Art Exhibitions

The book is not the opposite of technology. The book is already a machine. A hinge machine. A memory machine. A sequencing machine. A concealment machine. An imagination engine.
Rather than staging a familiar opposition between the analogue book and the digital interface, Technics of the Page / The Last Human Reader places the artist’s book beside artificial intelligence as predecessor, companion, irritant and saboteur.

The exhibition moves through technical beings, memory systems, generative machines, networks, hallucinations and that which refuses capture. It asks what happens when books and archives increasingly circulate as data, metadata, predictions and extractable patterns, and what remains stubbornly material, illegible, embodied or resistant. These books must still be turned, unfolded, rotated, decoded, listened to, peered into and sometimes performed. Meaning may lie in a fold, a cut, the resistance of a binding, an instruction, an omission.

Artificial intelligence enters the exhibition as an unstable apparatus for thinking about memory, authorship, classification, prediction and reading. The title The Last Human Reader is not a prophecy. It is a provocation:

What counts as reading when the reader may be human, collective, machinic, ancestral, distributed or imagined?

Parking for the opening is available in the garage beneath the museum. 

The exhibtion is curated by Ciara Struwig, Renzo Filinich & Stacy Hardy
with Sam Kentridge, Twiggy Matiwana, Gabrielle Mudiwa, Sahar Carter & Vuyokazi Ngemntu.

Entrance free, all welcome

 

Address: Corner Bertha (ext. of Jan Smuts Ave) and Jorissen Streets, Braamfontein, Johannesburg

Tel: 011 717 1365

Hours: Tuesdays to Saturdays 10:00 - 16:00.

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STOKVEL GALLERY || pause Participating: Various artists Opening: Saturday 10 October 2026 at 10:00 - 11 October 2026 View exhibition details...