Art Exhibitions

The solo exhibition titled The Ground Beneath Our Feet by acclaimed South African artist Diane Victor at The Bridge Gallery, Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, unfolds through different bodies of work that engage with memory, loss, and what lies beneath the soil. In her work, Victor draws intensely from her personal background in South Africa, where, owing to her father’s profession, she was raised in a mining environment. Mining, with its multifaceted ties to labour, landscape, and exploitation, has become a formative source for her artistic practice. In this context, Victor explores interconnected themes of violence and layered, often buried histories from a feminist perspective. To evoke the physical and symbolic weight of extraction, Victor works with natural materials such as smoke, dust, and cobalt. By grounding her works for this exhibition in these materials, she links her personal history to broader narratives of contested resources, human struggle, material transformation, and endangered ecologies.
The exhibition brings together newly produced large-scale installations, drawings, and existing works by Victor as part of a fluid, singular spatial composition. This serves as an invitation to the audience to immerse themselves in the layered narratives of the visible and the hidden that comprise the exhibition as a whole. Dust, smoke projections, and floor drawings form core elements, addressing things we might try to bury or forget. Things that remain hidden become resources, sites of conflict and contestation. Who owns our past, our trauma, and our future? The exhibition space itself becomes part of this narrative, with carefully orchestrated light and shadows shaping the overall atmosphere and spatial experience. The installation integrates floor drawings, works on glass with smoke, and sculptural elements in dialogue with the venue's architecture, avoiding physical separations and allowing the works to unfold organically. Light is employed not only to reveal forms but also to guide the viewer’s experience, highlighting the interplay between wall and floor works as well as a major hanging installation, creating an immersive surrounding. 

 

The curators of the exhibition are Assoc. Prof. Dr. Johan Thom, artist and Coordinator of Fine Art at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Basak Senova, curator and designer, and Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, with her PEEK project Atlas (of Creative Mechanisms): [Curating-Conducting], funded by the FWF–Austrian Science Fund (2022–27).
The exhibition is kindly supported by the University of Pretoria, including the Faculty of Humanities, the School of the Arts, UP Museums & the Javett Art Centre at the University of
Pretoria.