Form as a Carrier of Memory
Art of Contemporary Africa, 28 January – 1 February
“In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”
— Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland
Form as a Carrier of Memory take's as its starting point novelist Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel Lowland - particularly calling on a quote from the text: “In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.” Lahiri’s proposition is utitlised as a working principle rather than a theme to illustrate so that the exhibition does not seek to reveal hidden histories or resolve meaning. Instead, it considers form as the site through which the unknown endures.
The curated presentation brings together work by Esther Mahlangu, Clint Strydom, Samuel Allerton, Gavin Rain, and Carol Cauldwell. Across painting, photography, and sculpture, the exhibition considers how form can hold what resists resolution—how memory, experience, and history persist without becoming fully legible.
Esther Mahlangu’s geometric abstractions operate as vessels of intergenerational knowledge. Rooted in Southern Ndebele visual culture, her practice carries memory through pattern, colour, and rhythm rather than narrative explanation. These works do not seek to translate cultural knowledge into text; instead, they sustain it through continuity and precision, allowing form itself to function as a living archive.
Clint Strydom’s photographic works engage the city as a layered psychological space. By collapsing multiple moments and viewpoints into single images, his practice reflects how urban environments are remembered rather than merely seen. Peripheral spaces, signage, and fleeting presences accumulate into images shaped as much by absence as by documentation—echoing Lahiri’s concern with what remains unreported, unrecorded, or overlooked.
Samuel Allerton’s sculptural figures explore the entanglement of human and environmental histories. Working in bronze, wood, and stone, his forms register vulnerability, endurance, and ecological memory through posture and material weight. These sculptures do not monumentalise experience; they hold it quietly, attuned to interconnectedness and long duration.
Gavin Rain’s pointillist paintings foreground perception as an active, temporal process. Images emerge only through distance and attentiveness, dissolving and resolving as the viewer moves. Meaning here is cumulative rather than immediate—an experience shaped by patience, restraint, and the refusal of instant clarity.
Carol Cauldwell’s bronze sculptures draw on narrative suggestion, folklore, and magic realism. Balancing humour and gravity, her works invite recognition without closure. Memory operates through association and allusion, allowing shared myths and personal histories to surface without being fixed.
Taken together, the works in Form as a Carrier of Memory echo Lahiri’s insight from The Lowland. In a world increasingly committed to explanation and exposure, these practices do not attempt to restore mystery, nor to resolve the unknown. Instead, they allow it to persist—embedded in form, carried through material, and sustained by attention over time.
