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 The Co-Incidence of Circumstances6 November 2025 - 8 February 2026 Participating: Wessel van Huyssteen Oliewenhuis Art Museum is pleased to present The Co-Incidence of Circumstances, a solo exhibition by Wessel van Huyssteen, featuring a decade of work that explores landscape, materiality, and the marks of power on our environment. The exhibition runs from 6 November 2025 until 8 February 2026.
Wessel is interested in concepts of place and how to engage with the representation of landscape in the age of the Leviacene (the current era, defined by the dominant, destructive power of states, corporations, and artificial intelligence). As an artist who grew up in rural South Africa during apartheid, he is particularly interested in how power structures leave marks on the natural landscape.
He works in a multitude of mediums allowing for its materiality to steer his practice. Currently he produces intimate and highly detailed watercolour paintings and collages as well as abstract fields of large densely stitched textiles.
The majority of the works on exhibition consist of textiles or ‘stitchings’ as he prefers to call them. The textiles used are mostly viscose, rayon, nylon and occasionally cotton. These ‘stitchings’ are used to reflect on the textile’s toxic production processes resulting in environmental degradation- Rayon and viscose are produced by acid stripping wood. These ‘cheap’ textiles form the core of the ‘fast fashion’ industry that exploit cheap labour in far off countries for hapless social media addicts who consume its products to construct and post ever shifting selfie identities while feeding machines whose masters are tech-bros with increasingly authoritarian ambitions. The bits of neon coloured nylon safety vests he uses is derived from petrochemicals. These garments worn by workers needing maximum visibility, like road and construction workers, strip them of their individuality and ironically reduces them to an invisible class. The interconnectivity of politics, power, capital and how it shapes identity and impacts on natural eco systems function as the mood music to his art making process.
The ‘stitchings’ consist of fabric layers that are cut and sewn and re-sewn to excavate and construct disrupted and deliberately unpredictable geographies. In addition to materiality; work, time and craft are all essential elements to unpack his practice of craft that is impossible to duplicate by AI or robots, as the manual dexterity needed to execute these ‘stitchings’ hopefully lies years beyond the reach of the most sophisticated of artificial minds. He would like to invite the viewer to engage with the work on a tactile, optical, and auditory level. Auditory in the sense that the viewer should imagine the repetitive, persistent, but ever-changing tone and rhythm of the machine as the artist guides the needle across the material.
The textiles he uses are bought from his local textile shop in Bethlehem where the seemingly insulated home grown and the capillary networks of global capitalism meet. Provincial tastes for exuberant bright colours determine what the shops stock, which he embraces as a celebration of the local. The meeting of worlds can also be witnessed by increasingly industrialized agricultural practices taking hold across his district where gigantic farming equipment leave swathes of parallel lines, marks he often mimics in his work, when ripping, tilling, and harvesting monoculture crops - crops consisting of patented seeds that are sold as units with their herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers; all produced by foreign multinational companies with little to no concern for local food security or eco-systems.
The exhibition The Co-Incidence of Circumstances, brings together a body of work produced in the past 10 years. While each artwork stands alone and is inspired by specific circumstances they are all intertwined within a larger narrative. The artist relies on what Carl Jung described as synchronicity, the alchemical process when unrelated events seem to align meaningfully, when the material world mirrors what happens in the psychological. Alchemy provides the symbolic framework through which a coincidence of circumstances can be understood as meaningful, not random. This is especially true working with unruly stretch fabric that has a will of its own and distorts under the pressure of the needle to alter or exaggerate narratives the artist tries to tease from the material he works with.
The artist invites the viewer to relish in the sensual tactility of the work in the hope to create an emotional bridge and to restore some dignity to the original materials from which it was manufactured.
About the Artist
Wessel van Huyssteen has been active as an artist, arts educator, curator, and film maker since 1986. He holds a Master of Arts in Fine Arts with distinction from Wits University. He has been nominated and won several local and international documentary film awards. The Co-incidence of Circumstances is his 5th solo exhibition. His works are in several public and private collections amongst other the Nirox Foundation, Spier Arts Trust, Modern Art Projects and the South African National Art Bank. He lives in the hamlet of Rosendal in the Free State where he co-owns Ark Contemporary gallery. VENUE:OLIEWENHUIS ART MUSEUM Address: 16 Harry Smith Street, Dan Pienaar Tel: 051 447 9609
Email: oliewen@nasmus.co.za MORE EVENTS IN Bloemfontein
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