Wim Botha
Rooms 2001-2014
This catalogue, published to accompany Wim Botha's exhibition The Epic Mundane at the 2014 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, is a companion volume to Busts 2003-2012 and Solipsis I-V and traces the development of Botha's immersive room installations over more than a decade. These works begin with commune: suspension of disbelief, a Christ figure carved from bibles and suspended, under surveillance, and continue through to the large-scale installations including Linear Perspectives, his 2014 solo exhibition at Stevenson Cape Town, and The Epic Mundane in Grahamstown. In an extract from an interview with The Epic Mundane's curator, Brenton Maart, published in the catalogue, Botha states of these later works:
Each room is a constellation of objects suspended in an illusory space defined abstractly and minimally by a black line, like a three-dimensional architectural drawing. This space is overlayed onto the gallery floorplan; it enters the gallery as parts falling outside the boundaries of physical space; it is formless; it can permeate things. This implies that the objects inside are also not quite as real; although they are currently visible in the gallery, they are part of the metaphysical space; without concrete form. Inside, things are weightless and floating, thus the objects can take on other natures; they don't have to mean what things in the real world mean. Portrait busts - in this space - are no longer objects; they become entities, people; inhabitants of some other reality; animated.
Published by Stevenson | Catalogue 77, July 2014
Softcover, 80 pages | Price: R200
