Between my I’s : Tussen my oë is the first major solo museum exhibition of South African-born artist Marlene Steyn, hosted at the University of Stellenbosch Sasol Museum in conjunction with the Stellenbosch Woordfees ‘24. Steyn is the Woordfees ‘24, artist of the year.

First, there are the dots. The particles of light, the occasional granularity of sight, as if for a split second atoms are visible, as if the pores of artworks have expanded beyond the brushstroke towards the pixel. Then, there’s the dot above the i. The hovering head replicating the human anatomy, expanding towards ego, and abstracting as pupil. The pupil looks intently. Its existence reflects the process of seeing and being seen. It becomes plural, shifting the singularity of first person identity to the bifocal gaze of a pair of eyes. In Afrikaans, eyes is oë. The umlaut—the two dots ¨—is suspended above the vowel, above the word. The dots represent a pair of eyes. They visually recreate meaning beyond the denotative function of the word itself.

Eyes are everywhere in Marlene Steyn’s fifteenth solo exhibition, between my i’s : tussen my oë (a bilingual, homonymic pun hinging on the translation of between my eyes). As a partially retrospective show that includes both new and previous work from the past six years, one is tempted to harness eyes as metaphor for the overview of an already prolific career. Yet this risks glibness and the author’s gaze recalls that, in this ambitious series of paintings and ceramics, eyes enforce their own presence. They multiply across faces. Two pairs of eyes. Three pairs of eyes. An infinite number of eyes. Eyes insert themselves into an array of body parts. They could be a nose, a mouth. They could be breasts. Eyes are prominent, up front. They are also ghostly, emanating eerily from the background, behind and through other faces, animals, and objects. They become the negative space between elbows and chest, the bodies of swans, the inner maw of crocodile jaws, ominously open to attack. Yes, eyes achieve symbolic value through their literal prevalence in Steyn’s body of work, but this very pervasiveness also complicates their status as orbs, organs, and objects. If eyes exceed their own boundaries and constantly redefine how they can be perceived, eyes are not limited to being eyes, but become the space between themselves too. The space between eyes is more eyes.

The interval between is, of course, central to Steyn’s body of work. In her paintings, for example, background and foreground are often layered to offer an interplay of liminal scenes blinking in and out of focus. Similarly, in her ceramic sculptures, ropes of clay sketch three-dimensional forms in air. The negative spaces between the concrete lines or material shapes are equally important as the outlines of the sculptures themselves. Physical presence and open space, foreground and background, object and that which is in-between, collaborate in the articulation of these works, how they hover in a gentle leakage of mediums.

Eyes allude to this fluidity of the in-between too. Eyes are wet. They leak. They weep, allowing them to exceed their own boundaries. Accenting this liquid ability, Steyn’s manipulation of eyes—their plurality in her work, their reproduction across canvases and in clay—capitulate on the metamorphic quality of eyes as they seep across any kind of representative function, fold into the background, and re-emerge differently shaped. Here one common transformation is from eyes to eggs. Fried eggs take on humoristic faces. One yolk smokes a cigarette. Egg white faces feature creepy, yellow orbs for eyes, while another yolk emanates from inside a perfect, circular set of red lips. Steyn is having fun, is being playful, for sure, but this work is also serious in scope, clearly citing the French author Georges Bataille’s 1928 novella, L’Histoire de l’Œil (or Story of the Eye).

In Bataille’s provocative, surreal narrative world, a pair of lovers fixate on pleasure as formulated through circular, orb-like constructs—a soft-boiled egg, a bowl of milk, the testicles of a bull defeated in a fight. This transposition of a sequence of moist, round objects culminates dramatically, in the book, in the eroticization of a murdered monk’s eye. Morality aside, the interrelation of egg and eye is obvious. In an essay about this novella, “La Métaphore de l’Œil” (or “Metaphor of the Eye”), Roland Barthes argues that there are two intersecting, metaphorical strands that run through the text, one preoccupied with spheres and the other with wetness as a form of transition and malleability. For him, the correlation of metaphors—that is, the boiled egg still runny on the inside, or the hardening or objectification of an eye through its violent removal from the human body—establishes a network of exchange that moves beyond the literal towards an erosion of determinate meaning, of fixed and definable imagery. This much is true of Steyn’s eye to egg ratio too. In her work, there is also a blurring of visual language that complicates the veracity of what is seen and mitigates the literal in a dreamscape of possible imaginaries. Yet instead of the egg becoming an eye, as with Bataille, in Steyn’s work, the eye becomes an egg.

Here one could quip: what comes first, the chicken eye or the egg? Jokes aside, Steyn’s inversion is a significant one. Couched in the cruelty of Bataille’s mutilation, the egg is upgraded to an eye just to be blinded, showcasing a form of physicality that might be perceived as sensual but is deprived of the sensory. In Steyn’s oeuvre, sight maintains a fertile cycle of receptive and generative capability. As the eye transforms into an egg with its innate life-giving force, the idea of omnipresent and all-seeing eyes loops back to and expands forward towards the reproductive potential of the symbolic egg. This vibrant transfiguration, which even posits the egg as an eye, produces a rhythm of constant looking and constant creating. This vibrancy is embodied, even erotic. Yet it also results in a dynamic formulation of visual arts practice, as it is directed simultaneously inwards to its own making and outwards to its visual status as artwork—a constant reverberation of seeing and being seen.

Steyn’s paintings and ceramic installations make eye contact with their viewers. The ongoing proliferation of eyes—strengthened by their reproductive prowess as eggs—look out from the canvases and sculptures, and position themselves as the subjects of their own gaze. Now the exhibition title, between my i's : tussen my oë, expands its potential meaning beyond the level of playfulness, and beyond the ubiquity of eyes. The slippage and interrelationship between a plural form of first person pronoun (i’s) and sight (oë or eyes) challenge preconceptions of who gets to be and who gets to see at an exhibition. Is Marlene Steyn as artist offering a visual rendition of the network between her selves and sights? Or are the artworks asserting themselves beyond their function as creative objects to be hung on walls, to be mounted, suspended, and installed? Do these artworks also look back? This exhibition invites viewers to meet the artworks’ gaze. At this exhibition, viewers need to multiply their eyes, to look as a form of reciprocation, to enter the world of this show by both receiving and giving interpretation and signification in equal measure. Viewers need to engage these artworks with magnificent, yellow yolk eyes. They need to throw their eyeballs at the artworks and catch them in the in-between space of the colon’s two dots : as they bounce back.