The artworks of Lesego Motsiri explores themes of (un)belonging through the mediums of poetry and digital prints. Pieter Odendaal’s poem “bainsvlei, mangaung” investigates legacies of land appropriation and relationships to soil in the context of a post-apartheid poet dealing with his ancestors’ actions. 

This poem served as inspiration for the creation of five digital prints by Lesego Motsiri, based on photos taken at various graveyards in Mangaung. The prints hint at explosions, disorientation and imbalance, but also at regrowth, thereby mirroring the theme of the poem. Lesego is a member of the Free State Art Collective. 

The works will be linked to the Artivive app, thereby offering the viewer an immersive AR-experience of the work. Each of the prints will be animated on the Artivive app and will include audio of Odendaal reciting excerpts from the poem. 

The work offers Odendaal a way to process the legacy related to soil of his forefathers, and the collaboration with Motsiri adds further layers to the work, incorporating perspectives from a descendent of those that were previously oppressed. “Earthly Remembrance” directly speaks to the exhibition themes of memory, revision and restitution and reimagined pasts.

The research entity ViNCO (Visual Narratives and Creative Outputs) at the North-West University’s Potchefstroom Campus proudly presents the exhibition Stairways and Ruins. 

The exhibition features work by 23 artists, and established as well as upcoming artists are represented in the show. Most of the Graphic Design and History of Art lecturers (the subject groups where ViNCO is situated) also participate in the exhibition. Works featured on the exhibition include installations, paintings, and moving images.

ViNCO is honoured to have Andrew Lamprecht, curator of historical paintings and sculpture at Iziko South African National Gallery, as curator for the exhibition.

For the exhibition, artists were asked to produce a visual artwork using the idea of stairways and ruins, developed from the writing of Bessie Head and Sol Plaatje, as prompt. Interested artists were briefed on thematic and conceptual possibilities of this notion, including archival matters, memorialisation, myth, auto-ethnography, and (re-) imagined pasts and futures. Therefore, creative possibilities sparked by the topic of the project relate to stairways that invite notions of dreaming, transporting, transcending, and creating, as well as ruins that suggest a consideration of the past, of destruction and of wreckage.

This exhibition forms part of the large-scale, three-year collaborative project by the same name.