It’s Heritage Day weekend and Cape Town is on edge; squalls are coming off the ocean, and the streets are eerily quiet while people gear up for braais and World Cup Rugby. I spend the morning visiting two artists’ solo shows: Warren Maroon’s Well, There Goes That Dream at Everard Read and Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s 9 Hopkins at Southern Guild.

I have come to understand Warren Maroon’s practice as containing ‘rest energy’ – the tension of incomplete violence. By that, I mean the feeling precipitated by Rest Energy, the famous 1980 performance by Marina Abramović and Ulay. Abramović holds the bow and leans back; Ulay holds the arrow and leans back even further. The tension of potential violence is chilling to observe, even in retrospect, when it’s clear that no one was hurt in the making of the duo’s four-minute piece.

Warren Maroon, Between a rock and a hard place, 2021. Courtesy of Everard Read.

The most obvious comparison is Maroon’s Between a rock and a hard place (2021), in which two chairs are bound together by clamps with a glass interface, and two hammers are suspended from holes in the glass through which, were two people to sit on the chairs, they would speak. The difference, of course, is that the people are absent. And yet, the arrangement contains the same bone-chillingly silent, potential violence. His other works function in similar ways, but more obliquely. Lure (2022) is a Persian rug, intricately embedded with broken beer bottle glass. It’s the lacerated thought that makes the work so powerful. The same way that you imagine Abramović being pierced through the heart in Rest Energy, you imagine kneeling down on this carpet and bleeding.

The new show is about what it takes to survive violence, both the criminal violence (such as that which ravages the Cape Flats) and the many forms of violence imposed by the South African state in the past and the present. This is trodden territory, but Maroon’s gift is how, in his found, altered, fabricated objects, he creates a wincing tension, such that you feel it in your gut.

The artist is stretching his ideas tauter. The show opens with You Stole my Heart, a flower bed of rose bouquets across the gallery floor. The petals are meticulously made from paper, and the stems are fashioned from barbed wire. This is a sequel to his Geleentheid (2022), an axe with a handle covered in rose thorns, and it functions by collapsing the boundary between victim and perpetrator. There is only violence, and you will cut your palm whether you wield an axe or a rose. 

Warren Maroon, You Are Here, 2023. Courtesy of Everard Read.

Upstairs, there is You Are Here, six judge’s gavels stilt-walking across the gallery. Wooden dowels pierce the gavels, creating an angular scaffolding that holds them in precarious limbo, never delivering justice. On the wall, a clock deconstructed into three hands that go in contrary directions, along with a seatless chair slumped against the wall, amalgamate into a piece entitled Parliament. The tension is created between the freeze frames of the gavels, the non-time of the chair and the second hand going in one direction, while the minute hand goes in the other. Time is stretching, and something has to give. These works elevate rest energy beyond physical violence, which I think is the easy, if necessary, entry point to understanding Maroon’s work. Here, you feel the cruelty of the state’s banal, corrupted, bureaucratic violence.

That said, I find his works made of match sticks to be underwhelming, as they don’t reach the sheer sublimity of, say, the toothpick works of Chris Soal, even if the latter’s is missing some substance.

In comparison to Maroon’s tension, Bineshtarigh is all about compression. Prior to 9 Hopkins, Bineshtarigh’s work focused an Arabic-Afrikaans text that alluded to the violent erasure of creolised languages that developed amongst exiled and slave communities in the Cape Colony. By transliterating the language into illegible script, he compressed a complex history into mournful, evocative pages of an non-existent archive.

Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Panel Beaters Wall VI, 2023. Courtesy of Southern Guild.

Bineshtarigh’s new show is dedicated to the eponymous industrial property in Salt River that was previously a garment factory and now includes the artist’s studio and Desmond Tawodzera’s panel beating shop. The show memorialises a building that has been left to decay by the municipality and which is scheduled to be demolished and redeveloped as part of the gentrification of the wider neighbourhood. 

If walls could talk, then Bineshtarigh has developed a technique to tell their stories. He lathers glue onto the walls of the panel beaters, which are covered in the traces of industry and labour: oil, grit, spray paint, sweat, and scuff marks. Once dried, he peels the glue off, bringing the underlying surface and compositions with it.  

For example, Panel Beaters Wall IV captures the negative image of the action and labour of the workplace. There is the silhouette of a spray paint job and the peeling paint of wear and tear. The amorphous fades and light traces are the abstracted remains of the work done here. Hung in the gallery, it is a numinous memorial to honourable labour.

Bineshtarigh then makes his own gestural marks with ink and paint onto the walls and floor of his studio and repeats the extraction of the surfaces with his glue method. These works are part-graffiti, part-action painting. You sense that, by peeling the walls off themselves, Bineshtarigh is archiving the history that these buildings have witnessed: the rise and decline of the textile industry, the exploitation of labourers, the continued violence of gentrification, the time these buildings have spent empty, and finally, the artist’s own labour. He layers all these aspects and tightens the clamp. The whole situationist history of this building – and the suburb, and the city beyond – seems to be compressed into these walls like a photographer can compress time into an image via long exposure. 

Bineshtarigh is also concerned with various forms of violence, but similar to Maroon’s work, his work does not bleed. All the marks – inscribed, bleached, covered over and varnished – are incisions turned, under pressure, to the density of scar tissue. His achievement is making this scar tissue ceremonious, as if the works should be hung in a religious place. 

Indeed, coming away from these two exhibitions, I am struck by their shared solemnity, how they say so much with so little about this city and its past and present violence. Eloquent and affective, these, I think, are sophisticated memorials to this place’s Heritage. 

Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Studio Wall XII, 2023. Courtesy of Southern Guild.