“Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.”
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
“Experiences like this: they seem to accumulate over time, gathering like things in a bag, but the bag is your body, so that you feel like you are carrying more and more weight. The past becomes heavy. We all have different biographies of violence, entangled as they are with so many aspects of ourselves: things that happen because of how we are seen; and how we are not seen. You find a way of giving an account of what happens, of living with what happens.”
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
Bubblegum Gallery and Hallmark House proudly present GAMES NIGHT, a solo exhibition by Dinika Govender.
We all have different yet entangled biographies of violence that have seeped into our making. History is not an abstract entity that haunts unnamed and unchartered territories outside us. It is forever present in, on and with us—inscribed in hieroglyphs of racialised and gendered assemblages—onto our bodies, into our languages, our relational tapestries, and into our experiences of the world. “When did you begin to put the pieces together? Perhaps when you put the pieces back together you are putting yourself back together.” (Ahmed, 2017).
These inherited Historical and socio-cultural scripts tell us something about the ways in which we have been made, and unmade. They are ever-present, unwelcome, (dangerous) strangers, occupying the most intimate rooms in our homes and hearts. It is in this space—from the syntax imparted through, and by these scripts and from memories lingering beneath the skin’s surface—that emerging artist Dinika Govender’s exhibition GAMES NIGHT takes shape.
I’m exploring and examining systems of power through the lens of the most intimate parts of our lives: love, sex, relationships, and everyday culture.
Why do we love the way we love? Why are we the way we are?
In GAMES NIGHT, I look at some of the “scripts” we operate everyday relationships with – the games we tend to play with each other in service of The Good Life Industrial Complex – and I’m asking us, me included, to take a long, hard look at ourselves and the cultures we participate in.
Govender’s GAMES NIGHT is sectioned into three games/parts. TRUTH OR TRUTH™: a take on classic games of strategic flexing – Truth or Dare (or Truth, Dare, Command) and 21 Questions. PICTIONARish: a slight twist on the old guessing game, Pictionary, and 7 MINUTES IN HE(LL)AVEN: a fabulated space to take a breath, steal a moment of privacy, and meditate on conceptions of love as figured by Hollywood. The exhibition’s conceptual and embodied intellectual reckoning also unfolds in the event of the experience itself. Here, the audience—and their subjective memories and experiences of love, desire, intimacy, and sex—become a companion in its making.
Percolating beneath the work’s material surface is a turning towards what is difficult. In thinking through, and with associations—piled up like bricks in our bodies, hearts, and psyches—as a type of grammar which places, shapes, and orients us in the world. In asking: where these associations we have piled up like bricks in relation to love, have come from and what have they taught us about our relational existence to love and the claim we have on it?
‘Games Night’ is about trying to turn our internal scripts—inner dialogues that have been building, going on for as long as any of us have been going on—but the kind of scripts that we often receive from the time that we are born, depending on gender, class, region, we’re handed these scripts that tell us how to be. Which path to set off on, to live a life that will be deemed socially acceptable or desirable. The in brackets questions are always “to whom and in service of what?”.
Here is a body of work, a body in work and words, a reckoning with memory, and with those experiences that pull us apart—weighed down by feelings we’re prone to run from, and “animated by the everyday: the detail of an encounter, an incident, a happening, flashing like in-sight.”
About the Artist
Dinika Govender is an emerging multimedia artist. With a multimedia background and no formal visual arts training, her practice is conceptual and experimental, geared at creating spaces that invite us to be “gently re-sensitised – to take a hard look at our patterns of thought, the cultures we participate in, and the systems we (often unwittingly) perpetuate.”
Currently based in Johannesburg, her creative practice sees macro themes of gender/race/colonial legacy/class/ecocide/and cultural imagination, rub up against internal themes of identity self-love/community/assimilation/and sheer survival.
Exhibition Info
Where: Hallmark House
Address: 54 Siemert Road
Time: 17:00 – 20:00
When: Saturday 1 April 2023
To book a viewing please email: info@bubblegumclub.co.za
