The Wits Origins Centre presents 'Imagine Visionary Animals', a site-responsive temporary exhibition with Berlin and Johannesburg-based Icelandic artist Erla S. Haraldsdóttir.
By balancing photorealist and symbolic realism Haraldsdóttir returns to her longstanding investigations into how images can serve as portals connecting cultural symbols, archetypes, and lived experience across time and place.
Through this distinct form of ocular magical realism, the exhibition acknowledges stone surfaces as humankind’s original canvas through an interplay of colour, transparency, light, reflection, and spatial perception.
The exhibition is, on the one hand, informed by the hues of materials composing the physical exhibition space of the new wing, and on the other hand, underscoring the museum’s core themes – cave paintings and rock engravings.