Enter the gallery and take a left and you’re presented with what seem like either used sanitary pads or sleep masks, suspended in a cluster from the ceiling. Some have fallen to the floor; most are curled up like dry leaves. Flanking this installation is a series of prints, each one a mandala-like layering of handwritten notes. Look again at the installation, and you’ll see it’s the same pattern on the insides of the masks. The work, collectively titled Ooogklappe, is by Christa van Zyl. If you’ve seen the last few exhibitions in this series, you’ll know that Van Zyl’s been puzzling out institutional care and labour for some time, now. This time around, the artist is concerned with embodied knowledge – how the administrative order of to-do-lists, meeting notes, and general work-day scribblings gives way to a particular kind of embodied knowledge. It’s a clear and exciting concept that’s on it’s way to finding a natural material form. While the mandalas appear too precise – even if deliberately so – and are subsequently impersonal, the masks-turned-pads feel like a more resonant realisation of Van Zyl’s research.

Xylan de Jager’s Invisable Authorship (sic) looks at participation and invisibilised labour, using the gallery space as a site. The installation is intriguing – agar bearing the microbial traces of gallery-goers and creating a “biological cartography” of encounter – but the accompanying video is an ill-suited partner to the work. The short, looped film shows black and grey representations of scientific process – notepads and petri dishes – and a word cloud of names, with De Jager’s at the centre. Useful, perhaps, for distilling the artist’s interests and processes, but it pales in comparison to the rest of the work in the space.

Also making us peer into the petri dish is Tobias Barnard, who presents four touch screens, each filled with a different scene of microbial growth. Here, you’re invited to pinch and zoom, swipe this way and that, as is the choreography of the digital age, and feel a little like a scientist yourself. Each microbiome is alive with colour and natural form, and paints a portrait of the microorganism as an active collaborator in the work. Barnard’s use of macrophotography makes for wonderful images, but a physical representation of the work is missing – even cropped, printed, and framed sections of the microbiomes might have helped lend an essential tactility to the research.

Tobias Barnard, featured artwork at FADA Gallery.

Neil Lowe’s prints look quite traditional, and rather simple at first. They are, in fact, the result of an almost forensic approach to art-making. A video with sharp sound and harsh cuts gives us something of a window into his process – equal parts digital, handmade, mathematical, and playful. Each abstract drawing is the result of an ongoing conversation between digital and physical techniques, moving from etchings and prints to steel sculptures and impasto-style layers of oil paint. Almost all of these forms are on display, collectively presenting a diagrammatic view of Lowe’s approach to materiality, tactility, and relationality.

Neil Lowe, featured artwork at FADA Gallery. 

Participatory leanings and fragmented histories

Perhaps the most overt example of two kinds of practice and research cross-pollinating is Martin Bolton and John Shirley, who merge the very ancient craft of ceramics with contemporary digital technologies. Through organically crafted vessels and the introduction of 3D mapping and printing, there emerges a hybrid, experimental practice – clay forms adapted and manipulated through digital means. It is not towards replicating or replacing traditional forms of craft, but rather translating one form into another, and seeing what emerges in that simple act of creative exchange.

And there is Sibeko again, this time with one of his recent performance-based paintings on canvas, ‘Play Fortress’. For all of its scale, brilliant colour, and choreography, the work seems to languish in its solitude, neither in clear conversation with the surrounding works, nor with its counterpart billowing in the breeze outside. It helps to know Sibeko’s practice – one rooted in collaboration, physicality, and the essential somatic memory and intelligence of the human body – but for those who don’t, the work may appear simply as a pretty picture (or not so pretty, depending on your taste), instead of the rich, conversational, messy encounter with the world and the body that it is. What curatorial strategies might have been employed here, to place the work in greater conversation with the audience? It’s difficult to say, but knowing Sibeko’s love of play and imperfect performance, the work wouldn’t have been out of place hanging in front of the entrance to the gallery, forcing visitors to climb under it, or nudge it aside in order to enter. There’s probably an evacuation-code violation in that idea, but then, that’s more of a curatorial predicament. I’m only a critic.

Oupa Sibeko, featured artwork at FADA Gallery. 

Downstairs, Leora Farber’s Shivers | Shipments | Shards takes up half the room, and probably warrants a review of its own, but I’ll do my best to convey it all here. Farber’s work is comprised of dusty old objects – leatherbound books and shards of Delft porcelain – in various forms. The artist scrutinises and reproduces them through photography, painting, and a curious kind of sculpture involving bacterial agar painted with E.coli bacteria. It’s a living installation, as are most of Farber’s experiments in bio-art, in that the bacteria will continue to proliferate over the course of the exhibition. This is the thesis of the work – that the afterlives of declining empire resonate in these shards of colonial detritus, and that colonialism itself operates according to a bacterial logic, proliferating and transforming the environments it’s entered, retaining control and suppressing everything else. The photography is striking in its simplicity; the bacterial works less so, but perhaps I visited them before they really grew into themselves.

Leora Farber, featured artwork at FADA Gallery.

Next to this quite theoretical body of work, Zinhle Zulu and Leon Krige’s works serve as a kind of respite. Zulu’s work invites direct participation, asking audiences to move the various pieces of her portraits in order to collaboratively refigure the histories and narratives surrounding Zulu women’s identity and femininity. While the work’s illustrative style doesn’t compel me, its impulse does – storytelling is a collective and collaborative act, and history must always be co-authored. Krige’s panoramic and composite images of cities are a joy to get lost in. Johannesburg has been the subject of his work for years, and the city grows only more radiant in these images. Quite uncharacteristically, the artist himself peers through the top of one image, his reflection caught in the foreboding red glow of a nighttime cityscape. Here, again, the city is both a palimpsest and a collage, which is to say that the historical conditions that continue to build the city are both of those things, too.

Between overdeterminacy and nothing at all

The art world has been oscillating between too much text and no text at all for some time now. Yes, QR codes are useful, and yes, we’re all sick of them. Similarly, we have long ago given up on reading an entire wall’s worth of long-winded vinyl text, but we’d still like something to read, to help us make better sense of what we’re looking at.

Relational Trans_Positions is, for the most part, very low on written context. Almost all of the works have only QR codes next to them, which all lead to the same online PDF, also low on information when it comes to individual works. Then, in the case of Van Zyl and Farber, there is almost too much context – whole zines, exhibition pamphlets, and double-column wall texts speaking only to their respective bodies of work. Online, FADA Gallery’s Instagram features wonderful video portraits of each artist speaking about their work. But that’s something you’ll watch on the couch at home, not here in the gallery. What to do?

Image courtesy of the University of Johannesburg.

I am probably being pedantic, I know, but writing, after all, is an essential creative output. It’s a form of distillation, conversation, an act of translation and co-authored meaning. Surely there are students at FADA interested in having those conversations, making those observations, and committing them to short, sharp text to be displayed alongside each work? Walkabouts can be fun, and PDFs save trees, but in an exhibition with 10 different research topics, a little wall text goes a long way. 

Altogether, though, Relational Trans_Positions is a monumental show, both in its myriad works and individual concepts. To house all of it under a single curatorial concept is impossible, but the overarching theme is the less important part of the exhibition in any case. It’s the simple act of placing disparate works and ideas alongside one another, opening it all up to a viewing public, and seeing what new interpretations and grammars of understanding emerge, that makes these shows so essential. If art is a means of making sense of the world, then the FADA Gallery is far more than a showroom for art objects; it’s something of a communal laboratory.