POOL, Green Point Park
11.04 - 11.05.2024

In the week leading up to Bella Knemeyer and Amy Watson’s latest show at POOL, titled Things take time, time takes things, the International Union of Geological Sciences was in the news. The keepers of Earth’s time scale reportedly voted against the declaration of the Anthropocene epoch, which naturally caused a stir. I tried to wrap my head around the world-historical implications of the decision, but the more I read, the more my sense of scale seemed to warp and skew. I was left puzzling over how much time it takes, what time has taken and how to take time.

Thankfully I came across this exhibition in the midst of doomscrolling about geological time. Things take time at once reflects the strangeness of our time while also trying to counteract the acceleration and compression that characterises it. We live in squashed time; an abbreviated age of directness, presence and immediacy. The cost of same-day-shipping-being-in-the-moment-on-demand is an inconvenient middle that could be thought of as the protagonist of this exhibition. Watson and Knemeyer are great interlocutors for thinking through the middle, the space of mediation, which our epoch prefers to wish away.

The field of contemporary art accommodates plenty of work about the artistic process (the middle of artistic production), but mediation is seldom the subject of this kind of work. Most often it is about the unmediated encounter between an artist and their own navel. What feels different about Knemeyer and Watson’s approach is the quality of attention that is paid to the intermediary stretch. They foreground the non-alignment within the whole, the hitch, the recalibration. These awkward moments interrupt the flow of what literary critic Anna Kornbluh describes, in her latest book from Verso, as “immediacy style,” the predominant aesthetic orientation of so-called “too late capitalism.” Where immediacy style elides mediation in favour of one-to-one immersion and sheerness, Things take time lingers in the absences and interruptions along the way.

Some of these absences felt pretty real. Things take time took shape over the course of a month and the impression I am reporting on is only partial. There’s a Jody Paulsen piece I never got to see, additional programming I missed out on and a Vusumzi Nkomo residency that was only beginning to yield new ideas. About halfway into his residency, Nkomo presented some groundwork, which included a sonic lecture in the style of his performances with Dead Symbols. Music and theory are perpetually in conflict in Nkomo’s practice, continually sublating and cutting into one another. His lecture at POOL instigated further antagonism and dissonance, but the performance was admittedly preliminary. The basic curatorial principle of Things take time boils down to “allowing artworks to reveal themselves durationally, and through interruption.” In other words, the incompleteness is a feature. 

Knemeyer even lamented the harmony of colour within the exhibition, offset only by Mitchell Messina’s Noon Gun, suggesting, once more, keen attention to the moment that disrupts the cohesion or seamlessness of an encounter. Messina’s video stands out like a sore thumb and not only because it pushes against the predominance of stone, amber and green. It is by far the most awkward piece in the programme and Messina is the master of awkwardness. Without his contribution, the show could easily have felt too tasteful for its own good. Noon Gun imagines a fictional Cape Town terrorised by the titular canon, which seeks out and kills one innocent citizen every day. The silliness is played dead straight and Messina strikes an unlikely balance between humour and dread. He’s also good at thinking laterally about the form of projection itself and, in this, incorporates a circle drifting across the floor pretending to be a scope scouring the city bowl. Even its physical location, off to the side in the screening room, positions Noon Gun as the outlier that keeps the rest of the exhibition in place.

The most striking and conspicuously successful work is Amy Rusch’s the Wind inscribes ‘the Breath of all that is Alive.’ Rusch’s textile centrepiece is made of nylon spinnaker cloth, a heavy paperlike material that retains folds and creases for a short period of time. During the process of making it, Rusch would leave the cloth out in the wind and then trace over the disturbances left on the material. A detailed log book also accompanies the piece, including dates, times, temperatures and coordinates, as well as subjective impressions of the particular geological moment she’s documenting. The perceived immediacy of a gust of wind is stretched out and rendered longhand.

The wind is an active agent in Things take time. It animates and/or disrupts a number of works. I like how Jonah Sack’s “weather dependent” kinetic sculptures, Kites and Hand Clap Flags, avow their incompleteness and dependence on the wind as a material. Inga Somdyala’s red oxide sale, titled The Deep History; The Long Past VIII, also billows when the door is open to the northwester. At sunset, the twilight refracts through Somdyala’s cloth, casting the room in a shade of ochre. The open-endedness of Things take time happily allows the outside in. Nothing is sealed off; there is always room left for contingency. 

Nolan Oswald Dennis’ interference station i provides another detour and I enjoyed where it took me. Here again, something is interfering with the transmission; a disturbance along the way. Through headphones plugged into a mounted iPhone, two voices read from A Negro Explorer at the North Pole by Matthew A. Henson and An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie, although the voices are slightly out of sync. This uncanny doubling of the voice provides an interesting parallax view of the texts. Paired with the spacy psych-rock guitars that bookend each recording and a diagram of Dennis’ intricate cosmology, interference station i turns out to be an engrossing exercise in genre. It takes you somewhere else for a while.

While I’ve favoured horizontality here, you could also trace the exhibition along a vertical axis. Maja Marx’s Longhand, another highlight, crowns the exhibition above the entrance before the heaviness of Dineo Seshee Bopape’s unfired brick installations draws your attention to the floor. Bopape’s work invites us to “imagine there were no fences” and I was unsure of where to situate this sentiment within an exhibition so concerned with confronting and incorporating obstacles, rather than trying to overcome them. I appreciate the we-are-the-world universalism that Bopape is reaching for, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. At eye-level, thato makatu’s screenprints leave the impression of a floorplan that refers to a paper sculpture nearby. makatu’s contribution felt slight, but managed to occupy its corner rather elegantly.

Even within the gappy system that Knemeyer and Watson have constructed, you still get a real sense of relation between the works. In fact, it is precisely because of these mediating gaps that any kind of relation is possible. Most of the pieces were produced in the gallery space alongside the other artists and it shows. You can feel the works looking over their shoulder at one another, reaching across the room, rhyming and disagreeing. Instead of providing an immediate, immersive enjoyment, Things takes time favours the displaced enjoyment of a metaphor. It is not a resolved experience, but one that lingers and breathes instead.