Listing(s)

'Into the Night'

Niklas Zimmer at Salon 91

Into the Night by Niklas Zimmer is a collection of long-exposure, film-based photographs taken at night in Cape Town. In this series of nudes, still lifes and cityscapes, Niklas Zimmer has used the night and the process of photographing with long exposures as an allegorical backdrop for a politics of personal path-finding through ambivalent terrains of consciousness.

30 May 2012 - 23 June 2012

'Fata Morgana'

Cara van der Westhuizen at Salon 91

Fata Morgana, the Arthurian sorceress’s mirage – a canopy of impossible sails on a ship, the flight of birds’ spiraling migration, a woman on the edge of a wood, constellations on a blackboard, a map of forgotten lands.

Cara van der Westhuizen’s installation of prints is a complex landscape of longing. Ken Wak describes longing as a passive emotion, for something a ‘long’ way off compared to the more assertive notion of desire which is often for something one sees, feels or hears. The fantasy attached to longing is here associated with the projection of a ‘past place’ onto a ‘nowhere space’ in the present. Van der Westhuizen has appropriated the fata morgana as this magical ‘nowhere space’ and suffused it with the homesickness of early explorers to the Cape of Storms, pastoral scenes from the 1900s, winged migration and the visual language of early scientific diagrams.

Her work is punctuated throughout by a self-conscious awareness of the mechanics of sight. Mirrored Chine-collé embedded in the prints upsets the stability of the images and reflects the gaze of the viewer back at them. Like the trickery of the fata morgana – an illusion of light refraction through air layers of differing temperatures – van der Westhuizen’s works subtly shift the unconscious gaze in and out of history, memory and fantasy. Her fascination with this exotic Neverland remains an act of looking. Far from the desire to possess these visions, Van der Westhuizen retains a Brontë-like aestheticism in the moment of yearning - a look at longing itself as a moment of beauty. - Natasha Norman

02 November 2011 - 29 November 2011

'Tretchikoff and Me'

Various Artists at Salon 91

A salon-style exhibition of vintage archival prints by Valdimir Tretchikoff. printed under the artist's supervision, and contemporary responses to his work by established and emerging South African artists.

Curated by Andrew Lamprecht, and presented in association with the Tretchikoff Foundation.

23 June 2010 - 31 July 2010

Sirens

Jake Aikman at Salon 91

Salon 91 in association with SMAC Gallery presents Jake Aikman’s  ‘Sirens’, an exhibition of paintings which takes as its subject the classical myth of the beautiful half human half bird-like creatures who reputedly lured sailors to their death through their song. Curated by Andrew Lamprecht, the show explores this myth and the stories around it, reconfiguring the historical theme of the siren as muse and inspiration in a contemporary context.

01 December 2009 - 14 January 2010