“Displacement: A boat in a city. In a studio on the first floor of a concrete building in downtown Johannesburg. Going nowhere and yet always on its way. Between travelling and arriving, between being at home and being a stranger, between being and becoming. In a city that challenges me, sometimes uncomfortably so, and yet entices me to reinvent myself, to place myself anew.” ( Knaut, 2017)
In this Masters exhibition, Manuela Karin Knaut, artist from Germany, currently living and working in Johannesburg, uses historically significant objects that she has stumbled over by chance or that she has deliberately gone out to find to ask questions about the relationship between the past and the present, and the process of moving between them into the future. In her multisensory installation the artist transformed her studio into a collision of objects, video projections, sound and photographs that tie together into a dense reflection of the individual in a globalised world. Her work is a signifier that acts on many levels, inviting viewers to embark on an intensive exploration of their own inner worlds: an exploration of how personal memories and collective archives collide, of how inside and outside dissolve, of how fiction destabilises reality where everything seems possible.
See the video here Displacement Video
