Emma Nourse’s first solo exhibition since graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art will be exhibited at the BRUNDYN+ gallery. Titled Pause, this body of work continues Nourse’s preoccupation with representations of environmental entropy and the deepening influence of human interference.
The works on exhibition poignantly depict crumbling glaciers and melting ice sheets in stages of depletion. Once thought to be inexhaustible, the degradation of our natural resources now brings into question our own existence and the advancement of the human project.  Though this body of work illustrates the fragility and vulnerability of our natural environment, it also pays homage to its awe- inspiring strength and enduring will.

Nourse describes her practice as 'a form of quiet protest'. While the works may be quiet, they are tangible meditations that rouse our desire to touch, a metaphor for our relationship with the natural world. It is through an obsessive pattern of wanting that we test the compatibly of nature with our existence and in so doing lead its progressive destruction.

The exhibition consists of works that employ traditional tapestry processes and some non-traditional materials in unexpected ways, exploring the tensions between two-dimensional works and sculpture.

04 September - 18 October

'OPEN' is an exhibition of new paintings, sculpture, video, found objects and things on top of other things by Chris van Eeden. Expanding on the exhibition’s conceptual framework, the artist posits:
 
I’m opening up. I’m not convinced. I’ve worked over some theories.  This is my take, and we’re approaching a limit, possibly.
 
Edit.
 
Who knows. This theatre seems too small, baby; it needs a certain je ne sais quoi or at least more something, yeah. Global it may well be, but we’re stifled by our expanding horizons (u-turn now 2.9 miles from your current location).  What is this place? There’s only one left: the center of nowhere.  The promised land.  Join us there, or. Else look to the Tuscan Sunset Desert sky where banners hover and we play-drop XOs in the chemtrail traces searching for perfect combinatorial game theories, and, by the way, what’s your sign? Whispered, sultry: And your vocation?  I’m travelling, really.
 
I’ve said my piece.
 
You object.
 
It’s okay, but.
 
Now was the time, just now. You missed out.  Backdoor delivery.  Urban Dictionary.  Drones alight the scene (snooze), discount UHDs and discounted homeopathy to the upturned wrists of the invested masses.  Members only.  Anemic?  I see, your grassroots are showing.  Cover-up or let me highlight:  Occupy Everything, health through living, it’s my dream, or get starving trying darling.  Wile away.  It’s springtime again-again and it’s rousing.  Note, reasons why men have nipples.  And women?  In the Top 10 Things They Invented, today Chocolate Chip is in at nine losing barely to Automatic Dishwashing with numero uno; Kevlar, or was that Teflon, I forget.   Either way it’s your desire, your express Mechanical Bride Order.  And it’s only an object if you’re sampling.  Or pray for keeps; everything is open and presented, actual, real, normcore, and remember your trophies and souvenirs.  I’ll side order the t-shirt:  Too much is never enough [sic.].
 
Paste, pulped, entangled, synchronous, im/plausible, nscrtbl, el33t (I’m lingua Africana, maybe). Post-irony post-contemporary postnasal postie post toasties: chaff feeds the anima mundi.  900k with breakfast? I want Dollar bitches.  Or a drilling grilling, Sunny side up, only the yolk asseblief.  Dissimulate, dissimilate, dissimilitude, disintegrate, assimilate, simultaneity, simulcast, uhm, simultaneity.  None of a kind, today. Thank you. Superfluity!  Uthini? It means something.  After all it’s only in my words and pictures, which flounder happily in significance.
 
Have a fabulous ball, a mirror hall, a quantum conundrum, a maze (yawn).  And it’s in your eyes, you’re in.  You bought it. Lost? Feel your way up. Through.  Out or.  I aim to go down. I’ll swim in it. I’m swimming.  It’s deep.

Sidy Diallo will showcase his first solo exhibition 'Points et Itineraires' at the Brundyn Gallery. 'Points et Itineraires' meaning 'Points and Itineraries' in English, alludes to movements to different parts of the world, continent, country or landscape and the activities that one engages in when in those spaces. The exhibition is an extension of key ideas that Diallo has explored in the past couple of years.
 
Among these are his fascination with the future of Africa and how it has been impacted on by global politics and economics. At the heart of this is his concern for the 'African brain drain', a phenomenon that sees numerous Africans migrating to Europe and America for education purposes and unfortunately never returning. Diallo perceives this as a loss for the continent, one that obviously requires the skills attained by these graduates that could potentially aid in the economic development of the continent. This insistence on returning to home is not a means used to prescribe and restrict the livelihoods of African scholars, but is rather a call to diversify the knowledge and skills found on the continent. The artist acknowledges the importance and inevitability of migration, which in his work manifests as a reference to the Fulani herdsmen who roam the landscapes of mainly West and North Africa, seldom settling in a fixed space. The Fulani’s nomad characteristic becomes a metaphor for migration and transnationalism that is essential in reconfiguring the borders and restrictions of the nation-state. Diallo also refers to their non-capitalistic mode of trade that mainly relies on prehistoric bartering systems.
 
With this in mind, Diallo acknowledges the danger in some migratory activity. Going as far back as the Atlantic Slave Trade, we notice a discrepancy with the (involuntary) movement, exploitation and restriction of people, mainly people of colour. Centuries after the Slave Trade, there is still a systematic neo-colonial forced migration, one that is primarily economic and still based on capitalist ambitions. This manifests in the one-sided marvel that is globalisation. Through his work, Diallo challenges the insistence of globalisation to further oppress and in most cases exploit areas of the so-called global south. He portrays this through his points and lines motif and technique that is indicative of movement and free flow of ideas and resources and the challenge thereof.

'Phyllis' is a moving and atmospheric portrait of a ‘psychic’ vampire, a woman obsessed with synthetic Nollywood dramas, that lives alone in Lagos, Nigeria. The central idea of this short experimental film is the practise and significance of wig-wearing in Nollywood film; a practise the director has invested with deeper psychological as well as science-fiction layers. Underpinning this central idea however is a critique of the unforgiving treatment of single women in Nollywood and Nigeria. The film is an example of what the director, Zina Saro Wiwa, has termed 'alt-Nollywood', a genre that plays with and reworks certain narrative, stylistic and visual conventions of Nollywood. Phyllis explores the gothic possibilities of the Nollywood aesthetic creating a new kind of low-budget atmospheric film that is very much of Nollywood and yet subverts the genre. Using Nollywood to subvert Nollywood.