Not All Lives Are Legible

There is a tendency in the art world to measure an exhibition by its immediate visibility, how quickly it is received, how widely it circulates, how easily it aligns with the dominant conversations of the time. But some exhibitions are not designed for that kind of reception. They ask for a different pace. They resist simplification. And often, they are only fully understood once the world has caught up with the questions they were already asking.

Lost Souls by Anthony Lane, The Repenters by Hasan Essop and Husain Essop, and Darkness Rising are three such exhibitions.

Looking back, what connects them is not medium, geography, or aesthetic. It is a shared concern with how the “other” is constructed, how certain lives are made visible, invisible, legible, or misread within broader political and cultural systems.

Lost Souls was presented at a time when the Syrian refugee crisis was highly visible in the media, yet increasingly abstract in its scale. The exhibition deliberately moved away from the imagery we had come to expect. There were no bodies, no documentary photographs, no direct representation of suffering. Instead, the work centred on what remained. Shoes collected from the shores of Skopelos in Greece, separated from those who once wore them. Each object carried a presence, but no certainty. There was no confirmation of who these shoes belonged to or what had happened to them. That ambiguity was not a limitation, it was the work. It disrupted the expectation that empathy must be guided by proof. It asked whether we are capable of recognising loss without needing to verify it, and whether the absence of the body makes it easier or harder to look away.

In The Repenters, the Essop Brothers take a different position. The body is no longer absent. It is fully present, but it does not settle. By inserting themselves into the visual language of Western superhero culture, they expose how power is embedded within representation. These are not neutral images. Superheroes carry with them a very specific cultural logic, one that defines who is heroic, who is dangerous, and who belongs within the narrative. When a Muslim body occupies that space, the image does not resolve into inclusion. It fractures. The viewer is forced to confront the discomfort of seeing a figure that does not fit the script they have inherited. The work makes it clear that visibility alone does not equal acceptance. Representation, in this context, is not access, it is a site of tension, where identity is already preconditioned by systems that lie beyond the frame.

Darkness Rising shifts the terms again. It moves away from being seen or misread, and toward speaking from within. The exhibition brought together artists engaging with the Democratic Republic of Congo through lived, cultural, and historical experience. It pushed back against the dominant narratives that have long defined how Congo is represented, narratives that are often shaped externally, through media, humanitarian discourse, or colonial residue. What the exhibition offered was not a single counter-image, but a multiplicity of perspectives. It allowed for contradiction, for complexity, for a form of representation that is not easily contained. It refused the idea that Congo can be reduced to crisis alone, without denying that reality. More importantly, it asserted that the right to define that narrative does not sit outside of it.

Taken together, these exhibitions form a trajectory. From absence, to misrepresentation, to self-definition. They do not resolve the question of the “other.” They expose how it is constructed, and who has the authority to construct it.

At the time these exhibitions were shown, they did not necessarily align with what was gaining traction. They were quieter in their approach, more deliberate in their pacing, and less concerned with immediate consumption. But the conditions they addressed, displacement, cultural hierarchy, narrative control, have only intensified. These are no longer peripheral concerns. They are central to how we understand the current global political landscape.

To return to these exhibitions now is not to reposition them. It is to recognise that they were already engaged with the complexities we are still trying to articulate.

They were not out of place.
They were early.

– Shamiela Tyer