A Tale of Two Cities

NOTE: I'm a sole practitioner and, hence, not a VAT-registered vendor.

A Tale of Two Cities (2022)

(NOTE: If you scroll down the column of images to the left of the main image, you'll be able to study each segment of the work in more detail).

BACKGROUND:

This intricate work is made using postcards - all from my personal collection - of Berlin, Germany and Johannesburg, South Africa. My habit of collecting postcards, as a way of understanding and connecting with places, started in 1995 when I moved to Berlin. It continued when I moved from Berlin to Johannesburg (where I still live and work) in 2006. So, the collection comprises around 25 years' worth of collecting a broad range of images of these cities and the spaces and things in them. 

Both these cities, with their fragmented and schizophrenic symbolic and physical histories, have been massively important in informing my artistic work, based on my evolving understandings and 'undoings' of the politics of space across a range of registers and media over the years.

I always had a strong desire to translate this personal collection - trapped in a shoebox for many years - into something 'else', something less fragmented, more coherent. This urge came and went over the years.

When I was invited to participate in a group show in Cape Town, focusing specifically on paper, I decided that this would be a good forum for such a translation.

I spent a full month leading up to the opening, and my departure for the Ampersand Residency in New York, feverishly making this work.

This collage/montage work suggests an impossible and strange collision, even a fusion, of these two cities. The work's intuitive and unashamedly subjective emergence and final expression have, finally, given manifest form to an idea that has, until now, only existed nebulously in my imagination. 

The work was shown as part of the exhibition, Jan-Ken Paa/Paper at ‘no.3 SPG’, 152 Main Road, Muizenberg, Cape Town. It ran from 22.07.2022-31.12.2022.