Ad Hoc / Bridging

By windferreira / / Archive, Installations and Video Works / No Comments

South African National Gallery and Evil Son Project Space, Cape Town, 2012

How to look at everyday objects with foreign eyes?
After a six-weeks research period in the Western Cape, this question remains a challenge, especially when it comes to the point of presenting work as "foreign" artists to "local" publics. Two technical terms might serve as provisionary titles: 

AD HOC (Latin): For particular purpose only.
(1)    Improvised solution for a particular task or an unforeseen event
(2)    Process of shifting contexts to create new meanings
(3)    Exploration of first ideas in an open-ended process

Bridging: Term used in linguistics to describe the process of connecting two sentences via key words that belong to the same semantic field, without making this connection explicit. This process is performed by readers or listeners based on the hypothesis that they share the same reference system as the author or speaker. For example: "Mining has been battered by wildcat strikes. / The country’s biggest companies shed thousands of jobs." The definition, however, attempts to exclude ambiguities as part of a communication process. What if frictions occur between systems of reference that do not overlap? What exactly happens in the space marked by / ?

The double-solo exhibition Ad Hoc / Bridging inhabits two very different spaces: the oval room at the South African National Gallery, hosting an installation of small-scale models inspired by findings in historical documents and urban environment; and the new project space Evil Son in the neighbourhood Woodstock as site for a one-evening event and exhibition. The material for both exhibitions is exactly the same, but the  spaces provide two independent frameworks to test the work's issues and consistency, one time in a seemingly classical, the other time in a more casual way, making use of video, drawing, objects, text, and other media.

Developed during the Annex Residency Programme, supported by Goethe-Institut Südafrika.

Text and Images by windferreira

 

"The Art of Juxtaposition", tear-off publication as part of the exhibition