'Some Deleted Scenes Too'

Wa Lehulere uses diverse media, including text, drawing and performance. His work engages with the spaces between personal narrative and collective history, between processes of amnesia and archive. Performative gestures of unearthing discovery, destruction and erasure are central to Wa Lehulere's work. The act of digging, for example, becomes a metaphor for the pathology of history. The site simultaneously conveys a scene of death and archaeological dig, with the artist performing the dual roles of forensic investigator and scientist. Bones become the motif for a violent confrontation between the myths of the past and the fictions of the present.

Wa Lehulere's latest work continues to explore these themes with a particular focus on the disintegration of the archive, both collective and individual. In the performance titled Some Deleted Scenes (2012), we enter a world where all pages are either blank or burning, and learn about a man who has the ability to restore images to blanked-out photographs. In this performance and the dark room installation 30 Minutes of Amnesia: Scene 2, Wa Lehulere's choreography of the invisible draws our attention to those things on the periphery of our vision.

As the artist explains:
'[This body of work] dances with the idea of uncovering, writing and erasing of narratives both factual and fictional. Because of the possibilities and yet limitations of this endeavour, I have chosen to treat the drawings, texts and performances as both deleted yet "working scenes". So that the work, though in progress and development, is treated as material to be discarded. This method and strategy ... allows for an open exploration of the body both as archive and as a site for choreographing future narratives. As such the drawings function as forms of sense making and "sketches" for other mediums including performance, installation, video, writing, and vice versa.'

08 August - 21 September