Form as a Carrier of Memory: Art of Contemporary Africa at Art Palm Beach

At this year's Art Palm Beach Art of Contemporary Africa presents Form as a Carrier of Memory, a curated selection of works by Esther Mahlangu, Clint Strydom, Samuel Allerton, Gavin Rain, and Carol Cauldwell. This presentation  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 utotlised  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. 

Across painting, photography, and sculpture, the works presented share a refusal of immediacy. They privilege accumulation over explanation, restraint over declaration, and attention over resolution. Memory is not narrated; it is carried. Meaning is not fixed; it emerges through time, perception, and embodied encounter.

In this sense, the exhibition mirrors Lahiri’s literary method. Just as The Lowland allows history to surface through its effects rather than its events, the works gathered here allow memory, inheritance, and experience to persist without becoming fully legible.

Clint Strydom’s practice operates at the intersection of photography, memory, and contemporary image construction. Working with photography and digital layering, he produces images that collapse multiple moments, viewpoints, and emotional registers into single frames. His works resist the conventions of documentary photography, favouring instead a subjective, atmospheric approach that reflects how urban environments are experienced rather than merely observed.

Shaped by early life on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast and later immersion in dense cities—most notably Johannesburg—Strydom’s visual language is attuned to light, rhythm, and peripheral detail. Signage, street architecture, fleeting figures, and overlooked spaces recur throughout his work, forming compositions that oscillate between movement and stillness. The city emerges not as a fixed site, but as a psychological and emotional terrain—remembered, layered, and continually reassembled.

Within the curatorial framework of Form as a Carrier of Memory, Strydom’s works engage memory as something unstable and cumulative. His images do not record singular moments; they hold the residue of time passing, of experiences overlapping. The unknown persists here through fragmentation and opacity—through what is suggested rather than clarified. Form becomes a means of carrying urban memory without resolving it, allowing absence, silence, and ambiguity to remain active within the image.

Esther Mahlangu’s practice stands as one of the most significant and sustained contributions to contemporary abstraction to emerge from Africa. Trained through intergenerational knowledge passed down by her mother and grandmother, Mahlangu learned Southern Ndebele mural painting and beadwork within a cultural system in which visual form functions as both aesthetic language and social knowledge. Long before her work entered museums or galleries, form operated as a mode of transmission—encoding lineage, status, belief, and continuity within pattern, colour, and architectural rhythm.

Working with geometric abstraction, Mahlangu was among the first artists to shift Southern Ndebele painting from domestic and communal spaces into the context of contemporary art. This transition was not a translation of tradition into a new medium, but an expansion of its formal and conceptual reach. Whether working on canvas, vessels, large-scale murals, or architectural surfaces, her practice maintains an unwavering commitment to precision, repetition, and chromatic clarity. The discipline of the hand—evident in her use of symmetry, line, and colour—anchors the work in continuity rather than individual expression.

Mahlangu’s abstraction resists categorisation as either decorative or symbolic. Instead, it operates as a rigorous visual system in which form carries meaning without narration. Her compositions do not illustrate stories or reference specific events; they sustain knowledge through structure. Pattern becomes a site of memory—held, reiterated, and refined across decades of practice. This insistence on formal integrity has positioned her work in dialogue with global histories of abstraction, while remaining grounded in Indigenous epistemologies.