AVA Gallery
26.06 - 31.07.2025
Familiar, familial, and simultaneously estranged.
In ‘Nanna’s Kitchen’, Philander invites the viewer into an intimate, tender, at times pained, and witty archive built out of rusted tools, worn-out furniture, and the layered materials of remembered places at home. Using a display of objects, the exhibition initiates a reanimation of memory, both personal and collective, and ultimately honours the inter-generational labour of meaning-making in the face of systemic misrecognition.
Through an affective engagement with found materials, many of which come from Philander’s own family shed or his late grandmother’s cupboard, he situates apparatus of the domestic as sites of cultural knowledge. Philander foregrounds the difficulty of inhabiting the position of ‘coloured’, a category shaped by colonial taxonomical logic, racial triangulation, and cultural erasure. The objects, marked by use and time, are imbued with social life: holding the people who held them, and a larger story of coloured identity in South Africa. Inherited as identity is inherited, found as the artist searches for himself. The objects are repurposed, recontextualised and re-membered via the act of assembly.
Each sculpture tells three stories. Firstly, the objects tell their story as artifacts, bearing the marks of their histories. Secondly, they tell a story through rearticulation- where emotion writes the past, using the objects as representations. Thirdly, the mimetic gesture of process akin to historiography- what does it mean to take the artifact and tell this story with it by reshaping and repurposing?
Aaron Philander, Cleaning is comfort, 2025
As much as this exhibition is about materials, it is also about hands. What does this object say of the person whose hands held it, made it as it is now, and made with it? In this way, Philander centres descriptive, rather than prescriptive knowledge systems, mirroring the layered, bottom-up process of cooking a meal. In re-using discarded materials and tools, he furthers this epistemological effort. He tells stories of and with things we tend not to look at, things whose singular function has been prescribed.
With these objects, Philander’s hands join a lineage. Through the postmodern gestures of citation, appropriation and recontextualisation, echoing works like Duchamp’s Fountain, Philander is doing two things. Firstly, he is attempting to trouble dominant, exclusionary narratives by offering a new epistemology, grounded in lived experience. He is also searching for his own purpose and identity within his family line and culture, as he postures his own version of events, and, ultimately, engages the act of history-making. The very tools used by his grandparents are now his, what does the grandson do with them? What does he make?
Four sculptures stood out to me.
Cleaning is comfort: the bristle end of a broom, mounted, luxuriously, upon a pale pink cushion. A subversive affirmation of the importance of domestic work, often unseen and underappreciated. This work is the cover of the catalogue, and, to me, reflects a microcosm of the exhibition: the repositioning of the tool, while remaining in the semantic lexicon of what broom and cushion mean, ascribes it new value, in memory. What does it say of the grandson, his regard of his childhood, to hold the broom like this, in his mind? It is worth noting that while the exhibition pays homage to grandmother and grandfather, cooking and building, the title homes in on the maternal and the kitchen. In an exhibition dedicated to epistemological revaluation, this is a committed mimetic decision.
Aaron Philander, Portrait of Pa, 2025
Portrait of Pa: board with a circle cut out of its middle, with a saw stuck down its vertical. The saw so imbued with Pa, that it can be used to depict him. What, then, is depicted? A portrait not in likeness but in structure: bisection, absences, possibly a man torn in two by labour or masculinity? And again, what does it say about the grandson who remembers this way? What story does it tell of him?
Aaron Philander, Self Betrayal, 2025
Self Betrayal: half of the back of a chair mounted to board, the chair is stabbed through by a knife, held in place by a seatbelt. Invoking the car, the kitchen and the living room, speaking to internalised hurt, wrought by practices devised to regulate each space of the home- thought to protect us.
Set the table: a warped fork, a mug, carved of wood, with a cleaver cut into it, and two industrial objects mounted adjacent on a board. The image of the nucleus ritual malfunctioned in the traditional sense, but functioning towards rereading. The warped fork, a tool restructured to reflect the need for restructuring. Have a seat at the table just to find it was not built for you, and, in this, lies your invitation.
One walks away from ‘Nanna’s Kitchen’ perhaps feeling similarly to Philander walking from his nanna’s kitchen, his childhood, his history, with the revelation that making is an act of remembering, and remembering, an act of making.
Aaron Philander, Set the table, 2025
