National Arts Festival
20.06 - 30.06.2024

Polished bronze and silver, ornate figurines, ostentatious candelabras, and glass the colour of boiled sweets. Tucked away in the basement of Makhanda’s 1820 Settler’s Monument (still, like the local university, in the process of a name change), Stephané Conradie’s Wegwysers deur die Blinkuur is like a museum of trinkets. Under the ultraviolet glow of strategically placed black lights, the artist’s bric-a-brac sculptures sit like curious assemblages of South African household ornaments.

Conradie, winner of the 2023 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art, presented this body of work at the 2024 National Arts Festival as a continuation of her bricolage assemblages, and a consolidation of her longstanding research interests. The works, all listed as “mixed-media assemblages” appear almost like sporadic ornamentation in the gallery space. These are seemingly ordinary objects, plucked from side tables and living room display cabinets, but they are assembled here as refined sculptural objects – sentimental assemblages that hold myriad histories, narratives and values.

Stephané Conradie, Wegwysers deur die Blinkuur, 2024. Photography by Mark Wessels.

For the Namibian-born, Cape Town-based Conradie, these everyday objects drawn specifically from lower and working class South African households become devices with which we can examine value placement and meaning-making, embedded as they are in the legacies of South Africa’s history of colonialism, slavery, segregation, and apartheid.

Given the long history of forced removal, migration, and displacement in South Africa, entire communities of people were made to start over, building new lives for themselves and their families with only the possessions they took with them. In the absence of a home, be it a plot of land or a material structure, what does one leave behind or pass on to the next generation? These home décor items, then, become all the more valuable.

All of the sculptures in Wegwysers deur die Blinkuur are variations on this central theme. Each sculpture comprises a series of found objects – mostly metallic, glass, and ceramic – and largely retain their original form – an ashtray, a figurine, a candleholder, or a sweet bowl. Soldered and fixed together like this, they become divorced from their intended functions. Although arguably, most of the objects found in Conradie’s sculptures weren’t put to work as utilitarian objects to begin with. Rather, they remained well-dusted, polished and on display in the home – treasured objects intended to be passed down to future generations. It is here that Conradie’s interest lies.

Stephané Conradie, Wegwysers deur die Blinkuur, 2024. Photography by Mark Wessels.

Embedded in these cherished trinkets and ornaments is the story of a generation’s displacement and hardship, but also its sense of community and belonging. By collecting and reworking these objects into considered sculptural works, Conradie draws attention to a rich, creolised material culture and set of practices shaped by the effects of colonial extraction and division.

There is a collective sentimentality to the work, and perhaps an unavoidable nostalgia. This is not nostalgia in the sense of romanticising and yearning for the past, but rather after Svetlana Boym’s view of nostalgia, which is that it has less to do with the past and more to do with an increasingly vanishing present. There is a mourning, or an anxious attentiveness, in witnessing a particular period or moment coming to an end. Conradie knows this, too. For her, it is the blinkuur – the twilight – of a generation’s values and practices, ultimately inherited by the next. What to do with all of this history?   

Stephané Conradie, Wegwysers deur die Blinkuur, 2024. Photography by Mark Wessels.

“The elders of the home, while polishing the brass, are restless and confront their adult children, sensing their blinkuur has arrived: Who will inherit these brass pieces when they are gone?” reads the exhibition statement. “The holy book, medals, crockery and tea set, the painting, the cabinet? Who of the next generation will inherit their values, embedded in these items?”

Though her entangled sculptures are comprised of these charged items, it is the gestalt of Conradie’s sculptures that are of significance. It’s the new life she gives them as she fashions and forms them into sculpted art objects, that shifts focus onto their collective value.

In Perlemoenstroper, an upturned glass bowl serves as the base of a sculpture that is layered with individual ceramic and glass vessels and topped with a set of glass grapes and a small, ceramic bird. Each of these found objects is recognisable as a distinct curio, ornament and vessel. Together, they form something new – a trophy, an objet d’art, an heirloom.

Other works, like Vergeet maar net, a wall-mounted relief sculpture assembled from resin, epoxy putty, and found objects, showcase Conradie’s history as a printmaker. A puff adder snake, coiled and poised to strike, is at the centre of the work. The image is framed by pressed flowers and sits in a collection of steel and bronze objects, draped down the wall of the gallery with an almost botanical flourish. Under the black light, a thin frame of manganese glass glows green as if giving off a warning – we inherit more than a simple object.   

Stephané Conradie, Wegwysers deur die Blinkuur, 2024. Photography by Mark Wessels.

Importantly, there is a sovereignty to the works. The plinth-based sculptures all hold a hierarchical structure, with the most precious of objects receiving pride of place at the highest point of the assemblage, or at their core. The works are spotlit, too, prompting a reverence, or a more considered engagement. Finally, select plinth-based or wall-mounted works are secreted away in purpose-built alcoves. Entering one of these spaces triggers a sound installation, and a chorus of voices transforms the act of viewing into a mock devotional moment. Similarly, each alcove becomes a space to hide away and reflect, to spend time alone with the work, as one might in the privacy of a home.

While previous bricolage assemblages by the artist have been characterised by the use of a single colour, or their explosive, jumbled composition, the sculptures in this show are quieter and more refined.

Stephané Conradie, Wegwysers deur die Blinkuur, 2024. Photography by Mark Wessels.

All of this is towards a certain end. Rather than functioning as a haphazard collection of beautiful objects or misty-eyed mnemonics, Conradie’s assemblages are imbued with a real dignity, both through their methodical making, and their carefully considered placement in the gallery space. Salvaged from the shelves of antique dealers, second-hand stores and flea  markets, these otherwise ordinary, nostalgic objects are polished, shaped, and reframed as a collective assemblage, a contemporary lens through which we might examine and review their role and function in a private home – objects to be viewed, arranged, curated, inherited, refused, and refashioned.

Finally, in transforming these objects, Conradie not only highlights a particular material culture and practice, she also puts forward a refusal, or a resistance to this practice as being absolute. “What happens when the next creole generation does not accept their parents’ material culture as inalienable?” is the question posed by Conradie. Wegwysers deur die Blinkuur doesn’t necessarily answer this question. What it does is draw attention to the history and context from which the question emerges, and puts forward a new language – material and otherwise – and a new way of making sense of these heavy histories and enduring legacies.