Human Nature
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Arts AfricaCape Town
Curated by Julia Kabat
01 July - 31 October 2018
Unpublished catalogue
Interview, Julia Kabat & Ruby Swinney
Human Nature, these two words split the mind. Oppositions spring from this gap, “soul” and “mind”, “reason” and unreason”, “rational” and “spiritual”, “self” and other”. Are humans natural at all, is nature human at all? What is human, what is the origin of human that makes us natural if we are to be natural? This oxymoron is two words slanting in and away from each other, a hyperbole separated by an invisible asymptote. The paintings of Ruby Swinney are an engagement in that asymptote, an attempt to go beyond language and examine what we call “Human Nature”. The paintings invite and offer, not a self-assured Narcissus moment so familiar to our contemporary experience, but rather a deep introspection of the self-conscious self in relation to the ‘natural’ world.
[...]Swinney strives to decentre the self through a complete submergence into the self. Whether this selflessness, or othering of the self, is possible or not the paintings seem to urge the importance of the attempt, and invite the viewer to do the same. To see this attempt as a human responsibility is to try with knowledge of its failure. This moral responsibility of empathy is for and about all life human and natural, familiar and alien. These paintings are about the universal in deep waters of the individual, it is an attempt to stare into the face of Human Nature and seeing there not the romance of idyllic beauty but a troubled tangle of thoughts and pictures, fears and insecurities, a noise of bathing suits and family portraits, and beyond that, silence.
The Other Side of Silence by Noah Swinney
“It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Gallery 2
Such a woman as I
Mirage of all green forests—
The colour of the season always
When hope lives of abolished pleasures
Picture-dreaming in a room
Among silk provinces where pain
Ruined her body without stain—
So white, so out of time, so story-like.
While woman’s pride escaped
In tiger stripes.
- Laura Riding Jackson, The Tiger
Gallery 3
At the most we gaze at it in wonder,
a kind of wonder which itself is a form
of dawning horror, for somehow we know
by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow
of their own destruction before them,
and are designed from the first with an eye
to their later existence as ruins.
- W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Gallery 4
by being moved I exert my empire,
making the dreams of night real:
into my body at the bottom of the water
I attract the beyonds of mirrors...
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Water Lily
Gallery 5
They planted here the Serpent's seeds of light;
And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock
The riotous glass houses built on rock,
And candles gutter by an empty altar,
And light is where the landless blood of Cain
Is burning, burning the unburied grain.
- Robert Lowell, Children of Light
Gallery 6
No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.
A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing-, the
no one’s rose.
With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.
- Paul Celan, Psalm trans. Michael Hamburger
The Pop-up shop
All designs created by Platform . Selected merchandise still available at Zeitz MOCAA Museum shop.
Click here to view handpulled custom screen print.