Group Exhibition
8 May - 21 June 2025

Exhibition Opening: Thursday 8 May 2025
Exhibition Closure: Saturday 21 June 2025 Share Facebook Twitter

WHATIFTHEWORLD is proud to present The Unspoken Landscape, a group exhibition uniting eleven Southern African artists across two generations: Mia Chaplin, Wezile Harmans, Dale Lawrence, Strauss Louw, Maja Marx, Michele Mathison, Ben Orkin, Chris Soal, Inga Somdyala, Pierre Vermeulen, and Bindi Vora (UK).

This exhibition brings together artists whose work reveal a profound sensitivity to material and process. As a gallery based in South Africa, we have observed a leaning amongst artists from our region towards harvesting and reclaiming unexpected materials and the unconventional manipulation of the familiar. Thread, soil, seawater, coffee, sandpaper, cement, wire, and packing tape assume an alchemical quality in the hands of the artists that transmute humble materials into observations on a diverse range of subjects, from migration and environmental concerns to female subjectivity. The interplay of these materials and the social context in which these works have been produced share some of the sensibilities of Italy’s own Arte Povera, an art movement born initially from economic instability and political turmoil, but one that has continued to shape contemporary art practice. With its complex socio-political landscape and distinctive materiality, the exhibiting artists resonate deeply with this sensibility.

Soal, Lawrence, and Mathison draw our attention to the margins through granite offcuts, packaging tape, and worn sandpaper disks—materials discarded from the chain of production and consumption. Their engagement with the remnants of industrial processes and the materials’ “lived experience” underscores a poignant truth: we are defined as much by what we discard as by what we desire. At first glance, plastic packing tape, sanding disks, and granite appear to sit at opposite ends of the material spectrum: one is disposable, the other ancient. Yet in his work Roadcut, Dale Lawrence compresses plastic tape into a sculptural mimicry of geological strata—the very layers from which fossil fuels are extracted. In doing so, he reveals a startling loop: matter and energy can never be fully destroyed, only transformed.

It is a sobering reflection that the total material output of human activity—referred to as ‘anthropogenic mass’—is projected to surpass all global living biomass by 2026. On average, each person is estimated to contribute an amount of anthropogenic mass equivalent to their own body weight every week.

The work of Mathison, Lawrence, and Soal are observations on environmental change, the enduring toxicity of “disposable” materials, and the potential for rebirth through the re-engineering of what was once cast aside. This duality is apparent in Chris Soal’s sculpture Facet. Drawing inspiration from the monumental mine dumps of his native Johannesburg, the work appears shaped by natural erosion. Yet paradoxically, it is a cumulative gesture of collective labour—assembled from materials that have passed through many hands before arriving in the artist’s studio. Facet becomes not only a compositional study but a meditation on collective labour, and the profound environmental and social costs of the city’s mining legacy.

Soal’s reclamation of used workshop materials resonates with the practice of extracting mineral material from mine dumps. An estimated 420 tonnes of “invisible gold,” valued at $24 billion, lie buried in the Witwatersrand’s dumps—once deemed worthless. Recovering overlooked value echoes a recurring motif in Soal’s work that aligns with a central tenet of the Arte Povera movement: the political and poetic potential of otherwise ‘humble materials’.

Like Soal, Michele Mathison muses on the impact of extractive industrial processes on the landscape, informed by his lived experience between the urban centres of Harare and Johannesburg. In both cities, the informal economy of salvage runs parallel to official trade. Inspired by the textures and objects salvaged in survivalist economies, Distension XV builds on themes first explored in Mathison’s early installation, Refuge (2014), where tent-like structures made from steel and woven plastic evoked conditions of impermanence and displacement. In Distension XV, this sensibility is re-articulated through the use of plaster. This ‘sculptural’ frottage is created by taking an impression from the plastic mesh fabric often used in make-shift housing in the sprawling informal settlements surrounding Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Tracing the movements of citizens as they navigate urban landscapes, Wezile Harmans’ drawings serve as both record and testimony to the resilience of itinerant populations who carve out paths between the official borders of neighbouring territories Zimbabwe and South Africa. Interwoven with handwritten texts, Harmans’ works become cyphers of conversations and confidences—gathered through interviews with the many travellers he has interviewed across South Africa’s cities, towns, and borderlands.

Sharing an affinity with the pathfinding in Harmans’ work, Ben Orkin explores how queer communities create networks in the “in-between” urban landscapes of cities. In How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: Second Approach, Orkin constructs a chain of ceramic sculptures that evoke abstracted bodies, fantastical buildings, and viral forms. These pieces are interconnected yet not physically touching; their glossy, transparent glazes create a protective and prophylactic layer that underscores their tension and isolation.

Maja Marx began her career by intervening in landscapes, using stones to create and rearrange text on South African hillsides. Twenty years after these preliminary monumental interventions, “reading” the landscape as a form of text remains a central departure point for her observational colour field paintings. While Marx’s work is informed by Indigenous Southern African painting techniques, it also shares a kinship with the sensibilities of Arte Povera artists such as Giuseppe Penone (Propagazione), Carla Accardi, and Giulia Napoleone.

Shaped by geography and locality, Marx draws on the predominantly female Litema tradition of painting or scratching into the surfaces of clay and mud walls in traditional Southern African dwellings. “Litema”—meaning “text” or “ploughed land” in Sesotho—is a form of Sesotho mural art characterized by decorative and symbolic geometric patterns. Basotho women create litema on the outer walls and interiors of homesteads through engraving, painting, relief moulding, and mosaic. Marx’s paintings contain visual echoes of agricultural plough lines and curved rock strata, reflecting her deep interest in observing and reading the “lines” of the landscape. This is further informed by her use of botanical and mineral references.

Also influenced by geographic specificity and patterns within the landscape, Inga Somdyala surveys the terrain from a long historical perspective, using soil and clay sourced from specific South African localities as his medium. As Somdyala reflects, “Maybe I can call the landscape the theatre within which societal or political things play out. There’s a lot of contestation about land and landscape in the South African context, in particular. There’s a lot of history that goes along with looking at the landscape and thinking about the landscape. When looking at maps, things like place names and certain landmarks (…) become cues to accessing those ideas about the cultural character of a landscape or a place or the people in that place.”

For South African painter Mia Chaplin, the female body is a contested landscape—one that has been assailed, occupied and is now being defended. Using a combination of oil paint, sand, wire, and glue, Chaplin creates a cement-like binder for her three-dimensional paintings. Her work Atheist Prayer Net evokes the draped mesh “landscapes” of Arte Povera’s most renowned female artist, Marisa Merz. Like Merz, Chaplin’s work draws on themes of domesticity and the human form. As a painter, Chaplin engages with the Western historical canon of lauded (mostly male) painters, positioning her practice as a continuation of centuries of images of women, while consciously countering the tradition of paintings depicting women, as opposed to paintings about women.

A process-driven approach and a fascination with the transformative properties of materials such as salt, metals, and minerals create a striking parallel between exhibiting artists Strauss Louw and Pierre Vermeulen. In his work Falls, Strauss Louw dissolves the veil between the figure and the surrounding landscape. Using an experimental 19th-century salt print process, Louw’s images are brought to life through the alchemical properties of salt, exposed to sunlight during the developing process. His affinity for simple yet abundant materials echoes the values of the Arte Povera movement.

Pierre Vermeulen, on the other hand, makes his body both his method and his medium. Physical imprints of his body, along with traces of sweat and hair, are embedded into the topography of his layered canvases. He uses the salt from his sweat to oxidise the gilded surfaces of his paintings. His deliberate use of imitation gold leaf critiques the ascribed value of the art object, especially in ecclesiastical and classical contexts. For both Louw and Vermeulen, the body serves as a foundational marker in the landscape. As sculptor Barbara Hepworth observed: “There is no landscape without the human figure.”

Finally, Bindi Vora’s mixed media wall sculpture extends the exhibition’s material investigations into the terrain of memory, diaspora, and cultural reclamation. Her work—composed of gold leaf, pencil, gouache, photo transfers, found postcards, plaited silk, a teddy bear chain, and a metal urn—evokes a tactile archive in which personal and collective histories converge. Drawing from her diasporic identity as a second-generation Kenyan Indian whose family was exiled from Uganda before resettling in the UK, Vora assembles objects and images that speak to absence, survival, and kinship. The work, The Powers Surge, Keeping the Ghost Inside, operates as a counter-monument, delicately layering materials to form speculative inscriptions where myth, memory, and language meet. Much like the Arte Povera artists who embraced humble or discarded materials to critique dominant cultural narratives, Vora’s use of sentimental and domestic fragments asserts the value of marginalised histories. Her work becomes a site of quiet resistance—an intimate landscape where personal narrative pushes back against the silences of colonial erasure.

Text by Ashleigh McLean

For artwork inquiries, please contact Eleonora Marforio at eleonora@whatiftheworld.com.

Read more: Stefano Pirovano in conversation with Ashleigh Mclean, Co-Founder of WHATIFTHEWORLD.