Selwyn Steyn: Static Land Stills
Tomorrows/Today TT5
Rooted in architecture, spatial thinking, and visual theory, South African artist Selwyn Steyn’s pictorial practice explores how built environments in his home country carry memory, power, and ideology, and how life continues to unfold within spatial structures shaped by the legacies of apartheid.
Titled STATIC LAND STILLS, Steyn’s project for Tomorrows/Today 2026 brings together a new body of paintings that engage with the urban landscape of Johannesburg and the wider Gauteng region. Rendered in dust-laden tones of muted orange, pale brown, and grey, the city appears immediately recognisable yet subtly estranged: austere, stripped of spectacle or consolation. Roads, bridges, municipal buildings, quarries, peripheral fields, and dense urban grids recur across the small-format paintings, which are installed in a dense grid built in cardboard - the same material architects use to construct maquettes. Here, however, the structure evokes the logic of a surveillance control room.
Within this palimpsest of images, which from a distance reads as a uniform visual texture, the works function like parallel screens. The viewer becomes a watcher, mirroring the artist’s own condition of simultaneous belonging and displacement: being from a place while looking at it from elsewhere. Steyn’s paintings draw on cinematic language, suggesting monitored scenes captured in paused frames, with time unfolding aleatorily in multiple directions rather than linearly. What emerges is not a coherent narrative, but a sequence of snapshots, each of which holds the viewer in suspension, pointing toward a reality that exceeds what is shown. While the gaze may appear objective and expressionless, it ultimately reveals an emotional register: there is no evidence or explanation, but atmosphere and texture, operating optically and poetically.
Steyn sources his imagery through mediated means: satellite views, archival footage, documentaries, and online videos. He uses distance as a method, resulting in a gaze that floats above the city: neither controlling nor omniscient, but tentative, searching, and slightly dislocated. What emerges is not a portrait of place, but a texturised inward landscape shaped by unease and latent expectation.
This body of work was developed in close dialogue with A Season in Paradise by Afrikaner poet and activist Breyten Breytenbach, whose account of returning to South Africa after thirteen years of exile captures a country shaped by unresolved social injustice and contradiction. Breytenbach’s writing moves between tenderness and disillusion, proximity and estrangement –conditions that resonate strongly with Steyn’s painterly approach. Like Breytenbach, Stey currently living in Paris– feels physically removed from South Africa, yet emotionally and imaginatively bound to it.
Alongside the paintings, Steyn presents a sound work titled Static Land Stills, which shares its name with the overall project. Composed of multiple voices, the work privileges atmosphere over legibility, just like the visual pieces. A group of fellow artists, writers, and curators were invited to read a single line from a poem, novel, or song reflecting the spatial qualities of South Africa, drawing on authors such as J.M. Coetzee, Aimé Césaire, Rosa Lyster, Abdullah Ibrahim, and David Goldblatt, among others. These fragments are edited into a composite field of sound that mirrors the mosaic structure of the painting installation. The city, here, is no longer seen, but imagined through these voices.
_ Mariella Franzoni