Exhibition at Origins Centre, Johannesburg
(In collaboration with Jeremy Bolen)
2022

Using Johannesburg as a site from which to consider the ecological, the (post)colonial and the cyclical, the exhibition offered a series of immersive, materially complex installations encouraging viewers to consider what is present in the air we inhabit.

Johannesburg is built for (and among sites for) gold extraction. The mines have defined the landscape - giving rise to the architecture and industry built from the extracted wealth, as well as to the apartheid system, the destruction of viable land and clean water, and the yellow mountain-sized piles of dust that mark the skyline. This dust, even when invisible, gives form to a history of colonialism and its destructive local cost. It moves freely through the porous air - settling on surfaces and in lungs. This dust is the catalyst for the exhibition, which considers ways of sensing or knowing matter as particulate in the context of this city. In thinking through Johannesburg’s dust and its physical, symbolic and radioactive impact; the exhibition brings attention to how particles retain a record of where they have come from, and their potential to send material messages between far reaching places.