Goodman Gallery Johannesburg 26 January – 9 March 2019
Ecstatic Archive presents new work from Gerhard Marx’s ongoing series of disorienting maps which investigate in the words of writer Alexandra Dodd, ‘the formal and fictive possibilities of perspective’.
The title of the exhibition refers to a series of archives Marx has been working with over the past two years. The archives came from two main sources. The first was a collection of decommissioned geographic, geological and political maps from the past two centuries, which were saved from being pulped. While the other archive was of a more personal nature, comprising outdated maps donated by individuals burdened by a nostalgic attachment to these documents, but unsure what to do with them. Rupturing the flatness of these maps, Marx has reworked the material with the dedicated rigor of a cartographer charting ever more imaginative territories. The geometrically complex drawings produced by these efforts are best read with the assistance of a navigational device. One such compass can be found in the form of a catalogue essay written by Professor Edgar Pieterse.