1-54 London 2025: Booth E12
What does it mean to inherit histories that resist closure? How do fragments of memory, intimate, unstable, and contingent, return in ways that demand ethical reworking, reconfiguration, and interpretive negotiation? THK Gallery’s presentation at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair situates the practices of Tshepiso Moropa, Driaan Claassen, and Sahlah Davids within these persistent interrogations of archival authority, memory, and temporality.
Reading through the lens of archival theory and performative memory, the works of Moropa, Claassen, Davids, and Ashebir interrogate the archive not as a static repository but as a dynamic, mutable site where history, memory, and material converge. This framework aligns with Derrida’s notion of “Archive Fever,” where archives are sites of authority and power, shaping what is preserved, forgotten, or reimagined.
Moropa’s collages splice images, oral traditions, and dreamscapes into layered constellations of Black womanhood and ancestral presence. Her practice destabilizes conventional archival narratives, reconstituting the archive as a generative space that remembers, fractures, and dreams. Claassen’s sculptural forms, born from the dialogue between ancient bronze casting and contemporary digital fabrication, explore thresholds between order and chaos, matter and consciousness. His work cultivates liminality, inviting viewers to dwell in interstitial spaces where perception, embodiment, and psyche intersect.
Davids, through beadwork, upholstery, and assemblage, mobilizes Cape Muslim craft traditions to materialize histories of resilience, belonging, and spiritual inheritance. Her practice enacts memory as simultaneously tender and weighty, foregrounding its ethical, affective, and relational dimensions. Ashebir extends this engagement through painting, drawing, and photography, exploring urban experience, memory, and belonging. His series Layers of Life weaves archival and present-day imagery into narratives that confront impermanence, fragmentation, and relational complexity, offering spaces for reflection on how social, historical, and spatial forces shape contemporary life.
In juxtaposition, these practices transform the exhibition space into an epistemic field, less an exhibition than a site of temporal and material negotiation. Fragments are preserved only to be reconfigured; the past is neither stable nor complete but porous, contingent, and generative. Collectors encounter works that are rigorous, intimate, and charged with the tensions between rupture and renewal, inheritance and invention.
At 1-54, a fair dedicated to contemporary African and diasporic voices, this presentation stakes a critical claim: the archive is not behind us, sealed or finalized, but a living locus of engagement. Moropa, Claassen, Davids, and Ashebir do not offer closure or resolution; they stage openings, demonstrating that memory, material, and history can be reimagined, reactivated, and carried differently. Their practices compel encounters with time itself, urging viewers to inherit, unsettle, and dream anew.
