Extended until Thursday, July 28.

OPENING at artSPACE durban at 3 Millar Road, Durban, on Saturday, July 9 at 11 am is the exhibition ‘Seeking Permanence In A Transient World’, featuring the work of Samantha Boock.

According to Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist, ‘contemporary society can be defined as a “liquid society”: one that is in constant change’. Boock’s work questions the Western notion of desiring permanence; for things to stay constant, stable and controllable, when in reality, we understand that it cannot be achieved as we are transient.

At the same time Boock’s work attempts to gain a sense of permanence, by capturing people onto photographs.

The use of the photograph as a ‘canvas’ already has it’s own history and context; it has a captured moment on it, to be remembered forever, or, for as long as the image or photographic paper exists.

In the work, images of people have been physically ‘scarred’ into the photograph’s surface, forcing the permanent embedment of the person into the medium. The photographs have been stained, bleached or scratched to reveal the person that has been captured.

The images rendered are of people that Boock has or has had a relationship with in some form, exploring the transience of relationships or her own transience. The work attempts to keep these figures in her life longer than in reality. The viewer however ‘passes through’ these images, just as Boock has with the people depicted.

These exhibition closes on Thursday, July 21.

Running from July 30 to August 18 is the exhibition ‘Fracking the Grid: Views from an Energy Landscape’, featuring the work of Meghan Kirkwood. Then from August 20 to September 1 you can see Karla Nixon’s Masters Fine Art exhibition;.

From September 3 – 9 the gallery hosts Michelle Luffingham’s ‘Ingelosi ye Nyama’, and from September 10 to 29 visitors can see Corné Eksteen’s ‘Assimilation’.