Multimedia work is the focus of the week.
- This year freeform online radio station, the Pan Africa Space Station (PASS) is extending its reach with an audio-visual public art installation installed in St Georges Mall. Part radio tower, part rocket ship, it’s a sonic sculpture by artist Douglas Gimberg and architect Greer Valley that will disseminate PASS radio on street level. Referencing everything from Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s notorious ‘Nzwamba fusée”, to musician Sun Ra’s Space is the Place and the rocket-shaped mausoleum of Agostinho Neto in Luanda, the work is at once wi-fi, hi-fi and lo-fi. It may be tech-savvy, but it is also endearing and faintly ridiculous – a little rocket that shuttles effortlessly between potency and weakness, modernity and nostalgia, without ever finding equilibrium. If history is an attempt to recall events, people or places beyond our reach, here the past becomes as speculative as the future. St George’s Mall, Cape Town. Until October 12. Website: www.panafricanspacestation.org.za
- William Scarbrough, an American artist who moved to Cape Town in 2004, continues his complex engagement with narratives of violence, signification and ethics as presented in the global media. Titled Forgotten, his new exhibition takes the form of an installation in two parts that traces the tragic coincidence of two events in New York City. Presented in a tightly woven circular narrative that employs contingency to challenge our conception of objective history, it includes a series forensic facial reconstructions as well as a flash-interface video projection. Together, these elements offer up a narrative pushed aside in the wake of catastrophe. serialworks, Unit F404, Woodstock Industrial Centre, 66 Albert Road, Woodstock, Cape Town. Until October 9, with viewing Thursday to Saturday from 11am to 6pm or by appointment. Website: www.serialworks.info.