Taking A Moment - Curated by Simona Stone
August 24, 2024 - September 28, 2024
Cnr Dixon and Jarvis Streets, DE WATERKANT, Cape Town
What does it mean to truly pause? In those fleeting moments when you yearn for stillness, what do you observe? How does the world move around and within you? Begin by watching; then crouch, peel back, gather, and repeat. Despite your apparent firmness—or that of the ground beneath you—bear witness to the soft, leaky entanglements of present time.
A pause is both temporal and spatial: an expanse you occupy, even briefly. By 'taking a moment,' you try to carve out a space in time to sit still. Yet even in this supposed stillness, time swells with layers of history and memory. This moment is not immune to the past; it swirls among the entanglement of what we cannot escape.
As Okello and Duran suggest, "A framing of time and realities as palimpsestic, or imperfect erasure, suggests that the past is visible and acting upon the present." A palimpsest—an ancient writing surface where inscriptions were erased and overwritten—emerges defined by overlay, merging, and hybridity. One moment leaks into another, with its identity and beauty rooted in impurity and the blurring of ideas from different times. Each moment is an amalgamation of history, memory, and other moments, defined by its relationality.
A moment trusted to be still is anything but. Like the tangibility of our bodies, we rely on the 'solidity' of time to make sense of ourselves and the world. Yet solidity provides comfort and simplicity that time does not offer. The spread of a stain on fabric cannot be controlled, just as the layering of time cannot be stilled.
Artists were invited to play with scale and examine how moments are woven together. Seek the energy and voices between the threads. Witness their binds. If a pause is a snapshot of a never-ending layering process, what do these moments look like for you and the world around you?
Embrace these leaky moments, and look toward the marks left by 'imperfect erasure.' These moments are open to personal interpretation—emotionally driven, politically reflective, or catalysts for creative processes. Take your moment, embrace its lack of purity, and play among its moving parts. Capture how you navigate the tension between pause and the perpetual flux of time.
