SEEKERS, SEERS, SOOTHSAYERS

Participating lens-based artists include Gladys Kalichini, Latedjou, Sekai Machache, Nyancho NwaNri, Pamina Sebastião, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Helena Uambembe. Seekers, Seers, Soothsayers features seven artists whose lens-based work explores accounts and experiences connected to the nonphysical world. This invisible world can be thought of as spiritual, supernatural, psychological, or abstract. It is an otherworldly realm. Using experimental film, immersive installation, performance, sound, and narration, the artists depict how ritual, devotion and acts of remembrance can offer connectedness, bring restoration, or provide alternative ways of seeing oneself within the cycle of life. The camera lens is an effective medium that the artists have used to expand, project, and reflect on how historical narratives are carried through the body and passed on from generation to generation. The exhibition includes stories of seekers, those who engage with the celestial to call on the divine, as they attempt to gather up parts of their fragmented histories that were ruptured by colonial exploits. It involves narratives of seers and soothsayers, those bestowed with uncommon gifts. Seers can anticipate the future while making meaning of the past. Soothsayers warn, translate, implore, and mediate between dimensions. They offer language for things felt but often unspoken. There are seven artists in the exhibition. The number seven has been spiritually significant in various belief systems in the past and present. Seven has signified completion and perfection, has symbolized divine introspection and perception, healing and fulfilment. There seven phases of the moon, and seven days, named after deities in the Greco-Roman week. The Abrahamic God rested on the seventh day. The exhibition title is drawn from a poem by Jamaican author, Kei Miller titled Speaking in Tongues (2007), and it forms a mantra for the constellation of works on display. The poem points to a human need to engage with worlds one cannot touch, whilst emphasizing the limits of language to fully describe the lived experience.