

The Protea, Flowers, and Symbolic Violence
The protea as wound, desire, and refusal—This essay reads Bessie Head’s life through the protea metaphor, tracing how the art exhibition A PROTEA IS NOT A FLOWER at Zeitz MOCAA stages symbolic violence and its repetitions under apartheid, while her survival embodies the unresolved wound and the renewal of Symbolic Desire—an order always to be reimagined, always to come.
Nov 11, 2025


LION OF GOD by Walter Ford
Walter Ford probes the gaze of the symbolic lion, burdened by the weight of cultural signs stacked on its back since antiquity.
Sep 22, 2024


LIMINAL by Pierre Huyghe
Through immersive scenarios, Huyghe’s art exhibition challenges our perceptions of reality, identity, and the boundaries of time and space.
Sep 1, 2024


ANGELS: Berlinda De Bruyckere
‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. City of Refuge III’, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibit
Jul 18, 2024


TO SAVE A GHOST
Like the ghost of Hamlet's father who lacks symbolic closure, the rescue of Pierneef's Station Panels begins with symbolic desire.
May 27, 2023


BEAUTY AND THE VASE: aesthetic exposition
Artwork by Johannes Scott This writing explores beauty, as in a beautiful work of art such as a painting, theatrical drama, and a vase. The objective is to define beauty and establish its location, as in why beauty is not intrinsic to the work but rather extrinsically attributed by the social context of the viewer. In addition, why is beauty not related to the content (‘what’) but rather to the form (‘how’) of artistic representation. And lastly, since the ethical contemplati
Jan 4, 2022


Ceramic Grammar and Sublimation
The series of porcelain sculptures appropriates the conventional ceramic form of 18th century rococo figurines.
Feb 19, 2021


Curators
The American “curator” is variously called, in Germany, Ausstellungsmaker (“exhibition maker,” a rather hands-on definition); in France,...
Jan 30, 2021


THE ART OF CERAMIC MEMORY
‘In my opaque vitrines, objects move between profile and dimensionality, blur into a haze and come suddenly into focus. Which is how memory works, of course, shimmering like a mirage heralding us towards the wrong places.’ – Edmund de Waal. Edmund de Waal is a British ceramist who describes himself as a ‘potter who writes.’ At school in Canterbury, he took pottery classes from a former student of Bernard Leach and later, after graduating in English at Cambridge, found a sy
Aug 12, 2020


THE ANIMAL
Content 1. Scheme 1.1. Metaphorology 2. Order 2.1. Metaphorology 3. Strategy 3.1. Metaphorology 4. Animot and biographical animal Bibliography Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), claims that our conception of animals is grounded in literature; in particular, it is embedded in the historical writing of philosophy, mythology, and religion. These anthropocentric writings always give figure to the animal by analogy to the human. In order to give representa
Sep 26, 2014

