This exhibition gathers artists who create at the threshold – where form unravels into gesture, memory hovers on the edge of forgetting, and images are shaped as much by absence as by presence. The title, drawn from a line that suggests both radiance and vanishing, takes its cue from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a work that lingers in fragility, transience, and tenderness. Here, the moment just before disappearance is not a loss, but a space of possibility.
The artists presented work across a range of media – drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, textile, and performance – yet are unified by a deep attentiveness to the poetics of material and meaning.
ARTWORKS
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A shared sensitivity to terrain, both physical and psychic, runs throughout the presentation. David Goldblatt’s photograph of a stairway on a Cape wine farm captures not merely a structure, but a residue of power: architecture rendered as silent witness to histories of labour, land, and inequality. Clive van den Berg’s painted abstractions carry this further inward. His works evoke submerged topographies and unresolved narratives, where the land becomes a vessel for grief, longing, and remembrance – gestural surfaces that pulse with accumulated time. Misheck Masamvu’s canvases offer a different kind of excavation. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, his works are built through visible labour – brushstrokes that mark and erase, build and undo. They register the psychic tensions of being: the political interior, the struggle to belong, the rupture of time.
Elsewhere, material becomes a site of transformation and proposition. El Anatsui’s Untitled III, composed of painted wood, furthers his long-standing interest in elevating discarded or overlooked matter. Here, carved and patterned surfaces recall both erosion and construction – echoes of geological formations, architectural ruins, and the shifting skins of time. As with much of Anatsui’s work, it resists fixed categorisation – hovering between sculpture, relief, and textile, offering a space where history is not commemorated, but continually reconstituted.
Yinka Shonibare reframes cultural legacy through textile and performance. His quilt, Abstract Spiritual X, centres the African mask not as a static museum artefact but as a living form – active in the making of Western modernism, and now celebrated in its repatriation. Through vibrant patterning, cut forms and material play, Shonibare’s work questions histories of extraction and return, complicating the boundaries between object, image, and icon.
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s triptych, Herd (Quagga), invokes the extinct quagga in a spectral procession – part myth, part memory. Her work collapses scientific, speculative, and historical registers to imagine a visual cosmology where extinction becomes not only loss, but a space for re-enchantment. The animals move across the panels like echoes – figures caught between being and vanishing.
Kapwani Kiwanga’s Subduction Study #8 similarly manipulates material to speculate on planetary and political futures. By folding photographic prints of geological specimens – one from Europe, one from North Africa – she stages a collision, a convergence that mirrors deep-set anxieties about migration, empire, and ecological collapse. Through this gesture, the fault line becomes a metaphor, and the surface of the image a site of imagined rupture and recomposition.
William Kentridge’s multifaceted practice revisits and refracts philosophical and historical tropes through a deeply personal visual vocabulary. His contributions to the exhibition conjure the phantasmagoric: figures caught mid-motion, both absurd and haunting, inhabiting a space between performance and disappearance. Whether rendered in charcoal or cast in silhouette, his works speak to the instability of identity, the persistence of memory, and the slippages of narrative. Experimental and conceptually rich, Kentridge’s work resonates through its very polymorphism – seeking meaning in the gaps, the echoes, the repetitions.
