Lemkus Gallery proudly presents its largest curatorial endeavour to date, Grammars: a group exhibition. Produced in collaboration with Seth Kriger, Grammars is centred on an exploration of language and structural violence. Much has been said about the function of art as a form of language, a system of visual and sensory communication formed around personal perspectives and ways of seeing (and being). Extending this, Grammars explores the notion of artists as language makers engaging with a set of signs and symbols that seek to inform and expand our notions of understanding.
Through this framing, the exhibition also encourages viewers to take seriously how violence shapes and underpins different registers of expression and how artists are informed by or speak back to these modulars of thought. The included artists are of various places and positions, with varying levels of experience, but all demonstrate a high level of intellectual and technical rigour. The works themselves boast an incredible range of mediums, from painting to photography, printmaking, sculpture, textile, and installation. Conceptually, they reveal numerous subthemes, such as notions of value, loss, memory, cultural heritage, representation, and land. Each artist’s work is staked in different issues, from the ontological, to the political, or the psycho-social and generates different manners of interpretation.
Grammars takes inspiration from the notion of ‘grammars of suffering’; a way of indicating how violence operates at a metaphysical level. The violence of racial slavery, colonialism, apartheid, sets in place a particular set of relations which condition subjects in fundamental ways. The driving impetus of this show is to explore the ways in which these conditions manifest in individual artistic practices, insofar as to constitute their own mode of expression or critique— their own ‘grammar’. To this end, the included works engage different registers of suffering, from subtle to overt, demonstrating the various levels at which violence upholds the very structure of civil society. Our presentation seeks to embolden these tendencies, by playing off symmetry and asymmetry through the positioning of works in space.
The term ‘visual language’ usually pertains to the qualities of an artist’s work that distinguish it from the work of others. Thus, our use of language in this context is by no means recent, but seeks to illumine the profound aesthetic and conceptual forms of particular artists and to articulate how these forms sit in relation to each other. Moreover, language is and necessitates a particular system (a structure) which cannot be disimbricated from violence. It is in response to this dilemma that the included artists construct and deploy linguistic forms, not only to assert themselves, but to challenge the very ways in which structures persist and forge new vocabularies and mechanisms of critique.
