David Krut Projects (DKP) Johannesburg is hosting Mary Wafer’s solo exhibition Ninth Floor from Wednesday, June 24 at 142 Jan Smuts Avenue in Parkwood.

Ninth Floor is a new body of paintings and etchings that continue Wafer’s interest in structural marginality and exclusion in contemporary South Africa.

Following her previous inquiry into the Marikana massacre, Wafer’s current research on John Vorster Square – the police station that embodied the violence of the apartheid system – explores moments along South Africa’s post-democratic timeline in order to interrogate cultural change (or the lack thereof).

The sinister, and in places deteriorating, facade of John Vorster Square, now Johannesburg Central Police Station, is, in this work, a signifier of the collective trauma embedded in many of our urban spaces. It embodies a shared anxiety that is a consequence of the brutality of daily life in South Africa.

The menacing presence of the police station is a monument to systemic violence, and is painstakingly explored in Wafer’s large oil paintings.

The title of the exhibition is a reference to the poem “In Detention” by Chris van Wyk.
For more information, contact ame@davidkrut.com or 011 447 0627.