Planet Past

Someone once said that the past is place you can’t visit. 

He said that “planet past” does exit. Hence it can’t be visited by even out most expedient time travelling scientists. 

But is the past truly a phantasm and an enigma that cannot be fully “perceived”? 

Can the past be perceived without computational decoding of substrate memories cleaved from those discarded in dreams? 

Are those dreamscapes, realities that should not be understood by the waking mind?

What of the nature of layers one excavates within this “self”, the intuitive and “deconditioned,” or unhinged bodily flow of experiments on a world that transcend verbal and societal categorization?

Any commitment to the principle that reality is to some degree constructed and contextual, that this world is more various than any one system of knowledge can account for; that this world contains many worlds, is indisputable.

CREATIVE COLLABORATION - An Exhibition

 

The Potchefstroom Museum Gallery has over the years dedicated its efforts towards exposing unknown and experimental artists from various under-resourced communities, and recently an exhibition  was held to celebrate current voices in the art scene within the region.

The gallery continues to cultivate an environment conducive to focused creativity and communal reflection, exploring shared spaces that foster creative encounters and collaborations.

The exhibition is a constellation of innovative and alternative artistic practices that might shed light on our own unsettled present.

In staging representations of contemporary perspectives on cultural identities — the CREATIVE COLLABORATION exhibition presents and opens a space for new examinations of a diverse range of artists whose expressive natures are characterised by their traumas and methods of reconstructing the shattered. 

Through photography, Andile Mayekiso explores an ever more intimate glimpses into the hidden yet explicit lives of others, a welcome reminder that while material wealth and inherited privilege have shaped the country’s turbulent modern history, survival amid ruins remains a reality with which we constant contend.

Daniel Tladi, through his landscape painting, he produces a poetic visibility that reveals relations of power and injustices, but at the same time conveys tenderness and dignity. His art affirms that we are surrounded by other worlds hidden in backwater country spaces characterised by abandoned farms, dispossessed farm labourers and peri-urban realities.

The works therefore begs the question of restitution of land for the indigenous people who were displaced and dispossessed, and turned into menial labour on the farmlands of their ancestry.

Rethabile Weevirs is yet another voice that was exposed through this exhibition, and one of her works, reminiscent of Miles Davis’ Filles De Kilimanjaro album cover art, evokes a nostalgia for both the past and the future. Her work thus appears serene at first glance but conveys an overwhelming sense of a haunting vision of the eye as a reflective mirror into which souls are etched and stained.

The exhibition focuses on the inseparable relationship between humans and their immediate surroundings, places where they find comfort and security, and humanity’s capacity for renewal.

Revealing both optimism and analysis of social conditions, the artists exhibited here grapple with ideas of identity, land and poverty, while also celebrating the impact of time on all objects held dear by humans. 

There are intimate portraits by Marrak Art, where each portrait reveals subtle characteristics of elegance and personal freedom, flamboyant expressions unique to each subject’s ways of sensing the world and thinking about the self.

In a fractured world there is beauty in the ways that decays consumes artefacts of human significance. The automobile rendered obsolete by the power of time, consumed by climes and their treacherous changes, but that which remains are remnants, broken, yet signifying a life past and relegated to memory. 

Discarded by aggressive and hostile consumerism, these remnants become surreal images that populate Andre Austin’s work. The rusted enamel mugs, the decaying wall and the absurd rendition of Salvardo Dali’s Persistence Of Memory leave the viewer glancing into often overlooked and uncomfortable awareness of decay and impermanence.

Through this exhibition visitors will discover beauty and hopeful messages through the artists’ eyes and experience the transformative journey from rural landscapes to cityscapes and imaginative spaces that celebrate historical figures, the under privileged as well as the forgotten. 

Paul Zisiwe 2025

Untitled #25

In any familiar image lingers a latent yearning for alternative ways in which meaning can be subtly altered and pushed into abstraction. 

Abstractions are articulated in this video poem as conditions of becoming rather than a fixed state, forcing us to contemplate and look at anew.

And even if figures appear in some parts of this continuous flow of images, they are pushed into an abstract and strangely disembodied state.

But when interwoven with archival audio, the juxtaposition lays bare links between colonial infrastructure rooted in the dispossession of indigenous land and contemporary conditions of inequality obscured by the illusion of progressive motion towards modernity.

The lucid monologues by stalwarts such as Dr. Nthato Motlana and Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, by undermining established patterns of thought ascribed to visuals, invite viewers to explore alternative modes of recalling, a sonic mapping of our present through voices from the past.

The past is by no means silent; it is full of sounds that can be rediscovered through research, and these sounds, voices, slogans and hymns simulate the archetypal sounds of revolution, and reveal their psychoacoustic potential for rousing activism in the contemporary mind.

UNTITLED #25 thus explores colonial archives, retrieves erased narratives, and proposes new languages of struggle, a grammar of dissidence, which is characterised the struggle for freedmen South Africa.

Senqu - Life Across The River

 Senqu - Life Across The River

This is the story of a youngly counsellor working deep in the mountains of Lesotho, to ensure that terminally ill patients get  daily support and supervision that guides them to health. Karabo Rakolobe is a young man raising his small family with his dedicated partner. He wakes up each day to travel long distances to reach far-flung villages to consult and visit sickly people who would otherwise be unable to reach medical facilities.

And while his family provides moments of respite within an immersive environment of the sick and dying, he continues to express a sense of hope, hope in a world that seems inundated with strife and poverty.

Yet, his daily existence opens up ways to understand the desperate times and modes of existence shaped by different social circumstances, allowing us a glimpse into the power of human interaction and its therapeutic attributes.

Resist Or Die

 

We ignore the dead to our own peril, and as all mysteries never remain hidden, the dead will continue to speak from their graves, unto a future uncertain and flawed.

When voices from the past continue to haunt the present, what future will be free of ghosts?

Can the weight of traditions protect us from the horrors of forgetting, or do we always we make a journey that others have made before?

Once we prayed in the words of parents, but then our world expanded and the prayers fell short of the reality of living under the oppressor’s boots.

Many activists set an example of selfless sacrifice, their lives stolen by the hands of those who feared change. 

They were caught between the forces they tried to change but could not fully escape.

Yet, change is inevitable and and to be alive is to know ghosts.

And now, we hear their whispers when we listen. 

The echo prompts us not to ignore the dead.

We are haunted by their disappearance, and we cannot outgrow the pain.

Can the future be free of the demons of the past and traumas caused by a brutal police force that served to terrorise people of colour in the land of their birth?

Resist Or Die

Generational perspectives are important to the preservation of memory, and censored memories are part of what constitutes a subservient society.

Providing a foundation for exploring themes of colonial trauma, this video poem is contingent, and quietly political in the sense of depicting various events into a unison of collective revolt.

When black people are governed by routines of adjustment to the mess of colonial tyranny, what other option is left for emancipatory action?

In this montage, memory appears in traces, returning them as images or accounts of colonial legacies of a an authoritarian regime.

Affective archives, fragmented narratives, and the question of how aesthetic resistance can be articulated beyond dominant regimes of visibility is the crux of this enquiry into the past of others who were instrumental in liberating many.

This video poem interweaves historical archival documentation, and local narratives of activists, with an experimental visual and sonic language, deliberately foregrounding ruptures of communal rage and resistance to open up forms of visibility beyond the strictures of oppression.

And on several levels, it is therefore a is a meditation on times of violent struggle for liberation and its witnesses.

An Ode To Cinema

 

“Most humans are drawn to visual harmony, challenges their visual system or aesthetic preference. Colours are the mother tongue of the subconscious." Carl Jung.

A film leader is a length of film attached to the head or tail of a film to assist in threading a projector for a moving reel of images that pass through a film gate. These strips of gelatine have always been enamoured by the complexity of the colours that precede the main images, colours and shapes that linger between the numbers during the countdown. 

The bright shaft of light that eventually sizzles into dust hairs that euphorically turn into luminescent forms that boggle the mind, this light seems to be the genesis of these marvels of the film medium, which  are what makes one nostalgic of the days of shooting on film and projecting the final reels.

Typically made from rejected or retired prints of previously released reels, these snippets conjure up another side to the vision sparked by the persistence of vision, and like painting in motion, they are what I would call film art.

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This video poem, therefore explores changes in human cognition when indecipherable forms are persistently perceived, and the boundaries of the real seen through the boundaries of the real seen through new eyes.

And living in this multilayered video are translucent entities born of light and silver granules, replayed with light and hidden by light. The film gate - a crucible where opposing energies generate their light, is a sacred site.

Like a vast interface with unending flows of the unimaginable, this ode o cinema’s mysterious beginnings and endings, draws a circle in the life of the shifting contours of sight and sought.

Ultimately, the film art offers a personal space to inflict images of one’s unknowable imaginings, seeing what one wills and imagineers, a form of realising (MAKING REAL), the massive microscopic beings lingering in the light at the film gate.

The visuals are modes of self-fashioning owned imageries, signals toward the path still unfolding ahead, a liminal space where the possible in inevitable.

The forms and shapes that dwell in these entanglements between frames, can become forms of dream objects, what has yet to be named; that which invites the beholder to actively participate in shaping them.

Therefore, the video poem is a two-dimensional space of presences, evolving in relation ration to viewers’ perspectives, and their unsupervised methods of listening to inner ideas that rarely have a fixed course; activating forms of attention that escape closure.

Images By: Khahliso Matela

Still(ING) The Ocean

 O Sea, That Knowest Thy Strength

Effie Lee Newsome

Hast thou been known to sing,

        O sea, that knowest thy strength? 

Hast thou been known to sing?  

        Thy voice, can it rejoice? 

Naught save great sorrowing, 

        To me, thy sounds incessant

Do express, naught save great sorrowing. 

Thy lips, they daily kiss the sand,

        In wanton mockery. 

Deep in thine awful heart

        Thou dost not love the land. 

        Thou dost not love the land. 

        O sea, that knowest thy strength. 

“These sands, these listless, helpless, 

        Sun-gold sands, I’ll play with these, 

Or crush them in my white-fanged hands

        For leagues, to please

The thing in me that is the Sea, 

        Intangible, untamed, 

        Untamed and wild, 

        And wild and weird and strong!”

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 28, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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STILL(ING) The Ocean

The ocean and its waters seem omnipresent and omniscient; it appears to house fossils of long forgotten tales of journeying into the unknown, and deluges of sadness for souls that perished into its watery canyons.

It bears and moves shared memories of slaves drowned for their rebellion or sickness, the ocean in its stillness is where wet worlds inhabited by large and tiny organisms unbeknown to man thrive.

Water reflects the intertwined facets of human history, from cradle to graves which would soon be swallowed by rising levels as glaciers melt uncontrollably.

The ocean is that economic corridor that fuels he world’s capitalist machinery, water is a pathway from here to there, a transitory space where time leads to escapes to freedom, of eternal wandering, of discovering and rediscovering synergy spilled out of the ocean unto the open sands.