Strangers Of Commanding Aspect
18 April – 9 May 2015
Please join us for the opening on Saturday 18 April at 14:00
Preview by appointment
Exhibition publication available. Printed copy available from the gallery or please scroll down to Download the digital version
Panel discussion on Tuesday 28 April, 18:15 – 20:00:
Join us for a discussion of human-animal concerns with reference to Bonita Alice’s exhibition. Panellists are Bonita Alice, Ann-Marie Tully (visual artist and academic) and Sara Rutherford-Smith (Senior Lecturer in Legal Philosophy at UNISA).
The event is free, but booking is advisable
Regarding other animals, the focus of my thinking is the idea that an habitual emotional denial makes it possible for us to commit systematic abuses against non-human animals, and to project onto them as we do. Central is the notion that we live in the aftermath of a traumatic betrayal of an ancient relationship, one in which previously, respect was preserved between human and non-human communities despite daily negotiations, around self-preservation and access to resources in a shared environment; a relationship in which other animals were absolutely central to human consciousness, rather than what they have become - certainly for us in our contemporary urban lives - as John Berger describes them, “relics of the past without power”. Apart from the few we have chosen to adore, they have become invisible, and inconsequential in our daily experience. - Bonita Alice, 2015
Bonita Alice was born in Hillbrow, Johannesburg in 1962. She completed a BAFA at Wits University and an MFA at UCT. She lived in South Africa where she taught and exhibited before moving to the UK in 2007 where she now lives with her partner and 2 cats in Hackney, London. Her interest in human-animal relationships belongs to her ongoing concern with psychological processes, specifically, the destructive potential of unacknowledged internal crises which are reflected in the external environment.
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. 2014. Acrylic on paper. 385X568mm&app=&subm=)