In Where Are We Going?, Specs’ provocations are decidedly concerned with the nation’s cultural health, which is why, in its very orientation, the exhibition examines the seemingly amorphous shapes of South Africa’s political and cultural trajectories. Thus, to inquire, where are we going is to inevitably question the often mute and loud foundations on which modern South Africa is built. This is where Specs’ new exhibition draws its rhetorical, formal, thematic, and political strength from.

In this body of work, the famed truisms find material expression: the personal is indeed political. What emerges in this iteration is a sustained line of inquiry around how colonialism and its afterlives shape our temporal existence as a nation. This is to say that the exhibition reflects very deeply into our past, present, and future. It questions the significant historical moments that have defined modern South Africa and the pathos that encircles it.

These questions come to the fore with conviction in this new corpus characterized by sculptures, drawings, paintings, and photographs of anthropomorphic figures, all meant to weave a complex picture and an equally unfathomable recent history.