition runs until 30 November at 13 Viljoen street, Lorentzville, Johannesburg. It is open for viewing Tuesday – Saturday 10:00 – 16:00. Part of the exhibition schedule includes a panel discussion observing memory, loss and grief on the 26th of October at the exhibition site.
Inquiries regarding the exhibition may be addressed to Lerato Motaung on lrato431@gmail.com or Boitumelo Makousu on boitumelomakousu@gmail.com. Traces In The Still Air is made possible with support from THK Gallery, Nicholas Hlobo, Saki Zamxaka and Boitumelo Makousu (curator).
