Richard Specs Ndimande, In-between, 2020
“Where Are We Going?”
A solo exhibition by Richard ‘Specs’ Ndimande
Front Gallery: 29.01.26 - 05.03.26
“Where Are We Going?” is Specs’ most illuminative inquiry into the human condition yet. In this body of work, his provocations are decidedly concerned with the nation’s cultural health, which is why, in its very orientation, the exhibition examines the seemingly amorphous shapes of South Africa’s political and cultural trajectories. Thus, to inquire, where are we going is to inevitably question the often mute and loud foundations on which modern South Africa is built. This is where Specs’ new exhibition draws its rhetorical, formal, thematic, and political strength from.
In this body of work, the famed truisms find material expression: the personal is indeed political. What emerges in this iteration is a sustained line of inquiry around how colonialism and its afterlives shape our temporal existence as a nation. This is to say that the exhibition reflects very deeply into our past, present, and future. It questions the significant historical moments that have defined modern South Africa and the pathos that encircles it. To this end, in oblique ways, the exhibition reconsiders the significance of the year 1994. Not only is it a year that speaks of his own “becoming into the world” as a human being, but also the year in which the advent of democracy found its most ardent expression. So, the exhibition proceeds to question: if the year 1994 is a boundary between past and present, then how do we begin to understand the political weight of this seemingly porous boundary that enables crises of the past to intrude into the present and future? More crucially, what then does this year mean for South Africa’s fragile memory culture?
These questions come to the fore with conviction in this new corpus characterized by sculptures, drawings, paintings, and photographs of anthropomorphic figures all meant to weave a complex picture and an equally unfathomable recent history.
Exhibition text by Thabang Monoa
