Description
261-344 Main Road (2024)
These works are experiential studies toward 261-344 Main Road (2024), a series that reflects on how streetscapes shift with the buildings that frame them. The paper used to periodically block out street-facing windows often signals these changes, foreshadowing closure, redevelopment, gentrification, or demolition. For the final series, Bella Knemeyer derived six works from the cladded paper lining shop windows and their reflections of the adjacent Rex Trueform factory, a decommissioned modernist building in Cape Town.
In these preparatory pieces, mulched window paper and gauze are transformed into ghostly impressions of Rex Trueform. They appear as faint architectural traces, interstitial spaces worn through touch and use that slip beyond the precision of the modernist blueprint, bearing marks of indents, repairs, and irreparability.
As Ilze Wolff’s Unstitching Rex Trueform, the Story of an African Factory (2017) has shown, the building embodies South Africa’s complex histories of segregation, labour, and heritage politics: the Group Areas Act, sanctions, trade agreements, neglect, and contested memorialisation. These experiential works begin to articulate those entanglements, setting the groundwork for the completed series—an exploration of urban memory, impermanence, and the fragile cultural narratives held within architecture and its erasures.
Bio
Bella Knemeyer (b. 1991, Cape Town) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves between sculpture, landscape, and urban study. She holds a BA in Fine Art (Sculpture) from the University of Cape Town and a Master’s in Landscape Architecture from the University of Edinburgh. Her dual training shapes a practice that is materially inventive and conceptually grounded in the shifting textures of the city.
Knemeyer often works with recycled and mulched paper pulp, gauze, and other fragile materials, transforming the remnants of the urban fabric into sculptural impressions that hover between architecture and ruin. Her work considers how streetscapes bear witness to cycles of growth and erasure, and how the built environment is entangled with memory, heritage, and social histories in South Africa.
She has exhibited widely in South Africa and internationally, with solo presentations at RESERVOIR Projects in Cape Town (Here, There and Everywhere, 2025) and participation in group shows such as Fallow Ground Chapter Three: Contemporary Archaeology at PSM Gallery, Berlin (2025), Things take time, time takes things at POOL, Cape Town (2024), RMB Latitudes at Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2023), and A Pebble in the Mouth at Turbine Art Fair (2022).
Through her work, Knemeyer brings attention to the overlooked materials of the city, window paper, dust, and discarded matter, reframing them as sites where histories of use, neglect, and transformation remain visible.
