blank is pleased to present the weight of a stone, a group exhibition, drawing together works by Belinda Blignaut, Donna Kukama, Tendai Mupita, Inga Somdyala, Jean-Marie Malan, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Pieter Paul Pothoven, Rowan Blem, Setlamorago Mashilo, and Zayaan Khan. The presentation is co-organised by Thobile Ndenze and Lemeeze Davids.

With a focus on materiality, the show initiates an exploration around different states of earth – the stoicism of cement, the richness of clay, the sturdiness of metal, the infinite darkness of the mine, the pigmentation of soil, the fragility of glass. ‘The medium is the message’, writes communication theorist Marshall McLuhan. What does it mean to give attention to the stuff of this world, and to allow the material to sit at the forefront of an encounter?

These earthen materials crack, crumble, bend, and reflect, and in some cases, conduct and transform, opening this inquiry into a space of potential and communication between states. The exhibition becomes an invitation to consider not only the tangible, material weight of the ‘stone’, but also the gravity of the situation.


CLAY:

Belinda Blignaut presents an excerpt from her studio, which carries a growing archive of 6 years worth of South African earth pigments and other foraged organic matter at the core of her practice. The shelf carries the weight of time and the slow process of foraging, which is echoed by Zayaan Khan’s installation of smoke-fired ceramic snakes and rock salt, that have become motif throughout the years of Khan’s work, but is now exhibited for the first time. Rowan Blem also presents a selection of ceramic slabs of wild clay, dug from the South Peninsula of Cape Town, with hand-mixed glazes containing cobalt, copper, or titanium.

METAL:

donna Kukama’s steel work is part-memorial, part-documentation, and it is referenced from one of the pages of numbers that were read and projected on-site during the durational performance, Chapter C: The Genealogy of Pain in 2016. In the performance, Kukama rhythmically counts the number of years of colonial occupation in Brazil while a Brazilian co-performer counts along in Portuguese. Tendai Mupita presents two works on paper, including elements such as gold leaf - “Each particle”, explains Mupita, “contains an entire universe and, reducing the elements in its smallest fragments”. Jean-Marie Malan folds aluminium into soft undulating waves, reminiscent of fabric - her body is present in the form of the work, as the sculpture is dictated by her arm span, strength, and stamina.

SOIL:

Inga Somdyala examines the idiom ‘a pound of flesh’ in a site-specific installation that spans the full exhibition space. Somdyala thinks through the weight of the phrase as ‘what is fair to demand, but ruthless to take’ in relation to his research around land in South Africa, while Setlamorago Mashilo confronts these topics of land, memory, and ruin with over 300 cast concrete maize sculptures. Produced via recipe and instruction, a set of six xenoliths by Nolan Oswald Dennis makes use of soil sourced from around Cape Town (a shrine on Signal Hill, a seaveld in the South Peninsula, a yard belonging to friends, a home that had newly been built in Walmer Estate, a library in Company Gardens, and a hole dug within the new Amazon Headquarters construction site).

STONE:

Pieter Paul Pothoven observes the history of the ancient lapis lazuli mines in the mountains of Northeast Afghanistan, which he visited in 2009 and subsequently produced a body of work that addresses the stone’s meaning, through its presence in the world and absence at its source. The dark void of the mine is the negative of the blue stone, now dispersed throughout the world.


Click here to view The weight of stone zine, including parallel content submitted by the participating artists.


— press
 
2022  Hopkins, Z. ‘The weight of a stone’ Digs up Dirt. frieze Magazine, UK. Published 6 September 2022.

2022  Beaton, H.B. EXPLORING MUTABLE FORMS OF EARTH WITH BLANK PROJECT’S LATEST EXHIBITION. Connect Everything Collective, South Africa. Published 8 September 2022.