What Was, What Is, What If

Text by Nkhensani Mkhari

What Was, What Is, What If interrogates the liminal spaces between representation and deconstruction, where six contemporary artists negotiate the phenomenological terrain of cultural production. Each artistic intervention functions as a discursive mechanism, problematising linear narratives and destabilising hegemonic visual regimes.

Shaquille-Aaron Keith’s iconographic assemblage—an effigy marked with horns, cowrie shells, and the textual inscription ‘the 2nd commandment’—operates as a semiotic disruption, interrogating the architectures of religious and cultural signification. The work performs a critical hermeneutics of symbolic displacement.

Loyiso Mkhize’s phenomenological exploration of corporeality deconstructs portraiture through gestural fragmentation. Hands become metonymic expressions—mirroring, embracing—that reconfigure the Black body as a complex site of phenomenological negotiation and performative self-articulation.

Ebenezar Akinola’s canvas presents a liminal narrative of intimate choreography: an African couple’s embrace, strategically occluded by chromatic intervention, surrounded by seemingly aleatory objects. This work functions as a heterotopic space where personal memory and symbolic discourse intersect and destabilise normative representational economies.

Cathy Layzell’s abstract expressionist intervention erupts as a chromatic disruption—oranges, reds, and yellows consuming a subdued purple ground. Her gestural mark-making becomes a pure phenomenological event, where aesthetic experience transcends representational constraints.

Lars Fischedick’s triptych manifests a geometric heterotopia, a “spiritual reality” that perpetually defers definitive interpretation. The work exists in a state of ontological indeterminacy, challenging perceptual frameworks and suggesting alternative epistemological modalities.

William Chechet’s archival interventions through collage and Pop-art methodologically deconstruct colonial visual economies. By strategically dismantling and recontextualizing photographic artifacts, Chechet reveals the performative potential of archival reconstruction.

Collectively, these artistic practices articulate an “aesthetics of interruption” that positions disorder as a generative epistemological tool. The exhibition suggests a radical reimagining of artistic production: not as a teleological progression, but as a complex, rhizomatic network of disruptions, negotiations, and transformative potentialities.

Participating artists: Shaquille Aaron-Keith, Cathy Layzell, Loyiso Mkhize, Lars Fischedick, Williams Chechet, Anthony Lane, Ayogu Kingsley and Ebenezer Samuel Akinola