The discovery of the Americas and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope are commonly considered turning points in Western civilisation, but long before these seismic traversals the Indian Ocean was the “cradle of globalisation.” Like port cities the world over, Cape Town bears the signature of an intercultural and interracial mesh. It is within this history that Thania Petersen has positioned her art. Her solo exhibition is an engagement with the myth and story of Malayness — as a cultural identity, a system of belief, and a way of life. Petersen plays fast-and-loose with the notion of the “exotic” and the psychically more exacting awareness of cultural dislocation and re-appropriation. For Petersen there can be no finite sense of selfhood or home, for both realisations must be tempered with the imagination.
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