From the Depths Deeply Buried
July 07, 2026 - August 30, 2026
Oliewenhuis Art Museum
A solo exhibition in the Reservoir Gallery at Oliewenhuis Art Museum
Page through the catalogue and read the essay by author Kobus Moolman, titled: 'The Archaeology of Absence'.
Read the press release
In the solo exhibition titled From the Depths Deeply Buried, Emma Willemse presents works that engage thematically with the site of the exhibition. The Reservoir Gallery, an underground exhibition space at Oliewenhuis Art Museum, was once used for water storage. Sometime after it was built in 1904, it became dormant and forgotten until it was rediscovered in 1994 and repurposed to host exhibitions.
Willemse says that: "The Reservoir exhibition space has an interesting history related to many of the ideas in my work — its purpose and construction speak about preservation, exhumation and archaeology. Due to its subterranean location, it has connotations to the unconscious, those things that lie beneath the surface."
Willemse exhibits two bodies of work in the Reservoir space, both of which engage with the consciousness of place and its relationship to memory and identity. The first is an artist's book installation called 101 Ways to Long for a Home. The second comprises five large-scale boat-like installations. The motif of the boat, explored extensively across both bodies of work, forms part of a continued investigation into the meanings the boat generates in the context of displacement.
