Following the successful showings in Berlin, Johannesburg and Bayreuth, SMAC Art Gallery is proud to present Oblique, a multi-media exhibition by the artist Abrie Fourie.

The project Oblique follows the publication of the artists’ monograph in 2011 in Berlin, Germany. The book marked the start of an ongoing and evolving project, with various exhibition and publication iterations. Stemming from a research grant the Abrie Fourie received from the Africa Centre (Cape Town, South Africa). Fourie used this seed funding to digitise and catalogue his film archive spanning several decades. This led to an opportunity to critically engage with this material anew and think through different ways of presenting and curating this body of work, alongside the development of new creative concerns.

Intrinsic to Fourie’s work is an interest in the sometimes volatile and complex relationship between photography and fiction, and the disjunction between memory and what we as viewers and consumers of photography project onto the medium. The exhibition presented at SMAC Art Gallery foregrounds this concern with the inclusion of an HD Film installation, edited as a series of slow changing slides of all the images included in the monograph. Central to this work is a narration by well known South African actor Marcel van Heerden of a text by the author and theorist Ivan Vladislavić. A series of mounted and framed photographs have also been selected specifically for the exhibition, many editioned for the first time.

Fourie’s work, which includes photographs taken in four continents, can be seen as a catalogue of memories, as an ongoing archive. He explores the familiar and intimate zones of home with the same interest and curiosity as he does the unknown. He states that this approach is “not so much defining a place, as circling the relationship between spaces, sign and self; it hints at that silent tension between absence and presence, abstraction and reality”.

In addition, a series of text works consisting of quotations from Vladislavić’s work, are inserted into the project and in the exhibition itself by way of wall texts, and in more public ways, ranging from postcards, leaflets and magazine advertising.

Project Curator: Storm Janse van Rensburg