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Usha Seejarim in ‘Imagined into Being: South African Art 1989 – 2004’ at Stevenson, Cape Town
18 Oct 2025 (3 min) read
A video work by Usha Seejarim, titled The Opposite of Illustration (1999), is part of group exhibition Imagined into being: South African art 1989 – 2004 currently on show at Stevenson Cape Town until 29 November 2025.
The 1990s were a time of vast transformation in South Africa. As the country was imagined and wrought into being, so too was its contemporary art. Orthodoxies crumbled, positions were staked out, and everything seemed in flux. Imagined into being: South African art 1989 – 2004 grapples with the unfinished business of those years through the work of nearly two dozen artists, spanning the period from Albie Sachs’s landmark essay Preparing Ourselves for Freedom (1989), to the “decade of democracy” celebrations in the early 2000s.
By both necessity and choice, the selection is deeply personal and idiosyncratic - shaped by the diverse perspectives of the gallery’s multigenerational curatorial team. It echoes the cacophony of that formative decade without claiming to contain or define it. “Omitting far more than it includes, the exhibition nonetheless gestures toward a re-examination of a period that laid the foundations of contemporary South African art and continues to shape how we look and speak about art today”, says the curatorial team.
The exhibition offers a window into a contested time. “For many who lived through it, this era remains a constant point of reference, with its debates still resonating - now refracted through new nuances, angles, and sensitivities”, explains the team. From a moment marked equally by body politics and conceptual experimentation, distinctive artistic languages emerged and endure. Yet for a new generation of practitioners, this history has become almost abstract.
Bringing these perspectives together - alongside voices that may not have been the loudest then but are essential to the tapestry of history - Imagined into being invites reflection on how South African art was, and continues to be, imagined into being.
Works include mixed media, photography, film, collage and sculpture, and alongside Seejarim, features artists Jane Alexander, David Goldblatt, Nicholas Hlobo, Penny Siopis, Berni Searle, Santu Mofokeng, Thembinkosi Goniwe and others.
ABOUT SEEJARIM’S WORK: The Opposite of Illustration (1999)
This video work traces a journey between Johannesburg and Lenasia, a township situated 40km south-west of Johannesburg, through the trembling reflection of car lights in a rear-view mirror. The camera captures a natural choreography of light, transforming the mundane commute into a hypnotic visual rhythm. What appears as dancing illumination is in fact a record of displacement, distance and the inherited geography of Apartheid’s spatial design.
“The work resists the literal”, explains Seejarim. “It rejects the illustrative impulse to show, explain, or document, and instead embraces a visual and conceptual instability.” The shaking mirror becomes a metaphor for memory and movement, for the uneasy oscillation between visibility and erasure that continues to shape South African urban experience. Through this instability, The Opposite of Illustration proposes a poetics of motion where abstraction becomes a language for the lived residue of segregation.
The route from Johannesburg to Lenasia, taken daily by thousands, not dissimilar to other journeys from townships like Soweto or Eldorado Park, embodies the legacies of racialised planning that positioned labour and life at a remove from one another. “In this work, the glowing trails of headlights signify more than aesthetic beauty; they gesture toward the endurance of those who traverse these imposed distances”, says Seejarim. The video collapses representation into sensation, where light itself performs the tension between beauty, freedom, confinement, and displacement.
The Opposite of Illustration literally reflects on what cannot be easily shown: the slow violence of distance, the exhaustion of repetition, and the fragile luminosity of persistence. It presents abstraction as witness on how an image that refuses to illustrate can still illuminate the social, political, and emotional landscapes we inhabit.