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project description End of the World (Cape Point), 2004

Cape Point, at the southern tip of South Africa, was once believed to be the place where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. It is one of those places that reminds us of our transience. End of the World (Cape Point) is a visual echo of that exchange. At Cape Point, I sensed, in a moment of intense spiritual awareness, the meeting between mortality and immortality.

The end of the world, like a thief in the night, can come at any moment. It cannot be owned or known yet, paradoxically, it is solid, ever-present, for the end is included in ‘now and forever’. There can be no doubt that the end of anything has an attraction and beauty of its own; a calm inevitability, or the promise of renewal.

Introduction
Khwezi Gule

It is said that at the moment of death your life flashes before your eyes. Whether one believes in this phenomenon or not is immaterial. What it symbolises is the common desire to stand outside oneself and apprehend life, which is lived from moment to moment, as a totality, to perceive the meaning of one’s life with absolute clarity. For those who believe in the afterlife, as Abrie Fourie does, this is also a moment in which it is possible to perceive past and future at the same time.

It is also said that there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. Again what this statement illustrates is the premium human beings place on knowing what is going to happen in the future. Hence death presents us with a mental and spiritual challenge, that is, we know we are going to die but we don’t know when, how and what will happen afterwards. Death takes away from us the many little certainties we rely on for our day-to-day existence. What we will wear tomorrow, what we want to do for the weekend, places we want to visit. Others like to confront death and hopefully “cheat” it, like skydivers, police personnel, soldiers and daredevils. Others like to prepare for it through insurance policies, buying a cemetery plot, writing a will, going to church.

Every belief system in the world has some theory as to what will happen after death. What many of these systems share is the idea that whatever happens after death has a direct relationship to how one lives one’s life and that whatever experience it is one will be conscious of it. Indeed every concept we might dream of about what lies in store after death, whether good or bad, relates very strongly to earthly pleasure and anguish.

What does an eternity feel like? Will time have any bearing on things at all? How do you experience time if you are not preoccupied with making the next meeting or meeting deadlines or needing to sleep or wake up, or take a bath or with doing any of the things that fill up our lives.

When we are in love, when we feel exhilarated or when we meditate we seem to be able to make time stand still. In other words, whenever we are engaged in activities that make us appreciate time more acutely we perceive the extraordinary in mundane things and we appreciate the moment in its entirety.

Driving along any country road or freeway in South Africa one is bound to see plastic bags caught in the barbed wire fences that ring farms and roadside properties. One sees so many of them and in such fleeting moments that one hardly notices them anymore. Hence the image Yellow, which captures one of these plastic bags flapping in the wind, elicits an emotional response because something that we barely acknowledge is made beautiful and important.

A photograph arrests a moment in time. It stands for something that has been and that can never be. It is an attempt to defy time or to stand outside of it. A photograph also tries to stand outside of reality. The investment that is put in wedding photographs, for instance, suggests a desire not only to preserve a moment but to create a signifier for a happiness that is even truer than the event itself.

By photographing the mundane, Abrie intervenes in our perception of reality and accords importance to situations and states of mind that would have been forgotten in an instant. The act of elevating the everyday and ordinary is an attempt to make the viewer focus on the here and now, to see the potential of every moment for beauty, tragedy and death, to make the viewer aware that in each moment is embedded an eternity. This exhibition should not simply be looked at as representations of things but as portraits of time.