ForSeaChange

October 10, 2024 - November 21, 2024

AVA Gallery, Cape Town

PRESS RELEASE: For(Sea)Change

The Printing Girls group exhibition

AVA Gallery, Church Street Cape Town

Opening: 10 October 17h00, and runs until 21 November 2024

Opening speakers: Liz McDaid (award winning grassroots activist) and Cormac Cullinan (environmental lawyer and author)

In an era in which we face unprecedented threats to planet Earth and urgently need to re-evaluate our place in it, art activism can be a powerful catalyst for social change. There is growing recognition that the ‘wild’ of art, its playful unboundedness, its existence in the spaces between things, has a vital part to play in addressing the environmental and socio-political crises we are facing globally today.

The dominance of scientific rationalism in Western thought has allowed for outstanding technological advances. But it has also contributed to the devastating environmental breakdown we are experiencing in the twenty-first century. This philosophical bias has coincided with a growing objectification or ‘taming’ of wild nature, reflected in the rapid development of new industrial technologies, in the name of ‘progress.’ 

These new and ever more efficient methods of plundering the natural world meant trampling on the rights of indigenous peoples, who have always lived in harmony with nature and regard it as a sacred realm. In many indigenous cultures, human beings are seen to belong to nature rather than the other way around. For example, because life emerges from water, many Nguni cultures consider water itself to be the medium of the soul.

In Western culture, the soul is by now a deeply unfashionable concept. Thomas Berry argues, in his introduction to Cormac Cullinan’s groundbreaking study, Wild Law (2002), that as we have steadily objectified and destroyed the life systems on Earth on which human beings depend, there has been a concurrent erosion of the wild, unbounded inner life too. One could say that this depletion of moral being, of the sublime, life-giving, creative part of human nature, is mirrored in the destruction of nature: the pollution and acidification of our oceans, the poisoning of our soil, rain and air through continued burning of fossil fuels. It is also reflected in the increasingly uniform virtual worlds we inhabit: the culmination of a dissociated ‘Western materialist monoculture of the mind,’ to use Cullinan’s expression.

The printmakers represented in For(Sea)Change either consciously seek out the sublime, and give material expression to it in the fragile medium of paper, or expose the perilous consequences of ignoring our place in the broader scheme of things. The precarity of these works on paper suggests our human vulnerability, but these artworks also bravely reimagine our broken world: as a rewilded place, a place of restitution and regeneration, not only of our degraded ocean and environment but of our damaged and spiritually alienated selves too. Reaching towards the post-human, they acknowledge the harm human beings have done and look to the interconnectedness of human cultures with other material cultures in the world, both living and non-living.

These are powerful contributions to creating a more equitable, courageous and compassionate world, one in which we acknowledge that we live in a vast and interdependent community. In the wild sea of the collective unconscious, no man is an island. It's time for change.

Contact:

Olga Speakes, Director AVA Gallery. [email protected], +27 21 424 7436.

Cloudia Rivett-Carnac, The Printing Girls. [email protected], 071 242 2367

The Printing Girls

The Printing Girls (TPG) is an all-female collective of South African-based artists who work in print. In 2009, the six founders of TPG graduated in the Arts from Rhodes University which has always had a strong history of printmaking. During a class reunion exhibition in 2016 they inspired each other to create in print again and began to exhibit as The Printing Girls. The following year they decided to invite new female printmakers to join up, and TPG in its current incarnation began to materialise. But the main focus has never changed - to create a platform exclusively for our country's women printmakers to share ideas, network and exhibit together.

Association for Visual Arts (AVA Gallery)

Association for Visual Arts (AVA Gallery) located at 35 Church Street, Cape Town CBD - is a membership based organisation and one of the oldest non-profit contemporary art galleries in the country. AVA provides an enabling platform for emerging and independent artists and for the advancement of art. It is an accessible and popular space for the public to engage with art and artists.

This exhibition is made possible thanks to the grant from the City of Cape Town.