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Sustainability & the Imagined Landscape: A Dialogue Across Practises

Sustainability & the Imagined Landscape: A Dialogue Across Practises at Goodman Gallery

This exhibition brings together a group of internationally acclaimed artists, William Kentridge, Yinka Shonibare, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Kate Gottgens, Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Misheck Masamvu, and Walter Oltmann, to explore the layered relationships between sustainability, memory, and the landscape.

At a moment when ecological crisis intersects with urgent questions of history, displacement, and identity, the exhibition considers landscape not as a passive backdrop but as a living, contested space shaped by human intervention, colonial histories, and ongoing environmental transformation

Through drawing, photography, sculpture, and installation, the artists engage with both physical and psychological terrains.

William Kentridge reflects on extractive histories and the traces they leave on land and memory, while Yinka Shonibare interrogates global trade, material histories, and the entanglements of culture and consumption.

Pélagie Gbaguidi approaches landscape as an archive of trauma and resilience, layering gestural mark making with historical fragments to evoke both rupture and repair. In contrast, Kate Gottgens renders dreamlike environments that blur the boundaries between memory, fiction, and ecological anxiety.

Photography plays a vital role in grounding these explorations. Lindokuhle Sobekwa offers an intimate, diaristic engagement with place, where landscape becomes inseparable from personal and collective histories. Misheck Masamvu constructs dense, expressive surfaces that reflect the pressures of urban and environmental change, while Walter Oltmann’s intricate wire sculptures evoke organic forms, suggesting fragile ecosystems suspended between endurance and collapse.

Together, these practices propose new ways of seeing and inhabiting the world. Sustainability here is not presented as a fixed solution but as an ongoing negotiation between past and future, destruction and renewal, presence and absence.

By reimagining landscape as a site of both vulnerability and possibility, the exhibition invites viewers to consider their own relationship to the environments they occupy and the histories embedded within them.