3 november - 24 november 2007
Opening: Saturday 3 November 2007, 5-7 pm
> AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN TOUCH by Maja Marx
Zonderwater detail (Sleeping landscape)
As Far As The Eye Can Touch, by artist Maja Marx, documents a series of large scale, text based interventions executed in the landscape. Over the last two years Marx has produced a chain of site specific works by physically writing onto landscape surfaces such as koppies, roads and frozen lakes using stones, earth or paint, and by physically modifying existing landscape inscriptions. By performatively writing text onto land, the artist’s body takes the place of the hand in writing. In all of these spatial inscriptions, Marx’s artistic intervention is a transient and temporary product with stone texts that eventually sink through the melting ice of frozen lakes in Switzerland, buried stone letters that are excavated and re-chalked, or painted pedestrian crossings that are erased by heavy inner-city traffic. Her photographs and objects serve as the surviving trace and documentation of these works and resonates her interest in the role of the viewer as passer-by, and in how we survey and mark our ocularised landscapes.
When travelling on the road between Rayton and Cullinan north of Pretoria, the word Zonderwater, the name of the original farm which now forms part of the Correctional Services facility, is spelled out in neatly placed chalked stones. Between November 2006 and March 2007, Marx temporarily ‘buried’ ‘the letter ‘Z’ of Zonderwater using 4 cubic metres of earth from the area; thus rendering the familiar Zonderwater (literally translated as ‘without water’) into Onderwater (‘under-water’). In visually removing this letter from the text the artist ‘buried’ the Dutch Colonial past embedded in this name, playing with the power dynamics inherent to colonial acts of description, naming and the claiming of the ‘empty’ landscape. As part of this grand scale intervention, the process also included the recovery of the 33m long letter ‘Z’: firstly by uncovering the stones in an almost archaeological manner with a brush and then by officially re-chalking the stones with the help of prisoners from Zonderwater Correctional Services.
Maja Marx is a Johannesburg based artist and has participated in various local and international exhibitions including Gent, Belgium and Cuenca, Spain. She is a fellow of the Ampersand foundation (New York & Johannesburg) and a participant of MAPS (Master of Art in the Public Sphere); an exchange between the Wits School of the Arts, Johannesburg, South Africa and the Ecole Cantonale d’art du Valais, Sierre, Switzerland. Maja Marx is currently a lecturer at the Wits School of the Arts, and curator of the gordonschachatcollection. She also hosts a monthly radio talk show, Oogtaal, on RSG.