Wegwysers Deur Die Blinkuur

Solo Exhibition
20 June - 30 June 2024

Exhibition Opening: Thursday 20 June 2024
Exhibition Closure: Sunday 30 June 2024

WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present Wegwysers Deur Die Blinkuur, a new body of work by Stephané Edith Conradie, winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Arts 2023.

The day is drawing to a close; the sun is setting. The bright sunlight which gave the day its clarity, is quickly dimming. Everyone is hurrying to get inside before the depths of darkness set in. The twilight, the blinkuur, is a time to barricade against the uncertainty of the upcoming evening, when the world becomes still and threats begin to lurk. Surrounded by family and inalienable possessions, inside the home discussions begin. The elders of the home, while polishing the brass, are restless and confront their adult children, sensing their blinkuur has arrived: who will inherit these brass pieces when they are gone? The holy book, medals, crockery and tea set, the painting, the cabinet? Who of the next generation will inherit their values, embedded in these items?

They become agitated at this transitory moment, even scared, that no one seems interested in what they deem sacred – the next generation holds flat-screen TVs, smartphones, and modern furniture dear. The elders impatiently begin bundling items in corners, preparing for imminent handovers. They begin teaching family members, even grandchildren, who show the slightest interest, barraging them with stories, songs and unbendable ‘truths’. They frantically try to align their worldviews to permit a handover of material bundles in the hope that they do notfinish up in some seedy marketplace, or most frighteningly, the rubbish. For this will be what remains of them and what they stood for – and their love – as they enter the eternal night.

Conradie’s body of work reflects on this blinkuur, in which her pieces function as way-finders, wegwysers, or compasses through the foggy morass that characterises generational handovers of values and objects. Her artworks are themselves bundles of the fragile and fixed, confusion and truth, organic and eternal, life and death, sitting in a liminal space, at a twilight zone of remembering and forgetting. She integrates material keepsakes of (soon-to-be) ancestors which have lost their sheen – parcels discarded by offspring – immaterial melodies engrained through life-long ceremonies and the uneasy glow of presence before an inevitable departure.

But Conradie is hopeful of transferral, that spirits can reside, as the sentient images of fleeting animal and plant life, imprinted throughout her works. Ancestral residues will always remain, even when seemingly rejected. They become imbricated in beings, new identities and material cultures, that become fixed and clear after the morning’s blinkuur, another transitory, but hopeful, moment.

Text by Brandaan Huigen