Dinkies Sithole: Shrine Rituals

Bag Factory Artist at the Nando's Project Room # 2

Opens: Tuesday 5 August 2008 at 6:30 pm
Closes: Sunday 13 October 2008

Dinkies Sithole is the second artist in he current incarnation of the project room now appropriately called the Nando's Project Room. Sithole is a Soweto-born artist whose work traverses painting, sculpture, performance, video and other media.

The current installation is called Shrine Rituals and comprises a series of shrines made out of discarded materials. The objects in these shrines are re-invested with energy and potency. Here the scientific conception of energy meets the more universal idea of energy as something more metaphysical. For instance, many people in South Africa don't discarding their personal affects for fear that these objects might be used to bewitch the owner. Similarly different belief systems such as Yoruba cosmology where every object has a 'life force' or "ase".

In these shrines the batteries, which are products of science, are not out of place with the miniature Buddha's, rosaries, bottles of 'umuthi' and the coloured string, often used by ZCC adherents for protection.

Sithole works bring together different beliefs both old and new, belief in science and in spirits, religion and animism. But is that not the beauty of art: that it allows for the reconciliation of these seemingly antagonistic beliefs?