Memoir, the first group show at Deepest Darkest for 2022 is a salon show featuring South African artists Leila Fanner, Anton Karstel, Ferial Mohamed and Navel Seakamela.
Home and history, becoming, and belonging are themes explored in the varied practices of the four artists featured.
Leila Rose Fanner is a painter and illustrator working in both figurative work and abstraction. Her inspiration is interwoven with her spiritual journey and personal dream symbols. Depicting dream-like natural settings for her silhouetted female figures, she explores her personal relationship with the material realm through a metaphysical and spiritual lens. Her primary focus is on the meditative journey of creating a piece of art, which she feels is part of the appeal of the final piece.
Anton Karstel is a committed and prolific painter. Deeply concerned with the notion of art and its relation to social reality, he paints from photographic and historical source material – often using challenging imagery – as a means of addressing and confronting a specific subject.
Ferial Mohamed’s work is concerned with a personal interest in identity, decoloniality, in human consciousness, and reflects her appreciation of the grotesque and carnivalesque, and language or text as a device, functioning at times as a record of culture and the issues which affect that culture. In this sense, it operates as historical commentary, but this is purely incidental to her primary preoccupation with storytelling.
Navel Seakamela creates mixed media charcoal drawings and paintings as an extension to investigate and have a better understanding of his immediate circle, experiences, and in the consumer society depicting forms of self-representation to question blackness and masculinity adding on the notion of individuals who are often marginalised or rather disenfranchised and underappreciated in society.
The exhibition opens on Saturday 15 Jan at 1 pm and runs until 8 February 2022. All visitors are welcome.
Urban Icons II- series -Leila Rose Fanner 2021
Urban Icons – series – Leila Rose Fanner 2021
Memoir: Featuring Leila Fanner, Anton Karstel, Ferial Mohamed and Navel Seakamela
Opens: Saturday, 15 January 2022
1:00pm – 5:00pm
Ends: Tuesday 8 February 2022
Deepest Darkest: 20 Dixon Street, De Waterkant, Cape Town