'Spectral Lines'

The exhibition 'Spectral Lines' is based on a simple double entendre, speaking of lines belonging to the colour spectrum, but also the lines of spectres, or ghosts. On the one hand, Dineo Bopape, Lunga Kama and Jessica Lajard share a considered interest in colour that sets them apart from other artists in their generation whose work relies primarily on conceptual elements. On the other hand, these three artists all invoke ghosts. The above two connotations of the title, however, are secondary to the potential as a metaphor of its more precise, scientific meaning.

It is no coincidence that Bopape, Kama and Lanard have performed the role of the outsider at various stages of their lives, variously through their gender, cultural heritage, sexuality or national origin. Their biographies invoke the notion of ‘être un espion’ as posited by Felix Gonzalez-Torres: the outsider who notices subtleties that others may not. In chemistry, a spectral line is a dark or bright line in an otherwise continuous spectrum of light, resulting from a single photon’s interaction with a quantum system. If one sees artists as these single photons, artworks become the lines that make the interaction with their environment visible. At the most fundamental level, this exhibition proposes that Bopape, Kama and Lanard produce the lines that appear in, and as a result determine, the spectrum of their generation.

06 November - 18 December