Givan Lötz, This Hiss, 2026
Notes from the Fire
A solo exhibition by Givan Lötz
Main Gallery: 12.03.26 - 23.04.26
Welcome to the Pyrocene — or rather, what remains of it. In ever-widening circles, the Fire engulfed everything… or nearly everything.
What stands before us is the long afterburn: a landscape shaped by heat, loss, and imperfect survival.
In this work of visual speculative fiction, Givan Lötz imagines a time after time — a feral future in which the modern myth of progress has failed. Knowledge has not simply vanished; it has been scorched, fragmented, and unevenly preserved. What was once accumulated is now scattered. What was once stable has melted, cooled, and hardened into strange forms. Attempts to rekindle meaning flare briefly, only to be buried beneath new layers of ash. The further one digs, the deeper the unknowing becomes.
The works in Notes from the Fire appear as carbonised artefacts, petrified remnants, and half-forgotten memory-scapes arrested in wax paintings. Excavated from the imagined sites of the former Cape of Smoke, these fragments form a broken catalogue of a Life System once waged in the Age of the Pyrocene. Their surfaces are cryptic, their functions opaque. Deep meaning has burned away, leaving behind only traces, disturbingly familiar yet wonderfully strange.
Our guide through this scorched archive is a series of cast tablature, inscribed in a language we know only as ‘Ömen'. It is a script without translation, a semiotics of warning rather than explanation. Herein lie their lives and afterlives. These objects do not tell stories so much as they smoulder with implication.
While Notes from the Fire gestures toward the destructive force of nature and the familiar consequences of human hubris in an era of accelerating climate collapse, it resists complete moral closure. Instead, the exhibition holds space for endurance. Within these enigmatic remnants, we recognise something stubbornly human: the impulse to mark, to remember, to leave a signal in the ashes.
