Notes on Spectrality, Sorcery and the Spirit
Stemming predominantly from a period between the 1950s and 1980s to as recent as the 2000s, the artworks in the Norval family鈥檚 Homestead Art Collection (and by extension, the exhibition) attest to a longstanding preoccupation with ideas of the oneiric, the spectral, and issues pertaining to different forms of black spiritual economies. Populated by spiritual iconography, representations of visits to the sangoma, and Christian worship, the works speak to a particular mode of black socialisation that is represented through traditional mediums such as painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture.
The exhibition seeks to offer an interventionist reading and grouping of these works in the context of contemporary art and contemporary black thought. It seeks to draw attention to the prominence of a return to the spiritual, and to in fact highlight that there is no return: the spiritual has always been present and prominent, willfully and unapologetically guiding South African artistic practice for centuries. It seeks to ask what strategies can be employed in dealing with the tenuous, albeit widespread spiritual practices in the context of South Africa, and what is at stake in necessarily bringing these questions to the fore?
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Stemming predominantly from a period between the 1950s and 1980s to as recent as the 2000s, the artworks in the Norval family鈥檚 Homestead Art Collection (and by extension, the exhibition) attest to a longstanding preoccupation with ideas of the oneiric, the spectral, and issues pertaining to different forms of black spiritual economies. Populated by spiritual iconography, representations of visits to the sangoma, and Christian worship, the works speak to a particular mode of black socialisation that is represented through traditional mediums such as painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture.
The exhibition seeks to offer an interventionist reading and grouping of these works in the context of contemporary art and contemporary black thought. It seeks to draw attention to the prominence of a return to the spiritual, and to in fact highlight that there is no return: the spiritual has always been present and prominent, willfully and unapologetically guiding South African artistic practice for centuries. It seeks to ask what strategies can be employed in dealing with the tenuous, albeit widespread spiritual practices in the context of South Africa, and what is at stake in necessarily bringing these questions to the fore?
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