Prepossessing the future

This exhibition takes as it starting point the use of personas or constructed figures as devices for interrogating the self in relation to time and collective identities. Audiences are invited into visual and auditory thought worlds that have been mapped out in a digitally constructed present. These constructed figures are gifted supernatural qualities as they conflate the past and present with fictional narratives to review history, and as a result, reconfigure imaginings of our potential future. These figures are not simply reiterations of Marvel or DC characters, or copies resultant of Afrofuturistic methodologies. They are, instead, figures embedded in the South African political context, and provide an understanding of how the self and collective identities are understood in relation to the larger spatiotemporal landscape. The performative nature of these constructed figures grants the artists the ability to “prepossess their future and repossess this emergent present” (Coetzee 2016: 243).