Post Coital Drip. 2025. Installation_ Unfired clay on aluminium disc, under a red-wine vinegar drip. 60 cm x 50 cm.

Musée de la Bête: On Mapping Bodily Territories

Date: 1 March 2025 to 1 April 2025
Nirox Sculpture Park, Johannesburg

In Musée de la Bête: On Mapping Bodily Territories, I investigate how colonial conquest fractured the inseparable relationship between body and land, drawing on African cosmological understandings that regard the two as one. Through the installations Lay of the Land: Loungescape and Post-Coital Drip, I use soft sculpture, clay, and material transformation to expose the processes of dehumanisation, dispossession, and commodification that shaped colonial histories and continue to influence contemporary identities. Central to the work is Fauna, a figure inspired by Sara Baartman, whose fragmented body becomes a metaphorical landscape through which histories of violence, ownership, and resistance are mapped. The project develops the concept of “thingification to commodify,” extending scholarship on colonial dehumanisation to show how people, land, fauna, and flora were transformed into exploitable resources within systems of power. By reactivating Indigenous Knowledge Systems and relational ontologies, the exhibition offers a decolonial framework for reclaiming embodied connections to land, memory, and identity.

All photos by Paul Trieb.