9 February - 1 March 2008

Daandrey Steyn

Hanje Whitehead

   

Rebecca Emery

 

Thelma Marais

In Milan Kundera’s novel, Ignorance, Irina asks Sylvie “Why are you still here?” after the revolution had taken place in Czechia in 1989. After many deliberations, they realise that their interrupted history cannot be repeated, but also the reconciliation with that part of them which stayed behind in Prague cannot take place in any predictable way. In Odyssey, when Ulysses comes back after twenty years, the Ithacans indeed remember him, but to his disillusionment without nostalgia.

Such nomadic themes of emigration, absence, memory, forgetting, nostalgia, indifference and the fragility of presence are explored in Us + I. The exhibition looks at the private self in conversation with itself: examining and verification of the social self; reflecting the self-conscious self; different psychological mutations of the self; distorted perceptions of the self; and memories of the self.