Artwork Documentation: “Domain”
Title: Domain
Location: Kukumane, Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR)
Series: The Indigenous Project
1. Storytelling
Imagine a small, defiant island in a vast sea of sand. This is Kukumane, located deep within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve—a wilderness larger in area than the entire country of Denmark.
While authorities have emptied large parts of this gigantic area, a small handful of families have remained. They live under an invisible, bureaucratic siege, where water must be fetched from far away, and where the right to be there is a daily struggle.
Yet, she stands here. In the middle of her kraal, surrounded by blankets against the cold and with a black plastic chair planted solidly in the sand. This chair is not just a piece of furniture; it is an anchor. In a landscape where the state treats them as illegal intruders, the chair is the ultimate symbol of permanence.
The text on the image, “Secure in a Tilting World”, captures her situation precisely. The world around her is “tilting”—it is unstable, politically insecure, and changing. But she does not topple. She stands firm. The digital QR codes hovering over the fence testify that even out here, in isolation, the modern world is encroaching. But her gaze tells us that this domain belongs to her.
2. Catalog Text
The work Domain is a visual monument to the civil disobedience playing out in Kukumane, amidst the Kalahari’s vast emptiness. The motif captures a daily life characterized by both extreme vulnerability and indomitable strength.
The artist uses an intense, almost feverish color palette of acid-yellow and neon-green, transforming the dusty desert environment into a vibrating, digital landscape. The black “Monobloc” garden chair and the synthetic blankets stand in contrast to the kraal’s rough branch structure, telling the story of a people insisting on a modern, settled existence on their ancestral land—an area larger than Denmark, which they are now fighting to remain in.
The work incorporates large, semi-transparent QR codes and the phrase “Secure in a Tilting World”. This text layer functions as a commentary on the political instability the residents live under—threatened by “pass laws” and water shortages. The title Domain is an insistence on sovereignty. It is a visual confirmation that they have transformed the barren sand into a defined home they refuse to leave.
3. Curatorial Evaluation
Analysis: With Domain, the series moves into the core of the conflict regarding territory and identity. The work serves as an allegory for the concept of “home” under pressure.
The handwritten text “Secure in a Tilting World” adds a poetic and philosophical layer to the image. The “tilting” refers not only to the physical horizon but to the socioeconomic imbalance the San people navigate. The QR codes fragmenting the image surface to the right function as “digital noise” or a portal to the outside world observing them.
The black plastic chair, a global symbol of mass production, is elevated here to a political marker of “permanence.” By placing it in the reserve, the woman signals that she is not a temporary guest or a nomadic figure to be moved around, but a citizen with a fixed address. The woman’s pose is not questioning, but stating: She is secure in her own domain, even when the world around her shakes.