Exhibition Statement
Augury After Autogogues playfully and satirically stages a kind of speculative mysticism that indulges the sovereignty of ‘personal truth’. In a time when shared systems of belief are breaking down and facts are met with scepticism, the exhibition imagines the advent of the Autogogue: a self-guided mystic who looks inward for meaning — interpreting the world through emotion, affect, and intuition.
Within the space, this mystic uses fabulated devices to divine meaning from the noise of media, relationships, and everyday impressions. These invented instruments—strange and obsolete-looking—are used to track shifting moods, decode social dynamics, and reflect on personal slights, all in search of some higher (self)understanding.
The exhibition ultimately augurs a future state in which individuals are adrift on a sea of information, each enclosed in their own private cosmologies. Though laced with humour and play, the work points to an underlying impoverishment or spiritual ineptitude—a sense that we are no longer equipped to process the world around us, and that the tools we reach for are fragmentary, outdated, or failing.
Augury After Autogogues speculates in this vein: Where will we turn, once the scale, speed, and complexity of our information systems outstrip our emotional and spiritual ability to interpret, absorb, or endure them?
Works that will be on display are detailed below (click on image to enlarge)
Orbea kako-occultus
Title: Orbea kako-occultus
Medium: 3D printed object, resin, hot glue, fabric, Perspex, marbles and weed eater trimmer line
Size: 85 x 180 x 180 cm
Abacus for Emotional Transactions II
Title: Abacus for Emotional Transactions II
Medium: Cherry and Kiaat wood, copper rod and painted washers
Size: 65 x 70 x 40 cm
State of Reproach
Title: State of Reproach
Medium: Welded metal, African Wench Wood, glass, brass inserts, brush hairs and sand
Size: 200 x 180 x 85 cm
Meditations on Resentment
Title: Meditations on Resentment
Medium: Cherry wood, brass, sand and found objects
Size: 70 x 43 x 74 cm
Don’t miss Miné’s solo exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum, running alongside the 2025 Sasol New Signatures Visual Arts Competition exhibition. Exhibition Dates: 4 September to 2 November 2025.
