'Oblique'

The project 'Oblique' by South African artist Abrie Fourie follows the publication of the artists’monograph of the same name, published in 2011 in Berlin, Germany. The book marked the start of  an ongoing and evolving project, with various exhibition and publication iterations, and stems from a research grant the artist received from the Africa Centre (Cape Town, South Africa). Fourie used this seed funding to digitise and catalogue his film archive spanning several decades, which led to an opportunity to critically engage with this material anew, and think through different ways of presenting, and curating this body of work alongside the development of new creative concerns. Since 2012 the project 'Oblique' has been shown in several international venues.

Central to Fourie’s work is an interest in the sometimes volatile and complex relationship between photography and fiction, and the disjunction between memory and what we as viewers and consumers of photography project onto the medium. The exhibition presented at SCAD foregrounds this concern with the inclusion of an HD Film installation, edited as a series of slow changing slides of all images included in the monograph. Central to this work is a narration by well known South African actor Marcel van Heerden of a text by the author and theorist Ivan Vladislavic. 

A series of mounted and framed photographs have been selected specifically for the exhibition, many editioned for the first time. In addition a series of text works, quotations from Vladislavic’s work, are part of the exhibition.

Fourie’s practice can be seen as a catalogue of memories, as an ongoing archive. He explores the familiar and intimate zones of home with the same interest and curiosity as he does the unknown.  In his practice he avoids narrow and direct modes of documentation, and aim to explore the ambiguous and unfixed. He states that this approach is ‘not so much defining a place, as circling the relationship between spaces, sign and self; it hints at that silent tension between absence and presence, abstraction and reality’.

12 September - 08 November