Situated in Limpopo, on the edge of the Great Escarpment between Polokwane and Tzaneen, Haenertsburg was first established during the Witwatersrand Gold Rush. It is also the location for Nkhensani Mkhari’s mixed media work Landscape IV, 23.9763° S, 29.9941° E.
Presenting an abstract, instinctual, yet cartographic approach to spatial negotiation and conversation, Mkhari is one of nine artists in the exhibition Space Register. Presented by RESERVOIR and curated by Selwyn Steyn, Space Register explores the interplay between physical and cognitive takes on space.
In the South African context, spatial planning is embedded in the ideologies that rationalised violences that spanned segregation and stratification of society along race, class and gender lines. For this reason, arguments around space tend to go as far as rejecting space as neutral, spatial planning is presented as warfare because space has the capacity to inflict harm on people and communities through its own practices and protocols.
While it doesn’t reject this part of the conversation on space, Space Register goes wider in bringing together diverse artistic practices, each interrogating the notion of space through unique lenses.
Whether photography, painting, installation, performance, occupation or a combination of the above, the works featured in Space Register seeks to interrogate urban and rural life.
A conversation between the artists and their audiences; each work asks a set of questions related to space and the ways we register it in our everyday. Ranging from light, migration, segregation, intersection, ownership, safety, possessions and occupation, together the prompts guide viewers into autonomous meditations on the ways spaces (or our relationships with them) enforces normativity parallel to presenting more redemptive opportunities.