The exhibition comprises sculptures and drawings made with cowhide and cow hair, and paintings in oil on canvas. Unlike the distinctive figurative forms that the artist has previously made familiar to us, the drawings and paintings are abstract and ambiguous. They could also be perceived as parts or fragments of bodies such as bums, elbows, bellybuttons or toes, or the ears, nose, mouth, anus and vagina through which we draw in and expel life forces.
Mntambo describes the impulse behind The Unspoken:

The work I am making gives form to the loud silences in our lives that seem to be hidden but are actually in plain sight, if we choose to see them - or the conversations that one only ever has with oneself, even though others are having similar conversations, also with themselves. In terms of forms, I think of folds, holes, bumps, crevices and spaces that are indeterminate in some respect. They engage our attention and draw us into a space, but an element always remains hidden from view, never fully revealing itself. In this way we are reminded of the sentences that are edited out of our exchanges even though others may well be aware of our unspoken thoughts and feelings.

19 January - 25 February

Parasomnia brings together photographs from Sassen's recent Parasomnia series and some from her previous series, Flamboya.

Sassen spent her childhood years in East Africa. She describes that, on her family's return to the Netherlands, she felt like a foreigner in her homeland but knew that she had also been an outsider in Africa. Parasomnia animates these feelings of dislocation between home and away, night and day, life and dreams. The series comprises photographs taken in West and East Africa over the past two years, as well as a few taken in Europe, which frame her enigmatic and often haunting narratives.

As a New York Times critic recently noted (in a review of the Museum of Modern Art's New Photography exhibition), Sassen's images 'convey how strangely vivid and tantalizingly sad the world can seem to a mind and eye divested of the usual filters of perception'. Her photographs constantly disrupt our usual perceptions because some are carefully constructed while others are incidental scenes she encounters on her travels, leaving us unsure which are her imaginary fictions and which scenes from life. Her distinct visual language is articulated by a deep awareness of the formalist concerns of painting, sculpture and photography, as well as an acute sense of colour and the optical resonances of pattern and design.