And I, a newly evolved fish
Period: August 2025 – October 2025
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Download Catalogue: And I, a newly evolved fish
And I, a newly evolved fish considers bodies of water, particularly oceans, as sites, subjects, and frameworks through which to imagine gender, sexuality, and power otherwise, and within broader social and environmental justice goals.
The show’s title is borrowed from the poem, Points of View, by Jamaican-British poet, Lucinda Roy. In the poem, the “newly-evolved fish” represents the speaker’s desire for an unalienated and embodied relationship with water. More broadly, it refers to a fundamental idea of the exhibition: that water, being fluid and forceful, is a vector of constant change, or evolution. Water connects all life on this Blue Planet, and humans did indeed evolve from primordial seas. In this way, we are all fish: old, new, and ever-evolving.
‘Hydrofeminism’ is a guiding principle of the show. Credited to oceanic humanities and feminist scholar, Astrida Neimanis, “hydrofeminism” recognises that we are all bodies of water connected in an abundantly fluid and permeable “multibeing, more-than-human hydrocommons,” and asks what water can teach us. Critically, that “we” is held in tension, resisting a flattening universalism that disregards the urgent politics of difference. The South African-based volume, Hydrofeminist Thinking With Oceans (2024), brings together authors and artists who think in, with, and through the oceans and beaches of South Africa and beyond.. It insists on a feminism in, of, and for the water, practiced in ways that are affective, place-based, embodied, and relational. Challenging the conservative determinism of terrestrial thinking, and engaging the hauntological complexities of the South African coast, hydrofeminist epistemology and practice seeps and floods across times, poetics, sciences, politics, humanities, and humanity.
One fundamental invitation of this exhibition is to expand, deepen, and evolve our thinking and feeling in response to and with water, with the ambition that this can evolve our ways of thinking and ethics of living. The notion of a “newly evolved fish” points to the changing of life due to the changing of the water, begging the question, “what happened in the water to necessitate evolution?” What conditions have changed? How does water, and our need for water, organise us as humans, and how have we as humans dangerously reorganised water?
The artistic practices gathered in the show demonstrate diverse watery methodologies, like erosion, submersion, sweating, genesis, crystallisation, drifting, splashing, and play, which are interpreted as evolving fishy methodologies.
Kewpie (1941-2012, District Six, Cape Twon, WC), Kewpie Doing a Split at Strandfontein Beach, c. 1975-9.
Kewpie, Kewpie, Brigitte, Margaret and the Seapoint Girls Outside a Demolished Building, c. 1960.
Courtesy the Digital Transgender Archive.
Kewpie, an icon of District Six, and Cape Town’s queer and trans heritage, was a hairdresser, socialite, and dancer, and is the centre of an extraordinary photographic archive of queer culture. Seen on Strandfontein Beach, an area zoned as ‘Coloured’ under the apartheid regime, Kewpie is seen smiling in a floral bikini, her legs spread in a split on the sand. The shadows of her friends, including the photographer, stretch towards her from out of frame, while three children frolic in the water behind her. It is a jovial scene of seaside leisure that’s tinged with political disruption, challenging the policing of bodies by race, gender, and sexuality. It sits in uneasy companionship with a group photo of Kewpie and friends posing in the shell of a demolished building that immediately calls to mind the razing of District Six, and legacies of forced removals under the Group Areas Act. The crew is referred to as the Seapoint Girls, a tragic irony, as Sea Point was designated a whites-only area in 1957, part of the waves of forced removal and displacement of communities of colour away from the coastline.
Neo Matloga (1928-2012, East London, EC), Tepen, 2022.
Collage, charcoal, liquid charcoal, ink and oil stick on canvas. Courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.
While Kewpie’s photographs offer a historical perspective on race and gender in South African coastal history with its playful and social performances of femininity and masculinity, Neo Matloga’s artwork adds further fluidity to the human figure at the beach. In his signature collage style, Matloga creates whimsical figures out of different features like noses, mouths, arms, and legs, that often bear no traditional gender markers. Seen hand in hand on the titular beach of Tepen (Durban), these three “surreal bodies invite new interrogations of the human form. The evolving figures stand in a shallow, churning sea, that Matloga rendered in liquid charcoal, further animating the painting with unpredictable energy. The evocative brushstrokes bounce off of the chop-and-paste edges of the photographs, conjuring the froth of the saltwater lapping around the ankles.
Neo Matloga is only one of the exemplary artists whose work is exhibited in And I, a newly evolved fish, who embrace the paradoxical nature of water to explore black subjectivity as fluid, layered, and non-linear. His collage-based compositions made of magazine clippings and fluid media, evoke connection, fluidity and mutual care, not only in the depiction of bodies, but also in his deployment of water as his material. The use of water as a medium gives his work a quality of unresolved liquidity. “I turned to water to give me a chance to think differently about surface and to gain additional time to make my gestures,” Matloga states. Surface and depth are entangled. Time becomes expanded. Faces and bodies appear as memories in the process of forming and/or dissolving, both beautiful and unsettling. In this way water becomes an aesthetic agent of ambiguity and change. Acknowledging these ambiguities inevitably pushes us toward more interconnected ontologies. As watery beings, we depend on each other, and on the connection with planet earth.
Jody Brand (1989, Cape Town, WC), Paradise Pickles, 2022 —.
Lemon atchar, kumquat jam, sour figs,and rooibos, glass jars, paper.
Courtesy the artist.
Jody Brand’s Paradise Pickles interpret ‘preservation’ literally and conceptually. The three pickle jars are filled with lemon atchar, kumquat jam, sour figs and rooibos, recipes that have been passed down over generations, with their roots in the culinary creolisation of Khoikhoi, San, Indonesian, and Dutch food cultures in the Cape. Suspended like flotsam among the fruits and spices are the names of people who were enslaved on the Leeuwenhof Estate in Cape Town, where Brand first showed this work in 2022. In the proceeding years, microbial worlds have come alive in the jars, small aquatic ecosystems living alongside and animating the memories of those who were trafficked across the Indian Ocean and forced to labour in South Africa. The pickle jars, conjuring the kitchen shelf and the family home, honour the descendants of the enslaved who, like the preserved perishables, have resiliently built and sustained communities and cultures in the Cape through centuries of near-constant oppression, violence, and erasure. They also honour the stereotyped colonial-enforced roles of women in the home, long devalued, but so key to the care and nurturance of all. Brand’s living liquid memorials proudly insist that the work of memory is fundamental to the work of survival.
Jody Brand (1989, Cape Town, WC), Paradise Pickles, 2022 —.
Lemon atchar, kumquat jam, sour figs,and rooibos, glass jars, paper.
Courtesy the artist.
Today, artists, environmental artists, and activists of diverse gender identities, are reclaiming watery symbols to express nonbinary and fluid experiences. The works of arts that are included in And I, a newly evolved fish embody water and watery symbols to speak to race, place, power, coloniality, and performance art that engages with rivers, seas, and tidal zones, playing with ideas of border-crossing, liminality, and transformation — core themes for both environmental and gender justice movements.
Colophon
Curated by Rory Tsapayi, with Lwando Scott and Tamara Shefer
Catalogue design by Seth Deacon
Participating artists:
Chris Soal | Bronwyn Katz | Jody Brand | Zenaéca Singh | Mikhailia Petersen | Daniel Kgomo | Morolong Sabelo | Mlangeni Kewpie | Neo Matloga | Shakil Solanki | Cheri Hugo | Berni Searle | Andrew Verster
The exhibition is one of the five exhibitions of Horizon Europe Project RE-WIRING. RE-WIRING has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under Grant Agreement n° 101094497.
