– by David Mann

Images courtesy of UJ Arts and Culture.

In the foyer of the University of Johannesburg’s Keorapetse William Kgotsitsile Theatre, a new permanent artwork announces itself in a mirage of colour and motion. It is at once cascading down the raw concrete of the building and rising up like a flame to the soft curves of the ceiling. The longer you sit with it, the more it reveals. 

Fire My Spirit is a new site-specific installation by Johannesburg-based artist Bev Butkow, which was developed as part of the University of Johannesburg Arts & Culture's Artist in Residence (AiR) programme. 

The theatre, named in honour of the South African Poet Laureate whose work continues to interpret our diverse, but shared national story, is a space of experimentation and storytelling that celebrates how creative practice sparks new ways of collective thinking. Installed in this space, and officially opened on 18 June 2026, Butkow’s monumental installation draws on the poetic, historical and collective resonances embedded within the building itself. 

Suspended layers of painted fabric, ribbon, plastic and organza drift through the foyer space, catching air, light and movement. Materially, this is what Fire My Spirit is – a soft sculpture, a playful oxymoron. It’s permanent, but unfixed, simultaneously enduring and evolving. 

But what does it do in the space? Borrowing from Dr Uhuru Phalafala’s incantatory preface to her book, Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement: Poetics of Possibility, which reads “Earth my Body, Water my Blood, Air my Breath, Fire my Spirit”, the work captures the energy, the theatricality, and the power of fire and human spirit. In its dramatic scale and verticality – which, for those who are familiar with the Edoardo Villa sculptures installed outside, has a nice echo – it is a work that charts a linear journey. 

Images courtesy of UJ Arts and Culture.

Here is the spirit, the protagonist, the viewer, travelling upwards, ever aspirant, curious, ambitious. Fire becomes a force of transformation rather than destruction, unfolding through shifting fields of colour, light, transparency, and movement. 

But it is also a journey inwards. Through the artist’s layering of materials, from the draped ribbon and plastic of the outer layer to the pasted fabric and paint on the back wall, there is a move towards rumination. In this way, Butkow’s installation becomes a work of great verticality and linearity that also encourages reflection. As the spirit rises, it deepens. It’s a work that gestures towards an embodied knowledge – for there is no growth, no edification without introspection.

Much of this resonates with the ethos of the institution, explains Head of UJ Arts & Culture, Pieter Jacobs. 

"We are particularly invested in reimagining our venues as living cultural sites – spaces where visual art, performance, poetry, and everyday life intersect in ways that are accessible, dialogic, and socially resonant. This installation speaks directly to that vision, foregrounding the role of the university not only as a site of learning, but as a dynamic platform for creative and critical exchange." 

Jacobs goes on to state that Butkow’s installation succeeds in transforming a transitional space into a site of encounter – one that invites reflection, movement, and layered interpretation. “In doing so, it expands our understanding of how art can inhabit and activate institutional environments," he says. 

Images courtesy of UJ Arts and Culture.

Certainly, it is a work that asks you to stay with it, and to collaborate with it. Whatever way you initially view the work, is one of many ways of seeing. As a shifting poetic landscape, the installation reflects on how artistic knowledge finds form in the world – spatially, spiritually, physically, and collectively – by reflecting on the possibility of shared play and experimentation. 

On the opening night of the installation, the poet Quaz Roodt performed a selection of new poems written in response to Fire My Spirit, and to the work of Kgotsitsile. Seeing Roodt perform beneath the work, in response to it, provides a window into the kinds of future collaborations that might emerge. The installation is inherently performative and, considering its relation to the theatre itself, it can also be seen as a scenographic work, a grand theatrical backdrop.

Fire My Spirit opens new spaces to recognise ourselves as elemental – rising, transforming, and never fixed. It speaks to the potential of creative practice to unsettle familiar ways of seeing into new ways of making sense of the world, where knowledge is not singular but continually co-authored, and learning is made possible through practice. 

Importantly, Butkow is an artist who is profoundly embedded in Johannesburg. It is the place from which she draws her material and her inspiration. For years, Butkow had her studio in the Bag Factory, in Fordsburg, not far from where her grandparents used to sell eggs and produce at the market some decades back. She has her studio now in Ferreirasdorp, on the edges of the city, flanked by the double-decker highway. 

Images courtesy of UJ Arts and Culture.

Butkow's practice is concerned with the social and material fabric of the city. Her process, one of painting and weaving, is deeply linked to her way of navigating and making sense of the city, and its rich, intertwined histories. It’s a thread that runs through all of her work – an acknowledgement of, and a deep care for, this complicated city threaded together with fabric, refuse, colour, fashion, light and the open-heartedness of other people. 

Through these repeated acts of weaving, knotting, binding, and repair, she develops work that explores how tension, fragility, repetition, and care shape bodily and spatial experience. Fire My Spirit can be seen as both a continuation and a distillation of these interests and ways of working, always honouring the intelligence of the hands. To quote Kgotsitsile: “Poet, what words could have, the eloquence of hands at work or play, to nourish your life?” 

Butkow’s work, exhibited in Poland, Lisbon, Dakar, Hong Kong and in galleries and museums across South Africa, is ever-evolving, always deepening through the artist’s process of repetition and reflection. With this new installation, this monumental undertaking, Butkow further cements herself as an artist from and of Johannesburg, and whose work will continue to shape it for years to come. 

Images courtesy of UJ Arts and Culture.