Constitution Hill
17.03 - 25.03.2023
Kamil Hassim’s installation, Event Horizon, takes place at the site known as ‘Number Four.’ Completed in 1902 and in use until 1983, Number Four, at the racially segregated Old Fort Prison Complex (now Constitution Hill) housed long term black male prisoners under horrifying conditions. Robert Sobukwe survived Number Four, as did the infamous historic gang leader Mzuzephi ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula. While the space today may serve the interests of our thriving memorial industrial complex, unchanged realities of punitive and inhumane incarceration in contemporary South Africa render it part of a living landscape of trauma and violence.
Event Horizon, an installation of light prisms, is viewable in the eeriness of night at Number Four, its rays further emphasised by the artist’s introduction of manufactured mist. An event horizon describes the edge of a black hole, long thought to be “the point of no return.”1Interestingly, in recent years, scientists have become close to resolving what was long understood as the problem of the “information paradox.” This is the baffling combination of the following factors: the scientific law that that information/matter cannot disappear; that no information makes it out after crossing an event horizon, and that black holes eventually lose mass from the ejection of information-less radiation, and disappear. The question of what happens to the information that is pulled in by black holes may soon have a less paradoxical answer: that a black hole is not exactly a point of no return (more so a slow, and very piecemeal return, particle by particle.) Curated by Bulumko Mbete, the project consists of an echoing light dialogue between two reflective stations. A torch placed on a plinth has its light path manipulated as it travels through lenses placed in front of it and at an opposite station some metres away. The two stations reflect light back and forth at each other endlessly, a diffraction grating placed at one end returning the light back in several colourful beams that appear and disappear according to one’s position in the room.
Kamil Hassim, Event Horizon, 2023. Photo courtesy of Reza Kota.
For the late artist and philosopher Selby Mvusi, perception is the result of specific relations between a series of changing components.2Selby Mvusi, “Visual Perception,” in Selby Mvusi: To Fly with the North Bird South, edited by Elza Miles (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2015), 12–29. In his 1967 essay Visual Perception, Mvusi (finding future resonance in Hassim’s work) explores perception’s negotiation between factors like time, space, light, object position, the ‘field’ beyond the perception event, optical functionality — and even the behaviour of particles.3Mvusi, “Visual Perception,” 27. Each of these is unstable, governed, in some cases, by unknown parameters. Mvusi shows, for instance, that the West’s construction of human eyesight assumed incorrect limits on its capacity to observe speed and clarity. He explains that the stroboscope’s invention showed (westerners) that rock paintings by (non-specified) Southern African Indigenous groups accurately described the foot patterns of full-speed running buck.4Mvusi, “Visual Perception,” 12. One is left to speculate to some degree as to who Mvusi is referring to, but it seems likely to be Khoi and San groups, who are well known for their rock paintings. With western science having limited its conceptual capacity of eyesight, it was unaware that the naked eye could be trained towards such advanced tracking.5Mvusi, “Visual Perception,” 12. Herein, Mvusi shows that our assumption of what constitutes ‘perfect vision’ is itself a construct, which, by my extension, could be argued to render much of the world imperceptible, no matter how we may shift our relation to it.
Should we apply Mvusi’s observations practically, perceiving the world differently would thus not only be about relational shift, or looking from a different angle. It would seem to be a physical demand, including strength and endurance training of the senses beyond the limits of dominant belief systems. A highly disciplined, highly imaginative practice whose premise is that the sensory upper limits we have been taught — twenty-twenty vision, say — are a lie, and likely formulated historically according to ideal functionality of labouring bodies.
Thus, if time and space are in motion, if the capacity of eyesight remains wrongly formulated, and if light prisms act differently depending on how we position ourselves, then perception must be said to be chaotic on all fronts! The media statement for Event Horizon talks about how the phenomenon of prismatic light’s changing observability highlights a “connection… between a fundamental concept in theoretical physics, and a foundational idea in many indigenous cosmologies: that the act of observing the universe is in itself an act of creation because information and events exist in relation to one another.”
Kamil Hassim, Event Horizon, 2023. Photo courtesy of Shen Scott.
While such claims are interesting, they leave me uncomfortably curious. The term “indigenous” encompasses hundreds of thousands of years of disparate, diverse, and continually changing lifestyles and traditions of many billions of people who have lived, and live, across the world. Its use in this case is unattached to place or people, something generally mirrored in the work’s slight aversion to particularity. The framework avoids the unavoidable nature of its installation site. It also avoids conceptual digging beyond the employment of (admittedly fascinating!) big scientific concepts and broad decolonial observations. But I would argue, embeddedness is interesting: a case in point here is that selecting a former colonial black prison to explore the politics of disappearance and black holes seems to organically open up a myriad of dialogues, not least the notion that punitive incarceration may itself represent a subject’s ‘event horizon’… Perhaps that example makes little sense to the work’s intent, but my question stands: without attachment to a place, history, or particular knowledge system, does the work inadvertently obfuscate the conversations it seeks to have about the effects of coloniality’s systemic manipulation of our perceptions?
On the other hand, the sharing of this instrument with the public in such an open and ambiguous way makes space for unique articulations of the experience it produces. What is clear is that the instrument itself elicits undeniable interest. On opening night, shadowy figures in the room gathered around, collectively struck into a weird, almost primordial state of wonderment, our hands reaching out to try to touch or grab these seemingly tangible streams of shining nothingness. Noses poked through beams of light, fingers made long shadows… It was a strange thing to witness; a playful, if slightly ominous affect moving us beyond the scientific principles Event Horizon put to work — into another place, a different vibe.
The “holographic principle,” another exploration of the project, is, in my mind, a hopeful theory. It posits that “all the information contained within a region of space can be encoded on its boundary.” In other words, the information beyond the event horizon of a black hole is not lost, but is re-formulated into two-dimensional space on its surface. By the way, I am completely baffled by this — both confused imagining the task of mathematically proving such a concept, and intoxicated by the poetic potential of a two-dimensional informatic universe.
Event Horizon rolls with the holographic principle, proposing that, while colonialism has violated and obscured cosmological worlds other than its mainstream, these other knowledge systems still exist in all manner of squashed states. In order to see them, we may require different observational and perceptive tactics — and Mvusi might argue, different observational and perceptive abilities.
Coloniality continues to place limits on the content of our perception, as well as on our perception-tools — our bodies. Event Horizon is in the draft process, an experiment in speculation and disciplinary merging, as much as it is a politicised exercise with light. Taking seriously its task of perspectival pedagogy, the work highlights an impetus for creative practices concerned with resisting the systems that threaten our perceptive potential.
Kamil Hassim, Event Horizon, 2023. Photo courtesy of the artist.
