DBL: Exhibition Histories

Items

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  The Drawbridge, from Carceri d'invenzione (Imaginary Prisons)

  Trained as an architect, the master printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi, created his Imaginary Prisons (Carceri d’invenzione) series in the mid to late 18th century. This series of darkly foreboding interior scenes, which depict over-lapping archways and stairways that seem to lead nowhere, influenced the work of Lord Byron, Escher’s impossible geometries, as well as Poe 's classic tale of horror, The Pit and the Pendulum.
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  Sound from the Thinking Strings (installation detail)

  'Sound from the Thinking Strings' was comprised of twenty etchings created by Skotnes that drew on southern San mythology, archaeological and historical research and rock paintings; poems by the late poet Stephen Watson that interpreted extracts of nineteenth-century recordings of |xam cosmology compiled in the Bleek and Lloyd archive and pre-selected by Skotnes; and historical and archaeological contextualisations of these recordings in the form of essays by archaeologist John Parkington and historian Nigel Penn. The exhibition also displayed associated visual material that Skotnes sourced from the UCT and State Archives, the UCT Archaeology Department and the SAM.
• 

  Sound from the Thinking Strings (installation detail)

  'Sound from the Thinking Strings' was comprised of twenty etchings created by Skotnes that drew on southern San mythology, archaeological and historical research and rock paintings; poems by the late poet Stephen Watson that interpreted extracts of nineteenth-century recordings of |xam cosmology compiled in the Bleek and Lloyd archive and pre-selected by Skotnes; and historical and archaeological contextualisations of these recordings in the form of essays by archaeologist John Parkington and historian Nigel Penn. The exhibition also displayed associated visual material that Skotnes sourced from the UCT and State Archives, the UCT Archaeology Department and the SAM.