SMAC

In Miniatures

In Miniature group exhibition features modern and contemporary South African artworks by emerging and established artists who have chosen to, or at times been forced to, explore working on a small and even minute scale. The premise for this assembly of smaller-scale objects comes from the desire to understand, and even to give in to, the sense of scaling down, retreating from and re-considering the massive and the gigantic in their overbearing manifestations—not just in art and architecture, but in wider experiences of everyday life, in local and international politics, and in our relationship with the natural world.

The sense of impending disaster, and the experiences of real ones that so many of humanity face now, call for a retreat to the inner world—to that which is essential, comforting, and trustworthy. Living in historical times has always come at a cost. Grand historical narratives do not spare “the little man”, destroying his accumulations of worldly goods, status, and claims to consequence. Amassed riches get swept aside, grand palaces and gigantic monuments turn to rubble, and priceless art collections get looted or destroyed. What we choose to save in those moments is what matters and can often fit in the palm of one’s hand or in one’s pocket—a photograph, a small object, a memento of a life lived and cherished.

In his family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010), British ceramicist Edmund de Waal tells the story of his Jewish family through their collection of 264 Japanese netsuke miniature sculptures, which were saved from the 1938 looting by the Nazis and became the uniting thread holding the narrative together and the family linked through many years of historical and geographical dispersal. The small, intricately carved objects were made to be held, played with and, in the book as well as in real life, become symbolic of memory and connection rather than loss and distance. They are “small, quick, ivory stories”.

Miniatures and small-scale artworks included in this exhibition, whether sculptures or paintings, invite close looking and handling, establishing a level of intimacy and trust between the artist and the viewer. They evoke a sense of nostalgia, an ephemeral link to one’s own story or an idealised past held in objects and memory.

Every artwork in the exhibition opens an opportunity for a unique bond with the viewer, the merging and “the slow accretion of stories”. Looking at them and holding them, in the words of de Waal, “I open my heart to myself like a sort of vitrine and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the world can know nothing.”

— Text by Olga Speakes

The exhibition features works by Nina Torr, Collen Maswanganyi, Frans Thoka, Michael Tymbios, Ayola Goxo, Leila Abrahams, Tom Cullberg, Sundus Saad, Rosie Mudge, Simon Stone, Marlene Steyn, Nicholas Hales and Luiza Cachalia.