Comprising of 45 images, all personal photographs of people and places collected largely in and around the Western Cape, the exhibition marks several departures for Lien. For starters she’s taken a break from her obsessive conceptual studio-based practice to go on a road trip.
The resulting exhibition is a wild ride into the imagination full of mystery, the conflict of human desire, and emotion; a playful tour de force of improvisation and a storehouse of poetical, philosophical and historical treasures. Using digital photography for the first time Botha approaches the world with a new playful sense of wonder that recalls, in a lighter vein, travellers’ photographs from the age of discovery.
But in Botha’s work, geography and soul are charted on the same map. This is the contemplative life as road movie, where details one might consider trivial, the moment-to-moment dislocation of daily existence contain hidden epiphanies. The effect is not unlike the one achieved during Nicholson Baker’s epic journey up the escalator in his short novel The Mezzanine: getting there never mattered so little; what there was to say en route never mattered so much.
There are references to literature (everything from Borges and Julian Barnes to Pirates of Penzance), art history and archaeology. But the references are lightly sprinkled, and Parrot Jungle is more than just a smart postmodern reflection on art and fabrication. Meta-critical it might at times seem, but when we are brought up against stark references to South Africa’s colonial and apartheid history, we are reminded that Botha is doing more than just playing games with us. Rather Botha’s Parrot Jungle exists in the messy space where the personal and the political, history and memory, biography and fiction, art and life meet.