South African artists have a lot of histories to contend with. There’s our country’s troubled political history, our diverse cultural heritage and numerous social histories. Then there’s Western art history and the yet-to-be-written future history of art on the continent. Eish, sometimes it feels as though history is piled up so high behind us it can’t help but topple. This is Sanell Aggenbach’s terrain, a place of time warps, slippages, dislocated dreams and displaced images. Initially trained as a painter Aggenbach often fuses painting with sculptural and photographic elements in order to bring about a change of context. If her oeuvre is lacking in homogeneity, it’s because time isn’t linear or one-dimensional either. Her amalgam of intimate personal signifiers and cool modernist aesthetics posits art as a hybrid state of mind, redolent of distant histories that can’t help but echo with the reverberations of the present. In this new body of work, title Sub Rosa she investigates “translucent film as a medium for recounting half-truths by referencing tampered photographic film”. For the show she’s filled the gallery space with beautifully rendered, ghostly washed oil paintings drawn from photographic portraits. Nietzsche’s sustained critique of the will to truth is central to Aggenbach’s ambition, replacing truth’s dogmatism with the search for conditions of possibility. As Aggenbach's process of distortion shows, a series of choices, the selective act of recording, are all that is open to the artist. A case in point is Rebel Rebel, where an angry young man recalls Jean Dean's pouting visage. Seductive, whimsical and somehow darkly funny, with its imploding languages and references, it’s a subtle, slightly sad memorial to the unstable structures of fame, modernity and representation.