PROXIMATE WORLD navigates the porous boundaries where certainty dissolves into possibility. 

Drawing on ideas of interconnectedness, intimacy and nearness, the exhibition proposes spaces and futures that exist beyond our immediate grasp — worlds that are not wholly separate from our own, but adjacent to it, close enough to touch. These worlds are informed by memories and lived experience, alongside ancient histories that preceded them. 

Eight artists — Dineo Ponde, Cathy Abraham, Ulriche Jantjes, Nazeer Jappie, Kay-Leigh Fisher, Selwyn Steyn, Zenaéca Singh and Sophia van Wyk - were invited to respond to the provocation of the speculative and ‘other worlding’, where ‘other worlding’ is thought of as a practice of imagining and inhabiting alternative realities. Through fictive, ritual-based and rigorous conceptual framing, each artist explores the permeable borders between the tangible and the speculative. 

The exhibition is an invitation to reconsider perceptions and assumptions that are often unquestioned while teasing out new ways of imagining our relationships with cultural, ecological and socio-political spheres. 

In her work, Ponde conjures up creatures that she thinks of as “little hauntings”, autonomous beings that are born out of liminal spaces, suspended in time and existing through their own agencies. Executed in black ink and sometimes threaded on paper, Ponde’s works are traces of the past and fantasies of the future. They are somatic embodiments of experiences and memories but always existing from the perspective of the collective.

These hauntings find their echo in the repetitive gestures that shape Abraham's practice, where trauma becomes a generative force traced through deliberate mark-making. Rooted in the exploration of the structures of numbers, Abraham’s work considers boundaries between reality, fantasy and illusion. The psychological terrains Abraham maps through repetition extend into the physical landscapes that anchor Jantjes' explorations of place and belonging. For Jantjes, the landscape is both a personal and psychological terrain on which experiences are enacted, sites where histories are continuously unfolding. Drawing on reference materials including videos of long drives to Elim, a small town on the Agulhas Plain, Jantjes paints open landscapes, often with blurred ghostly figures, congregating, hidden in the folds. 

While Jantjes excavates personal histories embedded in the landscape, Jappie attempts to reform and re-imagine worldly fragments, placing them in a context outside of time. His paintings weave together the poetics of deciphering artifice and the authentic, transforming events into investigations of what lies beneath the surface. Working with a painter's sensitivity to colour and form, he creates works that function as critical interventions that speculate on world events. By exploring how regnant narratives can reshape and alter reality, Jappie amplifies contradictions and reveals the absurdities that often hide in plain sight. 

This interrogation of surface and depth finds parallel expression in Fisher's approach to family archives, where photographic truth becomes a site of possible excavation. Fisher's work explores memory and identity through the power of image-making. She revisits physical photographs passed down through generations, engaging with the complex and often contradictory stories these images hold. Her paintings are filled with motion and instability, with figures sometimes appearing distorted with multiple limbs or hovering faces. These visual disruptions speak to something essential about how memory works—not as fixed records, but as shifting, ghostly presences that refuse stasis. 

The instability Fisher reveals in memory's visual record resonates with Steyn's vision of a city caught between its present form and speculative futures. Steyn's work takes Cape Town's rapidly changing urban landscape as its starting point, creating vignettes that pair paintings of the city's current reality with digitally generated geometries that suggest possible spatial futures. Through his work, he creates a space for inhabiting the uncertainties that follow transformation. By highlighting these ambiguous futures alongside paintings of the present rooted in architecture and urban life, he questions the imagination of ways of being and belonging.

Drawing from sugar's historical weight, Singh’s work creates space where colonial legacies crystallise into fragile, contemporary forms. She uses the material to examine colonial legacies and their lasting effects on indentured women and communities. Often, beginning with found frames, Singh replaces their glass with sheets of sugar glass, then places photographic collages that combine colonial imagery with family photographs within these fragile structures. The vulnerability and tenuous connection between desire, fear, visibility and invisibility, explored through her work, is reflected in Van Wyk's investigation of emotional fragility, where intimate relationships become sites of both wounding and healing. Van Wyk explores the complex behaviours we learn around intimacy, love, shame, and trauma. Through a playful visual process, she attempts to reconstruct and rethink what she calls our "love default"—the unconscious patterns that shape how we relate to others. Her approach is intuitive, drawing inspiration from nature as both subject and method. 

Through different approaches, brought together through painting, drawing and sculpture, the artists in PROXIMATE WORLD invite us to explore the spaces between what we know and what we can imagine. - Nkgopoleng Moloi

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