Meeting You.

Meeting You, 2016
99 Loop Gallery
99 Loop Street, Cape Town, South Africa

‘Meeting you’ is an introductory meeting between Johannesburg resident Anastasia Pather and the city of Cape Town. This exhibition and quiet painting performance invites muses and interdisciplinary collaborators to explore the transience relationship between inspiration and the creative process, a method the artist refers to as jazz bonding.

This fleeting relationship also extends to Cape Town an area historically referred to as the Cape of Good Hope, a hot spot for colonisers* to refresh supplies, revitalize weary souls and ultimately bring ‘civilisation’ and culture to a savage community. These works are a visual exploration into the architecture of memory and the politics of association. Through this body of work the artist allowed her fingers to be guided by her memory of the western cape to paint the land.

Land a wildly and politically complicated concept for both the insider and the outsider. Pather imagined the relief for both the coloniser and the colonised slave exhausted by the brutal reality of life at sea when they spotted land wading closer to the beautiful Cape shores. Ships that docked full of men carrying manners and memories leaving with gold and other men to other wild lands.

*Jan van Riebeeck, colonial administrator of the Dutch East India Company arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 to set up a refreshment station for European ship travelling onto the spice and silk route. His arrival brought a permanent imprint of European culture and settlers to South Africa. When he left the Cape, there were more than 150 settlers and about an equal number of slaves at the Cape.