One of the collective's founders Bogosi Sekhukhuni was selected in 2016 by east London gallery Auto Italia and he is currently in London working with the gallery to establish the exhibition. The installation and work presented are drawing on the collective’s ongoing research project NTUSAVE; this programme continues their engagement with Ubulawu – a sacred collection of plants used in traditional Southern African spiritual practice – and their phytochemical properties.The collective seek systems of ancient and future knowledge, organically encoded in the properties of certain plants indigenous to Southern and Central Africa. Catalysed through ritual and symbolic action, these plants – all attached to ancient cultural practices both recreational and ceremonial – allow access to multivalent and healing methods of knowing and being. Aiding divinity and prophecy, communication with ancestors and their spirits, and access to altered dream states, Ubulawu encourages dreams which have personal and prophetic significance for the dreamer, ancestral spirits and the practice of divination.
In the Auto Italia project space NTU will use water as a medium for spiritual interfacing and intuitive sight, enabling communicative, immanent, cumulative and healing relations across apparent physical and temporal boundaries of consciousness. Alongside the Ubulawu plants, water is recognised in traditional African spirituality as a channel for interdimensional communication. Here, NTU mobilises water as a technology of resistance, assembling its spiritual properties to retrieve formal and substantial bodies of knowledge from beyond the limits of Western universal thought.
ROSL members and ROSL ARTS friends are very welcome to attend the preview of the exhibition where you can meet the scholar, the gallery curators and see the work first.
Preview: Friday April 28th 6-9pm
April 29th – June 11th 2017
Thursday – Sunday, 12-5pm
