Romancing The Stone

The ‘Romancing the Stone’ exhibition, opening 21 September at the KZNSA Gallery, forms part of the Arts Research Kaleidoscope [ARK], a festival emerged from the partnership of the South African Visual Art Historians [SAVAH] conference & the Durban University of Technology, Faculty of Art & Design, Digifest. The ARK theme is Romancing the Stone: Lithic Ecologies & Hard Places in South African Visual Culture [Breaking Rock].

Date

21/09/2022 –

21/10/2022

Various Artists

For more Info, contact us on: gallery@kznsagallery.co.za

The relationship between human beings and stone as a medium, metaphor and artefact has a significant and contested history within the visual arts. We use the word in metaphors to signify impermeable ideas and hardened frameworks. We describe ideas and ideologies as set in stone when we feel that they cannot be changed or shifted. However, as Monet observed in relation to the shifting light on the Rouen Cathedral, ‘Everything changes, even stone’. A monumental observation that speaks also to the displacement or casting into shadow of the grand narratives of the art canon, that have privileged occidental views. The lithic metaphor is a broad habitus, particularly aligned with KwaZulu Natal, where much rock art and history is drawn from within and around the rock (archaeology, history, and heritage).

This lithic metaphor is the productive framework for this exhibition comprised of multiple artistic strata, each engaging with the hard places in South African visual culture.

The rhetoric of romancing the stone is also a warning to be vigilant of the prism of romancing, using cultural, gendered and fetishised lenses, which can obscure a clear view of new, surprising, and transitionary identities.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Curators: Alison Kearney, Ann-Marie Tully, Rachel Baasch, Annemi Conradie-Chetty.