This weekend brings the tenth edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. It will be an intense, impressive experience for the many thousand of visitors making their way to the Cape Town International Convention Centre or participating in one of the satellite events taking place in and around the city.
Earlier in the week, however, I found myself going in the opposite direction — not running away, exactly, but drawn to a different destination: Twee Jonge Gezellen Estate, a few kilometres outside the town of Tulbagh. The farm is best known as the home of Krone Cap Classique, and I must admit that my experience there was suffused in a light, bubbly haze. It was nonetheless a revelatory experience.
One must be cautious about leaping too readily into analyses based on the opposition of the urban and the rural. Economically and culturally, big cities, small towns and agricultural regions are entirely interwoven — mutually dependent in ways both obvious and hidden. After all, Seeds of the Fig, the sculptural exhibition I had travelled to see, was made possible by a collaboration between Krone and Cape Town gallery WHATIFTHEWORLD.
But farm life does bring to the fore a different set of priorities, offering a necessary shift in perspective away from the assumptions that might govern “art in the city”. Heinrich Groenewald and Shona van der Merwe, who curated Seeds of the Fig, emphasise this in their framing. How might art installations disrupt the ingrained, centuries-old practices of a working farm? Can they draw us even further back, asking us to imagine the Sonqua pastoralists whose relationship with the land was destroyed by the arrival of European settlers?
This historical-political critique remains largely in the background as Groenewald and Van der Merwe explore the metaphorical possibilities of their concept and title. If the seeds of a fig are scooped out and soaked in water, the viable seeds sink to the bottom. The process can be likened to that of the artist in the studio: testing out ideas, experimenting with forms, deciding which to pursue and which to leave aside.
The fig is a curious thing. We call it a fruit but it is actually an inverted cluster of flowers. The fig wasp, whose minor reproductive miracle makes figs possible, has a life cycle beginning and ending inside this bizarre “fruit”, raising a philosophical question: can figs be included in a vegetarian diet? Figs are among the earliest examples of domesticated food production, with archaeological evidence suggesting that humans were already cultivating them about 12,000 years ago.
Seeds of the Fig thus gestures towards the fertile, patient, creative labour of the artist, as well as to the enigmatic nature of the works that result from it. “Open-endedness and ambiguity are the privileges of the artist,” write Van der Merwe and Groenewald. “To describe what each and every one of these sculptures is about ... could only corrupt the complexity and entanglement of their individual stories. Each work is a node, proof of life, marking a certain point in the artist’s timeline.”
Like all good curators, they partly undermine this claim by providing rich insights into the works they have assembled — but their observation about the unpredictable, digressive passage of time in the various stages of making and displaying artworks remains astute. Like farmers waiting first for seeds to germinate, then for plants and trees to grow, and finally for crops to flourish, artists and curators experience protracted “periods of gestation”.
The definitive object, or set of objects, demonstrating this principle becomes the centrepiece of the exhibition: Ibrahim Mahama’s Stranger to Lines II, comprising 10 enormous wooden caskets. For about three years, this was a “dormant sculptural mass” — having been prepared for the 2020 Stellenbosch Triennale that was interrupted by the first wave of Covid-19 — until it was reinstalled for Seeds of the Fig. Mahama’s colossal wooden structures, described as “postminimalist totems”, have a funereal quality but also call to mind the leaky vessels of migrant sea crossings and the packing cases that facilitate trade and exchange. It is a startling, sobering work.
• Seeds of the Fig is at WITW x Krone Gallery (Twee Jonge Gezellen Estate, Tulbagh) until March 31.
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