CHRIS THURMAN: Installations pit balance against imbalance

Stevenson’s premises in the leafy suburb of Parktown North make for a welcome respite from the business of the city: the gallery is situated in a fine old Johannesburg residence, all pressed ceilings and wraparound verandas. On my most recent visit, the building’s sedate white exterior was playfully offset by a handful of colourful struts and arches — not architectural embellishments, but a continuation of the lines shooting across the rooms and through the walls of the gallery.

These are part of an installation by Mauritian artist Salim Currimjee, complementing the paintings in his Tula series. The title comes from the Sanskrit word for “balance” and, while Currimjee uses this to express “harmony between his architectural and artistic practices”, the works exhibited also have the pleasing effect of creating a kind of disturbance or imbalance.

They achieve this partly by adapting Mughal painting techniques to abstract compositions. The Mughal tradition, which employs multiple lines of sight or perspectives in representing a scene or landscape — and even in portraiture — is often contrasted with the standard Western art historical assessment of the “vanishing point”.

Italian Renaissance painters experimented with geometrically based methods of representing depth and three-dimensionality on a flat canvas. By making both explicit and implicit lines in their images converge at a given point, giving the impression of a single observational position looking “into” the world of the painting, these artists established what would become a convention among European painters until the late 19th century (albeit with various rebels along the way, like the Mannerists, who embraced distortion, exaggeration and asymmetry). It was only with Modernism in the early 20th century — borrowing from, you guessed it, non-Western aesthetic traditions — that the vanishing point began to vanish again.

Currimjee’s work seems to fit into this Modernist paradigm: Picasso and Braque, Matisse and Kandinsky, Miro and Mondrian. Yet to view it with these “forebears” in mind is to remain stuck within a Eurocentric framework. Currimjee’s paintings and installations encourage us, instead, to break the frame. They do so quite literally with lengths of Plexiglas that are imposed on or incorporated into the painted surfaces, extending in each case beyond the neat borders of rectangle and square, “disrupting the illusion of a flat visual plain”.

Appearing along with Tula is Mahube Diseko’s Thank You For Bearing Witness, which is the latest in Stevenson’s Stage programme of exhibitions creating a platform for young or unrepresented artists. Diseko, too, aims to disrupt — in her case, by “rigorously and emphatically” engaging with a subject that may seem infra dig for many contemporary artists: love.

The medium that Diseko has chosen is her message. She works with women’s underwear, a choice reminiscent of Kresiah Mukwazhi’s use of bra straps in her 2024 exhibition Body Count. While Mukwazhi’s intention is a protest against gender-based violence, Diseko seeks to bring into public discourse the private, intimate and often-unspoken thoughts and feelings of women exposed to the risks and rewards of love and sex. Her medium also carries specific messages, embroidered into the underwear as a series of confessions, pleas and assertions.

Some of these are not necessarily gendered statements and could be advice for anyone — whether in the vulnerability of sexual encounters or in human interaction more generally: “Always have something tender to give”; “Try softer, not harder”; “Sincerity is scary”. Yet the materiality of the underwear, in various shapes and sizes, insists on a sex-positive feminism that is not “naive or fanciful” but rather assertive, as in the declaration: “My body is no home for shame”.

Some of the works are displayed so messages can be read on the front and the rear, such as the pairing of desire with doubt in “I want to be seen” / “But I’m scared”. While this is one of the pieces that Diseko has placed in simple wooden frames — perhaps ironically invoking that conceptual art convention by which the familiar, everyday object is transformed into an artwork — she (like Currimjee) resists and even mocks “the frame”, with some of her underwear sculptures mounted cosily on a plush white fur-lined wall.

• ‘Tula’ and ‘Thank You For Bearing Witness’ are at Stevenson Johannesburg (46 7th Avenue, Parktown North) until May 9.