Vela Projects proudly presents , a group video exhibition featuring works by Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Kristin Lucas, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson, Tabita Rezaire, Pipilotti Rist, and Minnette Vári. 

The exhibition reflects on the concept of the “permacrisis” – a condition of sustained instability where crises overlap, endure, and even form a new kind of permanence. Moving between rage and radical acceptance, the works explore the psychological, political, and bodily realities of living in a state of constant upheaval. Through moving image, Force Majeure asks how a culture of hyper-visuality shapes our sense of crisis. From Vári’s search through shadowed landscapes to Knoetze and Wilson’s virtual reality extractivism histories, the exhibition grounds global instability in local geographies and material legacies. Rezaire reimagines the architecture of the internet through African spiritual knowledge systems, while Buhlungu turns to opacity as a form of resistance, refusing the constant demand for explanation or exposure through language.  

Two historical works anchor the show’s reflection on our long-standing entanglement with digital culture. Lucas’s Host (1997) stages a fractured dialogue with herself, capturing the restlessness and alienation of mediated relationships, while Rist’s Open my Glade (Flatten) (2000–2017) presses the artist’s face against the confines of the screen, a metaphor for social pressures and algorithmic distortion. Viewed today, both works speak to a digital anxiety that has only intensified with time and context.  In law, “force majeure” protects against the unforeseeable and catastrophic. Here, the artists examine what happens when the catastrophic is constant – when grief, disorientation, and relational exhaustion become daily weather. Force Majeure invites audiences to confront the stickiness of crisis, the allure of spectacle, and the fragile acts of endurance that persist in its wake.