TRADE-OFF / BEYOND BORDERS Deepest Darkest Gallery CT Feb 12 – 22 March www.deepestdarkestart.com
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n addition to our Investec Cape Town Art Fair debut with award-winning lens artist Barry Salzman’s dual projects The Way We See the World and The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim on view at Booth A6, Deepest Darkest is proud to present the next instalment of our exciting 2022 gallery programme, Trade Off by AD-Reflex, and Beyond Borders by Nyambo Masamara on view at the gallery. Trade-Off, AD-Reflex’s third showing at Deepest Darkest centres on Agbogbloshie, a major hub for e-waste dumping and ‘recycling’ on the outskirts of central Accra, Ghana. The primarily informal practise sees these ‘recyclers’ manually burning plastic carcases to extract profitable metals, such as copper and wires. While crucial to their livelihoods, the significant impact on both the health and environment for both the recylcers themselves and the surrounding informal settlements are a constant and real threat. Soil and water in the surrounding area indicate the presence of toxic contaminants such as arsenic, lead and mercury. With over 50 million tonnes of e-waste produced every year, its management remains an inherently global issue, inequitably addressed. The works are a whole ‘palimpsest’ of human effort and history. In ancient Greece, a ‘palimpsest’ was a parchment written upon twice, provoking the idea of vanishing words, memories, and stories, and implying a process of layering and retrieving. ADReflex’s entire sensibility appears to be stretched between irreconcilable extremes. In their hands, history and fact, beauty and despair, turn out to be disturbingly malleable and imprecise. They draw on diverse sources that might provide the mythical structure to underpin their imagery, from the recycling efforts in Agbogbloshie, Greek mythology, Caravaggio, Francis Bacon and Twenty First Century technologies, all co-exist freely, and are in perpetual transformation. The ‘palimpsest’ speaks to a cohabitation of seemingly alien narratives folding and
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unfolding in dialogue, disclosing a state of duality, where we feel both aware and unaware, empowered and disempowered. Through extensive layering, their work borders on the ‘alchemical’ where no clear distinction can be drawn between the painterly and the digital. Painting clashes with technology in the form of 3D-modelling,
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