What remains through time, slowness and stillness: A solo exhibition by Sonya Rademeyer

Dates: 15 July – 24 August 2025

Opening event: 18:00 on Tuesday, 15 July 2025

Walkabout event: 12:00 on Thursday, 17 July 2025

Venue: Reservoir, Oliewenhuis Art Museum, 16 Harry Smith Street, Bloemfontein

“I hereby acknowledge and honour the First Nation Peoples of this land, The San and Khoe, who hold deep ancestral connections and memories to this land and its peoples, and on whose land this project takes place.” – Sonya Rademeyer

As a visual artist Sonya Rademeyer seeks to find ways to bridge cultural fragmentation through empathy as entangled artistic practice. The process of unearthing cultural entanglement is often explored through the medium of gesture and performance, with collaboration as key. Whilst grappling in deepening her searches towards cultural interconnectedness and social healing, Sonya remains centred on continued awareness in applying anti-colonial practices such as deep-listening and humility.

The exhibition is conceptualized around the theme of time and erosion and explored through a decolonizing worldview. In the place of stillness where erosion generally happens, natural processes of decay and erosion of plant life generally runs unnoticed. However, when notions of erosion are introduced to include the historical, the social, the cultural, intellectual or the political, it becomes humanly foregrounded. Using conceptual ideas around time, erasure, loss, invisible belonging and time as departure points to explore notions of historical cultural erasure, the more-than-human-kin (live snails) leave traces of such erasure by eating into high-end Fabriano paper. Throughout the exhibition period, the community of snails continue to contribute as collaborators in co-creating art.

An explicit aim within this exhibition is the welcoming and inclusion of community as equal epistemic collaborators. Both human and more-than-human-kin (live snails) contribute towards the exhibition in different ways, but at the heart are about community-building, relationality, dialogue, and reflection through decolonising artistic practices. Through their deliberate inclusion, the exhibition challenges the idea of how notions of erosion can be expressed through the vehicle of visual arts whilst including community into the structure of a western contemporary solo exhibition.

The altar piece to the exhibition is the building of a cultural wall or ‘Meraka’ (place of gathering) through community collaboration. Using post-natural and indigenous methodologies which include materials such as clay and animal dung, the collaborative building is viewed as a gesture of relationality. The wall hopes to visibalise decolonial ways of knowing, and deep memory lineages to understandings of place through the recognizable traditional building materials and particular architectural iconography.

In creating connecting possibilities within the exhibition and beyond, both uncertainty and unpredictability are considered and welcomed, allowing for a collaboration that enhances difference and allows for disparate conditions. Navigating away from the normative ways of comprehending western contemporary art solo-structures, new ways of writing curatorial text might emerge and perhaps most importantly, new and kinder ways of art criticism.

These new ways are what decolonisation is.

For further information about the exhibition, please visit: www.what-remains-through-time.com

The public is invited to join Oliewenhuis Art Museum for the opening of what remains through time, slowness and stillness. The opening will take place at 18:00 on Tuesday, 15 July in the Sculpture Park at Oliewenhuis Art Museum. This includes Performance Art by Rademeyer. Everyone is welcome and entrance is free of charge. Refreshments will be served.

A walkabout of the exhibition will be conducted by the artist at 12:00 on Thursday, 17 July 2025.

The exhibition can be viewed until Sunday, 24 August 2025 in the Reservoir at Oliewenhuis Art Museum, located at 16 Harry Smith Street, Bloemfontein. The museum is open to the public from Monday to Friday between 08:00 and 17:00, and on Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays between 09:00 and 16:00. A ramp at the entrance provides access for wheelchairs, while a lift provides access to the first floor. A R10 parking fee will be charged, payable in cash only, but entrance to the museum is free.

For more information please contact the Museum at 078 968 4300 or oliewen@nasmus.co.za. Stay up to date by following Oliewenhuis Art Museum on Facebook, Instagram and X for all upcoming exhibitions and events.

For more information about the exhibition, please contact: Ester le Roux, Curator at Oliewenhuis Art Museum at oliewen@nasmus.co.za or Sonya Rademeyer at sonyarademeyerstudio@gmail.com.

Issued by:

Karen Marais, Snr Exhibition Officer at Oliewenhuis Art Museum

+27 (0) 78 968 4300

karen@nasmus.co.za

Oliewenhuis Art Museum

16 Harry Smith Street

Bloemfontein

T: 078 968 4300

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Visiting Hours

Mon to Fri 8:00 – 17:00

Sat 9:00 – 16:00