The Plot Gallery
09.12 - 13.02.2022
The hurried migration into virtuality over the past two years has inevitably forged new and unusual forms of online intimacy. Phokeng Setai’s latest exhibition makes a study of this telematic closeness and the crisis conditions that precipitate it. ‘This stays between you and me’ (2021) is the culmination of the curator’s extensive engagement with the Cape Town-based Scheryn Art Collection and takes the form of an interactive virtual tour. For better or worse, the exhibition draws out how curatorial concerns of intimacy and space might translate from the irl gallery to the online exhibition.
The curator’s project, which aligns neatly with the vision of The Plot Gallery as well, attempts to extend some of the principles of spatial design to virtual exhibition making. The field of spatial practice, which responds to human geography in creative ways, has become one of the most prominent aesthetic traditions in contemporary South Africa. Practitioners like Sumayya Vally, Huda Tayob and Ilze Wolff continue to experiment with lateral solutions to South Africa’s vexing spatial question. Setai, in turn, asks if such practices might also be applicable to digital space. For ‘This stays between you and me,’ six virtual rooms were constructed for viewers to explore, each with an accompanying ambient audio track. The artworks that Setai pulled from the Scheryn Art Collection are contained within four of these simulated chambers, while a further two enclose the viewer in a hall of mirrors that reflects only the room itself. There are notably no doorways in or out of the displays. Instead, they can be accessed via a CCTV camera link, as if the exhibition is being peeped at, or surveilled, from a distance.
It is worth considering this simulated architecture upfront, not only because it is the exhibition’s primary gimmick, but also because the means of encounter is precisely the subject of Setai’s experimentation. The project is an attempt to make the Scheryn Art Collection more accessible to the public during the pandemic; to bring the collection closer to us, as it were. Setai takes this challenge as his “curatorial impetus.” However, the virtual encounter we are presented with ultimately falls short. The impulse to construct a skeuomorphic representation of ‘meatspace’ is an entirely reasonable one, but it seldom makes for a compelling aesthetic experience or an intuitive interface. It is almost an art historical heuristic to say that the techniques native to a new medium are more effective than those transposed from an older form. Similarly, the most striking presentations of art online seem to attend to the unique qualities of the screen, rather than reconstructing an analogue gallery experience. At least until reality and virtuality are closer to a one-to-one likeness, the principles of spatial and digital design will remain markedly distinct.
- Georgina Gratrix, Mr Nice to Meet You, 2011.
- Penny Siopis, Cake, 1984.
- Cameron Platter, Stain (Orange Rain), 2014.
However, Setai’s selection of artworks is engrossing enough that the interface soon becomes a secondary concern. A quintessential Georgina Gratrix countenance, titled Mr Nice to Meet You (2011), greets the viewer in the first lobby. The warm welcome is rather at odds with its austere environment, but it begins to make more sense alongside the adjacent pieces. The confectionary impasto of the Gratrix figure rhymes explicitly with Penny Siopis’s Cake (1984) and comes to a head in Cameron Platter’s collage work, which addresses the collective gluttony of our online media consumption. The tension between Setai’s post-internet sensibility and the African Modernist tenor of the Scheryn Art Collection is energising and allows for numerous lines of inquiry to be suspended within a capacious art historical scope. The curator’s opening salvo is remarkably tactile and inviting as well, drawing the viewer into the strange simulation with relative ease.
An enormous Deborah Poynton looms upon entering the second room. It is tricky to judge the scale of the pieces at times, but they appear to be proportionate to the human figures positioned in front of them. Each work can also be enlarged and viewed on a separate page. Poynton’s Interior with Red Tub (1998) studies how reality scales onto the painted surface as well. Ernest Mancoba and Zander Blom murky the representational waters even further, before an Admire Kamudzengerere monotype sees the artist scouring his own self-portrait in search of his deceased father’s image. These paintings speak to some of the animating questions behind Setai’s curatorship, most notably regarding online simulacra and how depth can be rendered on a flat screen. Dineo Seshee Bopape’s uncontested metaphor (2013) focuses more explicitly on geometry and adds to the unusual shape of the experience. Her description of the rectangle as “a chasm, or a hole” captures something of the abyssal quality of Setai’s virtual mirrors.
The paintings become sparser, perhaps also darker, as the tour continues. The penultimate work is an overripe Johannes Phokela panel about vandalism and sin, before Wopko Jensma’s pitch black watercolours guide us into an obscure fifth chamber that is entirely artless. The viewer is dropped into what looks like an underground parking lot full of stray museumgoers. True to the South African milieu to which Setai responds, sharing physical space does not translate to any meaningful closeness here. It is a compelling plot twist that adds dimension to the curator’s take on what online space feels like right now. It is an “ambivalent intimacy” that he tries to evoke and he largely succeeds in doing so. The virtual gallery he has built seems to mirror the “complex rituals of holding space within a dimension of social panic” outlined in the curatorial statement. The space he holds for the viewer is an equally (and appropriately) disorienting one.