In Afterland, a solo exhibition by Lien Botha
Eclectica Contemporary, Cape Town
6–28 March 2025
- Text by Karen Press
What happens in Afterland? A circus horse and its rider perform above the skeletons of trees, cradled by their trapezoid tightrope. A gathering of clouds hovers in the bleached sky of a different weather system, its cargo of rain withheld from the dry earth by a tight rectangle. God’s animals gather peacefully around Adam in the open veld, their eyes discreetly surveying the landscape. An artist meets some of her ancestors, brings them to see where she lives.
The trees, the moody sky, the veld are utterly familiar. The horse and rider, the clouds, the mythical creatures gathered in a biblical scene have been encountered before, elsewhere. What are they doing here, together and yet living so separately in our knowledge of them?
In Lien Botha’s works depicting Afterland the presence of landscapes that fill the frames, and of imported elements detached from their own home ground on distant canvases, invites recourse to the concept of the “figure and ground” as a way in to their interpretation, a concept used by students of the development of perception in the young child.
“The development of figure–ground perception begins the day the baby can focus on an object. The faces of caregivers, parents, and familiar objects are the first to be focused on and understood. As babies develop, they learn to distinguish the objects they desire from their surroundings.”1
The act of distinguishing between ground and figure, of recognising the object of desire, involves drawing on an already existing repertoire of recognition strategies for what matters, and what is incidental – a hierarchy of meanings the viewer ascribes to different aspects of the scene being viewed.
“If a viewer’s gaze is fixated on a particular region, the viewer is more likely to view the fixated region as the figure.”2
On what does the viewer’s gaze fixate in each of Botha’s compositions? The ground is what we recognise at once, in its literal sense: earth, terrain, territory – a landscape so familiar to South Africans that we can feel it on our skin, even if our feet never leave our cars to walk across it. Perhaps our eyes slide over the modest trees and low-lying bushes, over their muted and seemingly uniform textures and colours; each segment of this ground seems to have a consistent, constant quality, to represent a static ecosystem outside time. Africa outside history. Or, on the terrain a travelling rhinoceros encounters, Africa as an anonymous urban moment with no sense of place, only a road leading elsewhere. The signs of human habitation seem incidental.
Does our gaze produce the perceptual decision to head straight for the fragment of a familiar artwork in each composition? Each fragment is a memento of a work seen elsewhere in its vivid fullness, framed by the intensity of a gallery space, a ground manufactured to recede from view. These are the figures we travel far to look at, beyond the artless ground of veld and berg.
But Botha’s compositions create the conditions for a rethinking of this duality, a mutation of the figure-and-ground concept. In her works the ground is twofold: it is the familiar African landscapes that fill the frame, and the sifted elements of canonical European artworks that hover above or nestle within them. The figure is intangible, pervasive: it is the energy of their connection, a relationship forming before us, composed by our perceptual decisions, our storehouse of cues.
The act of composing the figure is the motor of each work, its energy source. The artist constructs the twofold ground, but it is the viewer who produces the full dimensions of the figure – one that includes their sense memory of terrain, knowledge of place, recollections of encounters in distant cities, tropes of aesthetic theory. The viewer has to enter Afterland and walk about in it in order to make sense of what the artist has brought together there.
In her notes on the works, Botha says:
I am acutely aware of the contestations and the binaries which the Western canon of art presents for an artist living on the African continent today. But to which point of reference does one return in order to continue your own in situ?
These digital photographic deconstructions, meticulously paired with muted landscapes (harvested from the African continent), are the results of a reworking and reduction (redress) of critically selected works by artists who were emblematic in the timeline of a once familiar art history.
Are these works therefore a provocation – Africa versus Europe? Present versus past? A canonised artistic timeline versus a vast and ancient landscape devoid of symbolic colour?
Or are they encounters, startled and startling? An invitation to return to, settle in, the territory so familiar to us that we can infuse it with the colours and textures of other seasons we know to exist there? And are the emblematic artists and their works guests, brought from the studios and galleries and critical theories where they’ve spent their centuries to meet a deeper landscape of origin, and see what they can (be made to) do here?
The cerebral examination of these works is where the viewer might begin, but it is hard to resist the invitation to find stories in them – stories that generate their own interpretive energy, populating Afterland at another level.
“There are wholes, the behavior of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but … by the intrinsic nature of the whole.”3
Albrecht Durer’s Great piece of turf sits on the veld like a ship, its profile resembling the Drommedaris that brought Van Riebeeck and his VOC gang to Table Bay. It is delicately quarantined from the surrounding vegetation by a translucent frame. Has it just arrived? Or has it been parcelled up, ready to migrate to the north? It sequesters moisture in its delicate reeds and pliable flat leaves, while around it the low scrub and pale grass blades lie imperturbably close to the bedrock. Durer’s greens are turning to grey-green – or will only find their true green when they arrive in the cool north. His turf is tall, tending upward, tightly entangled; the surrounding veld expands across stony ground, suggesting a strategy of endurance. Does the piece of turf long to leave, or is it curious about the prospects for survival here?
The Achilles Painter’s Muse is making music even though lifted from her painted seat, walking on sandy African soil. Her head moves faster than her body, studying the terrain that will receive her sounds (or possibly watching for scorpions and snakes). Her watchfulness suggests she is not at home here. The water tank she passes is an indication that she may meet people who farm this land. The heavy sky promises rain; the sparse vegetation may be desperate for it, or indifferent. She was the muse of music in another world, seated on a smooth surface; here she is a woman in a difficult place whose feet and hands know how to keep doing what she was born to do.
As Pietro Longhi’s Rhinoceros stares mournfully at a concrete wall and a graffito with no apparent human source, fragments of meaning circulate in and around her. The rhinoceros is our totem of loneliness and vulnerability, always about to lose a parent, a child, a companion, a body part. And now subject to the probing attention of uncomprehending strangers in her Venetian captivity, strangers for whom her existence is mere entertainment, raw material for their art; subject also to a wall that confronts her with a pun she cannot decipher. It holds out its two hands, one desperate, the other hopeful. The wall, the gawking spectators, her mutilated body all mock the scribbled call for unity. The masked and blankfaced audience has followed her back to Africa, conferring about her nature and her fate. What will happen to her next?
Kazimir Malevich’s Dynamic suprematism floats over the ancient geology of African hills like the blueprint of a new architectural intrusion. Or perhaps the hologram of an alien visitation, beaming itself down onto the planet. There is a brutal playfulness here, the geometer dangling his rectilinear constructions over the irregular curves produced by nature. But where does the complexity lie – in the Euclidean rectangles, or in the infinitely variable hills?
These are the stories of a single viewer, standing before each work with a readymade disposition to find connections. What the In Afterland compositions do is shake loose the fixed frames that surround Lien Botha’s source images so that they become new components of a present space. Whether the elements in each work mock each other or walk towards each other, demand redress – choice, rejection, restriction – or construct new aesthetic landscapes, is the open question they pose. The art in these works is the openness of the question, the spread of possibilities they lay before the viewer.
And they offer also an occasion for recognition of what is already part of our vocabulary of meaning: famous artworks, seen and studied and drawn on aesthetically in myriad ways; and landscapes that we can recall or imagine ourselves inhabiting. That is itself a provocation – to live in a world where the long grass and soft peaks make space for the grieving dog, the mythic muse, the bright geometries of the human imagination. This world that is destroying itself is still the world in which that imagination walks through the veld.
We live in a world in which incongruous juxtapositions are the stuff of everyday ephemera – easy jokes making for easy commentary, marketable memes, fashion items unweighted with meaning. In Afterland’s juxtapositions anchor the disembodied fragments of what Botha refers to as “the timeline of a once familiar art history” in a territory that has space to receive them: if there is “a reworking and reduction” of these works, there is also an invitation to them to exist in a bigger, older world of meaning. If they must become smaller, must float or step lightly or sit silently among the resilient vegetation and modest human structures that keep this world alive, so be it: they preserve their own forms, their colours remain true, but an older light illuminates them in our gaze. If, as Botha says, “every aspect of being in the world today, is under scrutiny and open to retrospection”, then the compositions of In Afterland enact a form of scrutiny that confronts many pasts with a generous clarity of vision and an invitation to recompose them for a redressed future.
- Karen Press is a South African poet and translator. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies in South Africa and abroad, and she has published twelve collections of poems. Her most recent collection is Heart’s Hunger: Selected Poems (Deep South, 2024).
Notes
1 Educanda (2018). “Early Learning: Figure Ground Development in Baby’s and Toddlers”. https://web.archive.org/web/20191211181044/https:/www.educanda.co.za/news/early_learning_figure_ground_development_in_babys_and_toddlers
2 Peterson, Mary & Salvagio, Elizabeth (2010). “Figure-ground Perception”. Scholarpedia 5(4): 4320.
3 Wagemans, Johan, Feldman, Jacob, Gepshtein, Sergei, Kimchi, Ruth, Pomerantz, James R., Van der Helm, Peter A. & Van Leeuwen, Cees (2012). “A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception: II Conceptual and Theoretical Foundations”. Psychological Bulletin 138 (6): 1218–1252.