Between Chicken and Dust

Detail of installation from the exhibition Things Appear and Disappear by Johan Thom held at Johannesburg’s Kalashnikov Gallery in February 2023.

Abstract.

"Between Chicken and Dust" is a story that responds to Johan Thom’s exhibition Things Appear and Disappear, held at Johannesburg’s Kalashnikov Gallery in February 2023. Drawing on Thom’s work, the story explores themes of loss and trauma through a personal lens, integrating a family’s oral history as a means of reflection. Rather than engaging in a conventional critique, it employs literature as a form of political and poetic inquiry, embodying the narrator’s lived experience of the artworks.

This response aligns with Jennifer Lauwrens’s ideas in Embodiment and the Arts (2022), particularly in considering how art evokes personal and subjective reflections. The story mines historical and familial fragments to build new perspectives, positioning storytelling as a means of reinterpreting the past.

The narrative centres on the narrator’s father, uTata, a storyteller. After awakening from a coma with dementia and left-sided weakness, uTata’s fragmented memories and persistent storytelling intertwine personal history with collective memory, myth, and legend. The narrator’s encounter with Thom’s art becomes a catalyst for reflection, allowing the story to engage both personal tragedy and broader themes of loss, memory, and collective trauma in postcolonial, post-apartheid South Africa.

"Between Chicken and Dust" thus demonstrates how art functions as a medium for creatively reconfiguring personal and collective narratives.