Spoorloos 7-27 July Everard Read, Cape Town
In Spoorloos, Hanien Conradie deepens her ongoing enquiry concerning place and belonging from her location as an Afrikaner female living in Southern Africa. The primary inspiration for this exhibition originated in an artists’ residency in the vast and desolate Tankwa Karoo Desert which is located in the Western Cape in South Africa.
The body of work consists of various reinterpretations of landscape painting within the contemporary moment of imminent ecological collapse, growing technological dominance and humanity’s rapid alienation from the rest of nature. Conradie mourns the mounting collective amnesia regarding humanity’s position as an inextricable part of the Earth. As an earth-concerned painter and in order to bring locatedness to her work, Conradie continues to converse with burnt plant material and found ochre as powerful representatives originating from the natural places she visits. By creating various practices of relation with natural matter, Conradie strains to remember the echoes of humanity’s ancient relationship with the Earth.
Where her Raaswater (2019) focused mainly on water, rainmaking rites and rivers, Spoorloos (2021) is located within the element of air. Here Conradie works with the archetype of the magician, with ritual prayer and with the Kármán Line: a place where the earth’s atmosphere becomes too thin for aeroplanes to achieve flight and where the rest of the universe begins.
At its most expanded, Spoorloos can be seen as a selection of paintings in natural pigments, ritual prayer pieces, poems and performances contemplating encounters with the Traceless.The Film: SPOORLOOS (2019)
The text for this film has its beginnings in 2012 when I found a December 1938 copy of Die Taalgenoot in an old wagon chest that used to belong to my Grandmother. At the time I was tracking how the culture and history of my ancestors (and Western culture) shaped the values and behaviour toward the natural world. It pained me to read Dirk Mostert’s essay titled Stemme van Suid-Afrika [Voices of South Africa], as I recognised how many voices in South Africa (both human and other-than-human) were in fact not listened to. I understand that culture and nature are so inextricably bound together that by silencing indigenous culture and nature, the necessary reverence for those beings who were shaped from the depths of this place were lost. I became aware of the vastness of the distance I have covered in my desperation to run from this older type of Afrikaner. I vowed to listen and to give voice to the voiceless; be it endangered plants; rivers; damaged places or people who cannot speak anymore.
In 2019 I visited the Tankwa Karoo Desert. The word ‘Tankwa’ is assumed to have Khoisan origins and is believed to mean ‘Place of Thirst’ and ‘Place of the San’. Here in this desolate arid emptiness remnants of Stemme van Suid-Afrika came back to me: only short words and part sentences. In this vastness the text rearranged and transformed itself in my mind into a new meaning; into something which better represents who I have become, what I believe and my stance toward this place we call South Africa. I walked barefoot, and as lightly as possible, as to avoid disturbing the rocks of this ancient and silent place, the Tankwa. As I listened deeply, I heard. What I heard was devastating, overwhelming and hard to hold as a mere individual. It compelled me to ask:
What is the Earth asking of me, and of humanity, NOW?
After my visit something in the place and in me transformed so radically that it has taken me two years to find balance again. The work in this exhibition is part of my ongoing quest to allow matter to speak; to find regenerating ways of relating to myself, to the other-than-human world and to humans from all time, both past and present.
Read more
- Tover Land 2023 at Animal Power! - Montoro12 Gallery, Brussels
- Spoorloos 2021 (Digital Walk About and Discussions)
- I am Water - New York City 2021
- The Making Practice - RK Contemporary 2021
- 40 nights/40 DAYS New Film
- Tankwa Artscape Residency (2020) New Film
- Earthling : A Broto Conference - Free Event
- 40 Day Prayer 2018
- Tankwa Karoo Residency June 2019
- Raaswater - Exhibition at Circa Gallery, Cape Town