PSM Berlin presents a series of three exhibition Chapters, following the Fallow Ground exhibition. Curated by RESERVOIR from Cape Town, Fallow Ground showcased 22 Southern African artists at Spaced Out, Gut Kerkow, from October to December 2024. From January to March 2025, new works by these artists will feature in three exhibitions, each exploring distinct sub-themes: natural materiality, identity and migration, and contemporary archaeology.

 

Chapter Three: Contemporary Archeology

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Archaeology is often thought of as a practice concerned with the distant past—unearthing fragments of civilisations long gone, decoding material traces to reconstruct lost histories. Yet, contemporary archaeology operates in the present, examining the residues of our own time: the ways materials accumulate, erode, and shift meaning as they pass through urban landscapes, industrial processes, and lived experience. This exhibition brings together artists whose work engages with this concept, exploring how everyday materials, structures, and surfaces hold the imprints of their histories.

 

The exhibition includes works by Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Bella Knemeyer, Dale Lawrence, Maja Marx, Gareth Nyandoro and Guy Simpson.

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Iranian-born, Cape Town based Kamyar Bineshtarigh employs mark-making as an act of translation through which to explore the complexities arising from the movement, migration, and displacement of people. Comprising layers of canvas, ink, paint, and glue, amongst other mediums, Bineshtarigh’s artworks serve as immersive archives of personal and public histories. Titled after a panel beating shop next to his former studio in a defunct garment factory in Cape Town’s semi-industrial suburb of Salt River, Panel Beaters Wall VI (2023), is a reflection on the condemned workshop. For weeks prior to its demolition, Bineshtarigh applied cold glue to the surface of a wall, which, when peeled away, lifted the original wall paint, his own impressions, and the motor oil, spray paint, and sweat of the panel beaters. The structure now vanished to make way for a housing development, Panel Beaters Wall VI is a testament to the ongoing gentrification of the city, the history of the building, and the lives of those who laboured within it.

 

Bella Knemeyer works with organic and industrial materials to explore themes of urban transformation, decay, and preservation. Her practice often involves paper-based processes, including handmade paper and pulp techniques, to create works that reference the shifting landscapes of Cape Town. By using materials that embody both fragility and permanence, she examines the metabolism of the city—how spaces are built, demolished, and repurposed over time. Where Up and away and over and again (2024) recalls an open sky, a plume of smoke discernible in its expanse, Double toil and trouble (2024) portrays the aftermath of a human-made disaster. Tracing the silhouette of an unturned paving stone in Buried between a lagoon and a golf course (2024), Knemeyer alludes to the dumping of rubble in a wetland to shroud the violent demolition of a nearby neighbourhood. The unfolding of each artwork prompts reflection on the metabolisation of space – its erasure, dormancy, and eventual reincarnation.

Interested in the confluence of commerce and culture, Gareth Nyandoro transmutes elements of Zimbabwe’s informal trade sector into large-scale works on paper. Having trained as a printmaker, Nyandoro’s artworks are characterised by a technique he calls “kuchekacheka.” “To cut” in Shona and repeated for emphasis in the style of Zimbabwe’s street slang, “kuchekacheka” describes Nyandoro’s process of incising, inking, and peeling away the paper’s surface. At times, Nyandoro integrates three-dimensional forms into his print works, his collages transforming into backdrops for installations. Through the inclusion of props such as clothing, fresh produce, and found objects, Nyandoro evokes the atmosphere of Harare’s marketplace stalls. In Musika WaBaba VaMike (2019) (Mike’s Father’s Market), paper sheets have been affixed to canvas and imprinted with the figure of a street vendor. The vendor’s wares – potatoes, cabbages, coal – are positioned on the gallery floor. With the produce’s impending decay, and Nyandoro’s abstraction of the vendor, Musika WaBaba VaMike calls for reflection on the resilience of informal traders in Zimbabwe’s faltering economy. 

Dale Lawrence, concerned with the interrelation of language, time, and materiality, transforms degradable data into enduring artworks. Disrupting repetitive processes such as his own artistic practice, a familiar language, or habitual behaviours, Lawrence is at once an observer of the familiar and bearer of the unknown. For his works involving script, Lawrence extracts phrases from transient texts – clickbait headlines, television periodicals, product labels, and song lyrics – reordering them into poetic logs and printing them in programming type. Lawrence compiled the text of This is a Beautiful Picture of a Japanese Tree pt. I (2024) by entering Thai script taken from product labels into translation software. Where This is a Beautiful Picture of a Japanese Tree pt. I comprises stacks of improbable logs laminated in epoxy, in This is a Beautiful Picture of a Japanese Tree pt. II (2024), kilometres of packaging tape are layered and cut to resemble an ancient manuscript or early computing device. 

 

Maja Marx approaches painting as an activation of surface, mapping found compositions onto canvas and allowing the process to proliferate. With each layer responding to the one beneath it, her paintings are equal parts rhythmic and ruminatory. The proximity to the canvas from which Marx paints imbues each artwork with a vivid legibility, that it might read as a stratified rockface, textured cardboard, or the shorthand notations of an engineer. Both Longhand (2024) and Farsight (2024) extend meditations on the thought processes that occur when painting in a dedicated studio environment. Longhand, a large-scale painting that stretches 23 meters to measure the southern corner and walls of a building, evokes the colour and growth of nearby lichens. While Longhand ought to be viewed from afar, Farsight demands closer observation – the eye’s mechanics obscuring reality to suggest a plane that extends beyond the painting’s surface. 

 

Guy Simpson’s latest works depict the facades of buildings from his childhood neighborhood in Orange Grove, Johannesburg. These paintings function as architectural memories, documenting the surfaces of a place that shaped him, while also addressing the ways in which urban spaces shift over time, retaining traces of habitation and change. Near to our old home (2024) depicts the negative space surrounding a door and its adjacent letter plate, while 12th Street Orange Grove (2024) and Copper and Rust (2024) offer material explorations of the medium – expertly altering the paint’s colour and texture on sheets of layered canvas, Simpson reinscribes his artworks with a sculptural quality. 

 

Together, these works form a contemporary archaeology of material and memory. They map the persistence of surfaces, the transformation of matter, and the ways in which urban environments become archives of lived experience. By engaging with the residues of the present, these artists invite us to reconsider the notion of excavation—not as a means of retrieving the past, but as a way of understanding the evolving landscapes we inhabit today.