Ruby Gogo

With these pastel works on sandpaper, Sibeko continues to work with his familiar abstract figures, but introduces something different: the possibility of play with the audience itself. Rather than presenting one fixed composition, the individual tiles can be moved and rearranged, allowing us to create different configurations and different figurations. This is important because play here isn't simply about making the work accessible or enjoyable. It becomes a speculative methodology. The tiles are materially real, and the figures are recognisably part of Sibeko’s visual language, but once we begin moving them, we are no longer limited to what they initially appear to be. A figure can become a creature, a body, a landscape, or something we don't have a name for. Meaning becomes relational and open to change. We become participants in the process of other-worlding. Sibeko gives us the tools to construct possibilities rather than simply presenting us with a completed world. And this connects directly to Kindred’s interest in the familiar and the foreign. By rearranging something familiar, we make it strange again. We are encouraged to suspend the need to immediately recognise, categorise or explain what we are seeing and instead ask: What else could this become? For me, these works demonstrate that speculation doesn't necessarily mean predicting some distant future. It can happen through something as simple as moving a tile, making a new connection and allowing an unexpected form to emerge. Sibeko turns play into a way of thinking, a small experiment in how different worlds might be made from the materials already in front of us.