top of page



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.

Johannes Scott
Nov 115 min read


Let Me Live Again by William Kentridge: The Undead and the Poetics of Absence
It is not a container but a frame for absence, a poetic ruin of wholeness. The montage itself threatens to unravel, disintegrating into charcoal smears and a trash of pulp—back to the graphite rubble from which the animation emerged.

Johannes Scott
Sep 163 min read


Álvaro Urbano’s Prelude: Chimeric Bloom
In the art installation PRELUDE at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, the artist Álvaro Urbano conjures a spectral mise en scène of a 19th century landscaped area situated in the heart of Central Park.

Johannes Scott
Sep 42 min read


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.

Johannes Scott
Sep 22, 20247 min read


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

Johannes Scott
Sep 1, 20246 min read


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

Johannes Scott
Jul 18, 20243 min read


Desire in THE POLE by JM Coetzee
‘Not a pianist,’ Witold describes himself, ‘simply a man who plays the piano.’

Johannes Scott
Jul 3, 20246 min read


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.

Johannes Scott
May 27, 20237 min read


BREAKING SALON: SANG art collection.
SANG 23/12/2022 - J Scott. Johannes Scott – January 2023 With exhibition halls designed in the fashion of a boutique hotel and walls...

Johannes Scott
Jan 13, 20238 min read


GLORY AND UNCANNY
Foucault and Lacan interpret the gaze of authority operative in a painting that signals the rupture between Classical and Modern knowledge.

Johannes Scott
Nov 15, 202110 min read
bottom of page

