The Troubled Archive Opening: Sunday the 30th of May 2021 at 10:00 am.
Ground floor gallery, Ellis House Art Studios, corner of Voorhout and 4 th .
 
The Troubled Archive brings together a constellation of artists that represent a continuation of an age-old phenomenon of creative disobedienceand agitation. The exhibition will open at the Ground floor gallery, EllisHouse on the 30th of May, coinciding with the Ellis House Open Studios and August House Open Studios events. 

Featuring Dirk Bahmann, Wayne Barker, Elize de Beer, Stephan Erasmus, Gordon Froud, Raimi Gbadamosi, Nathan Gates, Liza Grobler, Rhett Martyn, Oliver Mayhew, Lee-At Meyerov, Niel Nieuwoudt, Ross Passmoor, Mark Rautenbach, Stephen Rosin, Wilhelm Saayman, Oupa Sibeko, Matt Slater, Johan Thom, Bevan de Wet, Izanne Wiid, Emma Willemse and more.

During this short imposed moratorium on progress, this detour from ‘business as usual’, the Troubled Archive proposes a reappraisal of the value of chaos and turmoil. Where the archive attempts to overcome irrational chaos and its own incompleteness, the Troubled Archive looks to a selection of artists who accept, expose, and rely on the generative qualities of the unforeseen, the partial, the fractured and absurd. As agents of chance and change these artists willingly partake of the overwhelming unknown and point playfully to the values of its open-endedness.
 
It is in the instances of failure and ruin, in the inevitable recognition and experience of our collective fall, that we are robbed of our convictions and beliefs. This fashions the familiar into the strange and potentiates a new imagination for possible futures. In this state of furtive panic amidst uncertainty and confusion we may even have a hope of shaking the 21st century from the branches of its delusions. This ‘archive’ intends to strike together the implicitly and permanently incomplete, the paradoxical and the antagonising, often excoriating and incendiary; and so picture the surpluses of ‘not knowing’.

COVID-19 restrictions and safety measures will be in place so please bring your mask. Secure parking available