A Close Reading Of Selby Mvusi's "Visual Perception (1966–1967), 2020–

[This is an ongoing project, in which I speculatively apply some of Selby Mvusi's ideas about composition, (as written in his text Visual Perception) to my own practice. I did not choose speculation, but rather the project is forced into speculative enquiry because Mvusi leaves many of his ideas inconclusive, claiming that it is possible to reach perfect composition by applying certain scientific principles (and fully abandoning "intuition"), but at the same time, never explaining the formula or exact interaction of these principles. Mvusi's untimely death in 1967 leaves this phenomenal and under-read text open to applications of a number of the concepts he introduces. "Force quanta," of primary interest in this project, are the units of a composition, whose momentum is measured by their shape, and whose intensity is measured by their texture. Mvusi does not explain where one force quanta begins and another ends in a compositional field, and neither does he chart a method for measuring the momentum or intensity of a given force quanta's shape or texture. With these units forming the basis of Mvusi's compositional idea (in this text at least), I attempt to work with single units/ force quantum, which I define randomly, and arrange in various formations, as parts of larger compositions (attempting to attend to a balance of centripetal and centrifugal force) and as individual objects.]

<-- Installation images from group show at CIRCUIT, Lausanne:

BLANK | With a bet, | on a long distance relationship, | with time, | slow thinking and deep conversation.*

with Memory Biwa, Thulile Gamedze (me!), Donna Kukama, Robert Machiri, Zen Marie and Shirin Yousefi.