Words: Belinda Mountain
One of South Africa’s most renowned contemporary artists is now exhibiting at Norval Foundation in Tokai. Heliostat: Wim Botha is a brand-new exhibition exploring the transformation of light and it will run until 22 January next year.
Norval Foundation Director Elana Brundyn says they’ve been obsessed with Botha’s art for a long time: “The way he manipulates your experience as a viewer, and his special ability to catch you off-guard is something that’s really special”. Brundyn is excited about this opportunity to present his work to the wider public: “He’s an artist of international acclaim, and it’s only right that the South African public now has access to so much of his work.”
What to expect
Perhaps it’s best to start by explaining what a “heliostat” is, in Botha’s own words. “A heliostat… is a fantastic device that’s currently used as a very high-tech application but also in the old clockmakers’ skills, whereby a mechanical device tracks the movement of the sun… as the earth rotates”. By tracking the path of the sun and reflecting that light onto a single point it singularly focusses that ever-changing, ever-moving element onto a single idea. “It’s huge in the sense that you make the sun stand still,” says Botha.
Think innovative materials combined with references to antiquity, as well as the Renaissance. The theme that unites all work in Botha’s exhibition is refraction, understood in optics as “the transformation of light by splitting into visible rainbow spectrum or distortion through material such as glass or a prism”. Botha uses this principle literally, by applying dichroic filters to glass surfaces throughout the exhibition, and metaphorically, for the transformation and manipulation of canonical artworks and symbols of Afrikaans identity.
Owen Martin, chief curator, Norval Foundation, says it’s a privilege to be hosting the artist. “Botha…speaks to ideas and histories that have global relevance, reflecting the Norval Foundation’s own aim to be engaged with culture locally and internationally”. While some of the foundation’s shows intend to fill the historical gaps of the 20th-century, Martin says that this is one of those shows that displays the best of what’s happening in our present moment.
Norval Foundation
http://www.norvalfoundation.org/
