Art Exhibitions

25 April 2026 - 30 June 2026

Rirhandzu Vermeulen - BODE gallery - Cape Town
 
A long line of hot assumptions is Vermeulen’s alchemical work of transforming the many restrictions and projections externally imposed on her womanhood into mythologies of self: reclaiming these sites of ordeal, and wielding them as both weapon and shield. Through A long line of hot assumptions, Vermeulen asserts her right to define herself, actively constructing her identity on her own terms. The resulting body of work is both gentle and fierce, contained and excessive; a transgressive account of the paradoxical multiplicity of womanhood. 
 
The works offer the viewer an intimate glimpse behind the fourth wall, stumbling upon private worlds. These figures do not perform for us, but for themselves: dreaming, conjuring, contorting, refusing to mourn. Their enclosures, which attempt to constrain them, are revealed in actuality to be sovereign universes. Occasionally a gaze meets us, not with warmth or hostility, but with the quiet apathy of women who have long since stopped explaining themselves. Accompanying these self-governed spaces are clay creations made by the figures themselves; otherworldly flowers and bowls that take up space with the same insistence as their creators.
 
Sexuality, glamour, beauty, the enactment of womanhood; A long line of projected assumptions, are now returned to their rightful owners, wielded entirely on their own terms. This is not a gentle feminism. It is wayward, hypnotic, and fearlessly unapologetic. In an undaunted act of refusal, Vermeulen alchemises what was used against women, rendering it a mythology that belongs entirely to herself, and all women, everywhere.

BODE GALLERY

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