LIZA GROBLER VOICES FROM A DIVIDED FOUNTAIN
Image courtesy of Seretse Moletsane
LIZA GROBLER VOICES FROM A DIVIDED FOUNTAIN 19 – 26 August 2020
After more than 100 days of lockdown, an event in which each visitor is the lead character in their own experience seems like a gentle way to re-introduce the experiential nature of art and highlight inter-connectedness (while limiting the threat of infection). ____ In a vacant building in industrial Woodstock, Liza Grobler has created an installation project, open to all and free of charge. Though inspired by the derelict town of Deelfontein in the dusty Groot Karoo, Voices from a Divided Fountain is a tale that exists between history and nature, time and space. The artworks are part of a story of nomadic hunters, an enchanted hotel, a lonely ghost and mythical beasts, but also one of a great battle between the British Empire and a group of hot-headed Afrikaans farmers. The main character, however, is the ancient Karoo landscape, which holds the secrets of countless generations in her womb. ____ The event is a time-based immersive experience which entices all senses and takes the viewer on a physical discovery from one moment to the next. Visitors can pre-book their preferred slot and have one hour to negotiate the space. Each visitor can determine their own pace of moving through the experience. *Booking is necessary, as are face masks. *4 visitors allowed at a time. Email lena@everard.co.za to get the venue details and to secure your slot. Installation images courtesy of Michael Hall
The Longing of a Station Master Glass seed beads on board 100 x 100 cm
The Longing of a Station Master details
These and following pages: Deelfontein Drawings Mixed media on archival print 16.8 x 21.7 cm
Beaded Portal with Sage Glass seed beads on board 100 x 100 cm
Beaded Portal with Sage detail
WALKING AMONG THE GHOSTS OF DEELFONTEIN Olga Speakes
On arrival with a group of artist friends, she found the place where the passage of time and slow transformation of history into memory found its literal embodiment. There, it seemed, even a chance visitor could experience time’s passing. It reflected in light the ghostly movement of the wind on one’s skin, in the echo of footsteps among the dilapidated structures, in the slow but visible advance of Nature taking back what warring and enterprising men have taken away from her. The rubble that was once the Deelfontein Yeomanry Hospital is an abandoned outpost of Anglo-Boer War history from the early twentieth century. Liza Grobler, a Cape Town artist, was keen to explore the space, with its tales of unfulfilled dreams and accounts of ghostly violin playing often heard emanating from the ruin by the residents in the surrounding countryside. Walking among the building’s remains, on the cusp between history and nature, time and space, it was moments like this that resonated with the artist. They drew her in to explore, through her own process, the otherworldly presences that seemed to inhabit the place. The atmosphere at Deelfontein both enticed her and filled her with a sense of foreboding, but she could not escape its pulling force and a sense of connection with the invisible threads holding the place in their web. These presences and connections, which are often left unacknowledged, have the power to hold us in their dreamy embrace. Occasionally, they reveal their existence in the encounters like the one in Deelfontein. They are like someone else’s memories of the violin-like singing of the wind, of shadows travelling across cracked walls and peeling masonry, of whispering grasses taking over the battleground of time and history in this deserted ruin in the remote Karoo landscape. In her practice, Grobler allows herself to be guided not by the parameters of genres and materials but by the possible interactions that emerge when the presence of these other worlds is acknowledged and allowed to come into her own creative process; not in order to prescribe her actions but to enrich hers and her viewers’ understanding of the visible and social world around us.
The abandoned remains of Deelfontein speak, in hushed soft voices, of former glory, aspirations of grandeur, lost hopes. They witnessed the futility of these vanities, and watched them turning into dust, environmentally and historically, as time worked its slow unyielding power over the man-made creations. It would be easy to make connections between the ghostly remains and the socio-political history of the land as well as environmental concerns and agendas. The artist does acknowledge these in her work, they are inescapable in today’s South Africa, but it is also the creative power of the encounter and of the poetic – not only political forces – that are important to her. Grobler’s practice seems to be driven by the desire to connect with the psychological, emotional realities that permeate our daily lives but are not always clearly manifest in the physical world or social interactions. Some of her projects in the past have touched on such phenomena as dreaming or colour theories, psychological and cultural aspects of language formation, co-creation of environments through collaborative and interactive artworks. Her time at Deelfontein brought back memories of childhood – those times she spent learning and singing traditional Afrikaans songs which, in the context of our present-day knowledge of apartheid history, could be seen as embarrassing manifestations of culture’s complicity with the regime. These are also slowly turning to dust together with the disintegrating pages that carry them. Like the broken memories of Deelfontein, with its Anglo-Boer war history and subsequent failed dreams of reinvention as a luxury resort, they are not to be saved by the artist from either oblivion or disintegration; rather the memories and ghosts are being invited into her world as visual traces, remnants, dusty particles of history that rise as a cloud as soon as we step into their dreamy domain, filling our imagination before settling down, perhaps never to be disturbed again.
These and following pages: Deelfontein Drawings Mixed media on archival print 16.8 x 21.7 cm
Image courtesy of Seretse Moletsane
FAK Embroideries Thread on hand-spun cotton 165 x 139 cm
FAK Embroideries details
Sheep Songs Glass seed beads on board 100 x 165 cm
Sheep Songs details
Incantation Granite, gold leaf, palm leaf Dimensions variable
FAK Embroideries Thread on hand-spun cotton 178 x 139 cm
Image courtesy of Seretse Moletsane
LIZA GROBLER (b. 1974 Cape Town, South Africa)
Through her participatory environments, Liza Grobler explores the interactions between the physical presence of the viewer, the space in which the work is experienced and the constructed form. Her installations explore the relationship between inner and outer landscape as an experiential rather than a conceptual space. The viewer is encouraged to travel with her into an imaginary world where everything is in flux and anything is possible. The objects, images and installations are constructed through collaboration, interaction and exchange. Gallery exhibitions, projects and interventions are integrated components that cross-reference one another. Grobler has attended residencies in Norway, Finland, the United States, Mexico, Switzerland, Belgium and France. Her work is included in numerous corporate and private collections, including the Francis Greenburger Collection (USA), Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium), Benetton Collection (Italy) and Nando’s International (UK, Australia and USA). To date, she has had a number of acclaimed solo exhibitions and initiated numerous sitespecific and collaborative interventions in South Africa and abroad.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017
100, AIUD, Romania INC Art Collection Celebrate 10 years, Haitian American Museum of Chicago, Chicago, USA Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with Everard Read, Cape Town, SA 2017-8 S mokey Signals from the Groot Karoo, MAPSA Richmond and Everard Read, Cape Town, SA Romulus Rebus: Imaging Empires, Priest Gallery, Johannesburg, SA African Abstraction, Everard Read Gallery, London, SA SocialFabrics SA, finissage Cape Town, SA
Disobedient Landscapes, Uitstalling, Ghent, Belgium Voices from a Divided Fountain, site-specific installation at 139 Albert, Woodstock, in association Everard Read, Cape Town, SA a rainbow in my pocket, Everard Read, Cape Town, SA En die groen gras groei daar om, Aardklop, Potchefstroom, SA Ripples of Perception, CIRCA Gallery Johannesburg, SA Maybe Time Can Fold, CIRCA Cape Town, Cape Town, SA Barbed Wire Paradise is exactly where you are, Investec Cape Town Art Fair (Unframed Section), with Everard Read, Cape Town, SA 2015 If you go down to the woods today, Everard Read, Cape Town, SA SELECTED AWARDS & RESIDENCIES Playlist, Everard Read, Johannesburg, SA 2018 Residency Unlimited, New York, New York 2017 Smokey Signals from the Groot Karoo; project coordinator and SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS collaborator 2016 Laureate of AIR African Centre Residency, Khoj International 2020 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, with Everard Read, Cape Town, SA Artists’ Association, New Delhi, India TINY, Everard Read, Johannesburg, SA 2015 Nominated for Helgaard Steyn National Award for contemporary Matereality, IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town, SA painting Hard, but Soft, curated by Pierre le Riche, Glen Carlou, Short-listed for Headlands Centre Residency, San Francisco Stellenbosch, SA Residency at Guapamacátaro Centre for Art & Ecology, Mexico 2019 hybrid narratives, hybrid histories, U10 Art Space, Belgrade, Serbia Site-specific commission for Nando’s US, Chicago Verf dit swart / Paint it Black, Modern Art Projects South Africa, Social Fabric SA Residency in Port Elizabeth, SAMIL Aardklop Festival, Potchefstroom, SA 2014 Selected Artist for World Design Capital Cape Town, project #522 Forward? Forward! Forward…., Stellenbosch University centenary for public art exhibition, US Museum, Stellenbosch, SA Cité des Arts Residency, Paris CONTEXT Art Miami, with Everard Read, Miami, USA 2013 Shortlisted for Woordfees Visual Arts Award, Stellenbosch Winter, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, SA 2010 ABSA l’Atelier top 100 (also 2001, -5, -6, -8 & -9) 2018 Buffer Zone, video art night, Platform Project Space, Vaasa, Finland 2009 Frans Masereel Printmaking Residency, Kastelee, Belgium Common Threads, international textile exhibition, 99 Juta, 2006 Pro-Helvetia Residency, Altes Spital, Solothurn, Switzerland Johannesburg, SA Short-listed for Commonwealth Arts and Craft Award FLUX, Free State Festival, Bloemfontein, SA 2005 Selected for AVA Public Sculpture Competition In the Forest of the Night, Everard Read, Johannesburg, SA Selected for 3rd Brett Kebble Art Competition Winter Show, Everard Read Cape Town, SA 2004 ARTOMI International Artists’ Residency, Hudson, New York, USA