Rory Emmett was born 1992 in Cape Town, South Africa. His multi-disciplinary practice includes painting, performance, video, and installation. Emmett explores themes of personal and collective history and memory, identity formation, and intangible heritage within the post-colonial and post-apartheid South African context. His use of found images and materials thematizes notions of representation, contributing to ever-expanding conversations and conceptions surrounding the complexity and diversity of ‘coloured’ cultural, political and historical experience.

He completed his BAFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 2014, where he majored in painting and won the Judy Steinberg Painting Prize in his final year. He held his first solo exhibition at the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) Gallery in Cape Town in 2017, and his work has been exhibited in group shows locally and internationally. Emmett completed his MFA with distinction at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 2023. He lives and works in Cape Town.

I Thought I Recognised You

This body of work begins with a provocation: What would a world look like without race? Through painting, he erases faces, not to erase identity, but to ask how identity might be seen, felt, or remembered beyond the rigid scripts of racial categorisation. Drawing from found and family photographs, the works carry a weight of memory and history, yet they are veiled in layers of grey, a chromatic in-between, both shadow and light, nostalgia and possibility. Grey becomes a site of speculation, a space where binaries dissolve and new readings of presence emerge.

In removing the face, the traditional site of recognition and racial assignment, Emmett unsettles the viewer’s reflex to classify. What do we see when the familiar markers of race are gone? What assumptions rise to the surface?

The paintings evoke a world untethered from imposed boundaries. Joy, pride, and shared humanity flicker through the obscured figures, resonating as universal emotions. Recognition here is unstable: a projection, a memory, an echo of something we might know but cannot name. I Thought I Recognised You is both question and confession. It asks us to confront our biases, to sit with the discomfort of unknowing, and to consider how visibility and its absence shapes who we are allowed to see.