September 13, 2025 - October 06, 2025
492 Fehrsen Street, Pretoria, South Africa
Recently, I’ve begun to pray again. I couldn’t say to whom, I couldn’t entirely say why. I start my prayers with a greeting to forces outside of myself, recognizing the presences and absences that define that moment between self and not self. Sometimes I ask for things, others I seek for something nestling between comfort and affirmation. Sometimes I sit with the silence of closed palms and shut eyes, I sit with the humility of not particularly understanding why I’m doing it, I sit with the surrender. I’m yet unsure what it does for me, but by the time I say Amen it isn’t very long before I open prayer again.
Feast of Flesh and Prayer is the documenting of a poetic orbiting of loss and healing, of the institutional denial of being and the personal historical validation of it. the making and exhibiting of this work is a two-act performance of pause, a moment within which to sit with incomplete questions, unresolved faults, ongoing griefs and shattered/ing bonds without the need to have them be anything but that: small metaphysical deaths.
Death, as explored in this show is in one form the metaphysical disconnection from ‘the land’, it is the historical severance from the traditions of my people and my situation within, and irrevocable binds to a Euro-Centre (Johannesburg) – whose wealth builds upon the extraction of labor and spirit from my ancestral home in The Eastern Cape. Death, in the experience of lifelessness in the ancestral home; death in and around imprisonment; death in the powerlessness of subaltern bodies to influence the institutions that determine life standing; death in supreme despair and fear; death in the utter lack of personal agencies. Spiritual Death, Social Death, confronted and soothed through the salving of death wounds with limestone – as did my ancestors eMacacuma in rituals of passing through un-life. Salving death here does not imply revival nor life, but a kind of socio-spiritual undeath. A death within which movement still lingers, where surrender becomes hope, where hope is alone is enough because it has to be.
The focus of these works is not the moment of “death” or severance from that which gives spirit, but the expanded threads of socio-spiritual death that hold space within my own life as a result of those deaths. This is the examination of a continuous metaphysical death, it is a recognition of the direness of some of the ways it as manifested in my personal life. The materiality of these works, their very existence, is itself a prayer, a salve for death, an amen shot into meta-reality to substantiate a radical will to continuity, to life and to love beyond death.
This second iteration of the exhibition bears on it the continuing meditations born in the showing of the first: In hope, surrender; In black being, death. With this show I again allow the room to sit with the open ends that fray the conceptual edges of these artworks, in lying with this expression of uncertainty, in dragging this existential pause the show extends the belief that there is value in time lost to uncertainty and grief, that in the surrender explored here, emerges hope; that in continuous metaphysical death, emerges always a new practice of being.
