Force Majeure

Vela Projects proudly presents Force Majeure – a group video exhibition featuring Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Kristin Lucas, Lo-def Film Factory, Tabita Rezaire, Pipilotti Rist, and Minnette Vári.

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The exhibition explores the concept of the permacrisis and how radical acceptance and rage may be interconnected. As the prefix suggests, the ‘perma’ denotes permanence – a condition of ongoing instability, a relentless cascade of upheaval, unpredictability, and emotional outpouring. By some logic, then, the permacrisis becomes its own form of stability–a hypermodern diagnosis of the everyday–a chain of overlapping crises without resolution, defined by endurance, suffering, and spectacle.

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Taking a cue from the medium, the exhibition teases out deeper questions of visual consumption and creation, not only of the images we ingest, but also the countless worlds and realities reinforced by film. Some might argue the line between public and private has entirely dissolved through micro-videos and a cadence of clickbait. Then, perhaps, our sense of crisis is magnified by a medium and culture of hyper-real image making.

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In search and abreast, Minnette Vári’s work, The Eleventh Hour (2017), brings an introductory note as the only piece with auditory presence in the space. In it, various orblike figures search in the dark for a missing person. It’s laden with the dread and hope of circumstance, but also a kind of endless search in an expansive landscape. The scope and the action point to all too familiar local realities, but also a deep, growing isolation and an unsettling kind of anonymity of the unseen. Similarly, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson’s VR piece, The Subterranean Imprint Archive (2021), localises a notion of the permacrisis within Central and Southern Africa while simultaneously historicising it. They offer a critique of Western-dominated archives and techno-optimism through the narrative of uranium mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo – a material used to build the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The VR users, like Vári’s orbs, mingle in an unmoored world, here of techno politics and the material cost of “progress” we find ourselves in.

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Premium Connect (2017) by Tabita Rezaire explores the architecture of power, both online and offline, and proposes that the roots of the information superhighway may lie in African spirituality rather than code. The video, with its soft infomercial tones and hyper-internet graphics, embraces the idea that information systems might transcend the dichotomy of organism/spirit/device. Instead, the user and usage become the central tension, as is the intention and action of networks. These interactions and political interference are in part public’s spillage into inner worlds.

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Siminikiwe Buhlungu inverts this spillage back towards the private and explores alternatives to the feeling of being overexposed.   Glissant’s idea of the right to opacity and to exist unburdened by questions or demands serves as a way to read the work. In The Khuaya (2022) – “khuaya” as a play on the word “choir” – she records and replays a conversation without context. A group discuss neighbourhood gossip, deep holes, and taps that won’t spout water. Language forms an integral part of Buhlungu’s practice, not as a material as such, but rather as a force of obfuscation which here casts the viewer out. There is no use in Google fact-checking or repeating the question. Rather, one finds oneself within a narrative of incongruity, listening as rightly stunted aliens and outsiders.

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By way of the veil, this exchange flows both ways - our unsoothed fret pours into a muddied, anxious mess, just as disorder is circulated-en-masse. Cortisol sticks. It’s sticky. And what we accept is a deeply psychological and individualised diagnosis of stability, nostalgia, and expectation. Here, the works of Kristin Lucas and Pipilotti Rist offer bodily accounts of the digital experience. Both their works were produced in the late nineties and early noughties, when fears of the internet were running amok, yet when reread in a contemporary setting, they offer a sustained thread.

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Kristin Lucas’ Host (1997) explores the complexities and chaos of virtual interactions and their impact on distrait relationships. Lucas plays both sides of the mediated exchanges as smash cuts intensify a restlessness and split her image into four. The film highlights the isolation and inner frustration born from the digital experience – our reliance on and recoil from it – while also emphasising an inner humanity of the digital as a man-made design. Lucas’s schizophrenic and dismembered assessment rings true and is only intensified within the panoptic digital networks we currently peruse.

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Similarly, Open my Glade (Flatten), 2000-2017, by Pipilotti Rist suggests a claustrophobic relationship with screens and disembodiment by digital media. In it, the artist’s face is distorted and smooched up against a glass pane, making its display, either the projector or monitor, a cage. As the artist squirms, her makeup and spit muddy the screen as her actions turn more desperate to escape the pressured space. Rist’s commentary is aimed at the social pressures and larger forces of society that distort women, which, 25 years later, is a persistent condition that is only magnified through algorithmic output.

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Thus, the artists in the exhibition highlight potential responses with a sensitivity to the unfiltered madness created by many. They individualise and also suggest acceptance of the ongoing grief and disorientation at various distances from the self. The permacrisis, inherited already in the 90s, therefore surpasses headlines about WW3 or economic collapse, AI takeovers, and the Epstein Files. It encompasses relational exhaustion and a creeping psychology of indifference and outrage.

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Force majeure is a legal clause. It is a protection from the incredibly damning, catastrophic and unforeseen, which are seen, felt, and responded to here, through a racket of lust, brutalism, and bankruptcy.