The Gods Must Be Crazy

by Tshepo Sizwe Phokojoe

Curated by Mzoxolo Vimba

Mezzanine: 02.10.25 - 13.11.25

At the heart of The Gods Must Be Crazy lies a search for home. Home as land, as origin, as ancestry. In this pursuit, the project turns to the Sakman community, mountain dwellers, renowned herbalists, and carriers of knowledge clothed in Hessian fabric, whose living practices echo the wisdom of the Khois and Sans inhabiting Southern Africa. Their stories and silences speak to the extinction and endurance of ancient Bushmen wisdom, whispering of a home long fragmented, yet never lost.

This exhibition interlaces Sakman traditions with African mythology, particularly the cosmic struggle between Gaunab and Tsui-Goab. Gaunab, a signifier of drought and death, embodies the destructive forces of history and forgetting. Tsui-Goab, the supreme being, celestial God, and bringer of rain, embodies renewal and benevolence. Together, their tension mirrors the human condition: to live between rupture and repair, to search for light within shadow, and to recognize that both are necessary for balance.

But the work extends beyond myth, it is also a meditation on the origin of art itself. Without being religious, it gestures toward God as source: the giver of imagination, memory, and image. Art here becomes both altar and archive, a way of acknowledging that perspective is itself a gift, undeserved, overwhelming, perhaps even absurd. Indeed, the gods must be crazy to grant unworthy mortals the capacity to see, to feel, and to tell stories of such magnitude.

Through textile, and mixed media, the exhibition reimagines these narratives with Hessian cloth as a central motif, an emblem of continuity, vulnerability, and resilience. It becomes skin, shroud, and scripture: the material that binds the ancestral past to the contemporary body.

Ultimately, The Gods Must Be Crazy is an ode to ancestry and origin. It preserves fragments of vanishing knowledge, reclaims the mythologies of Gaunab and Tsui-Goab, and dares to pose the question: where is home? Is it in the land beneath our feet, in the myths that shape us, or in the inexplicable grace of creation itself?

This exhibition does not claim to answer, but to hold space for the question. To sit in the paradox of loss and abundance, of silence and song, of exile and return. It is a call to remember that art, like home, is both fragile and eternal, rooted in earth, yet always reaching toward the sky.

Ruby Wilson