The annual Spier Light Art exhibition will take place from 21 March to 21 April 2025, once again transforming Spier Wine Farm into an immersive space of nocturnal adventure. With 16 site-specific installations activating the landscape, you're invited to wander, discover, be immersed in the play of light and the stories that each artwork tells.
Tours and tastings
Guided tours will be available on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. This year, visitors can embark on a sensory journey in among Berco Wilsenach's 'Project of the Blind Astronomer', where our resident sommelier will host a blind tasting experience every Friday night.
Introducing the participating artists
The 16 selected light installations for 2025 were selected by the curatorial team, Jay Pather and Vaughn Sadie following an an open call. This years exhibitions explores three broad themes: our relationship with the land, light as a tool for surveillance and safety and lastly our contemporary condition.
- Florian Bach
- Gina-Rose Bolligello
- Jess Bothma
- Paul Castles and Nicole Brady
- Sue Clark, Ross Juterbock and Carla Prins
- Sophie Guyot
- Zakiyyah Haffejee, Mmakhotso Lamola, Zahraa Essa and TK Mbadi
- Dean Hutton
- Serge Alain Nitegeka
- Karla Nixon
- LightUp Collective: Stephanie Briers and Andrew Earl
- Elgin Rust and Jane Appleby
- Antoine Schmitt
- Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum
- Hashim Tarmahomed and Joshil Naran
- Berco Wilsenach
Spier Light Art - curatorial statement
By Jay Pather and Vaughn Sadie
Spier Light Art, over its six years of its existence, has provided a space for a range of artworks that use light as a central aspect of their form. Set on a farm that inspires with its rolling, lush landscapes, Spier Wine Farm is restorative and mindful in its sustainable practices, and also vexing because of its colonial history.
The exhibition occurs within a large enough frame to inspire a range of experiences. Here, artworks have emerged as playful, evocative, bombastic, subtle and participatory, involving audiences in constructing the work itself.
The last editions of the event have provided a road map for ways in which light art in all its mercurial shapeshifting can draw our attention to a subject beyond its materiality, surprise our senses, evoke awe, laughter and intrigue, debate emotions, and touch us below our surface sadness or hurt.
This year’s works, with the sheer variety of light instruments and aesthetics, will no doubt extend that road map. However, unlike other years, there is an abiding propensity for content, and a recurring theme has emerged from the collection. A vast majority of the works speak to ideas of scaffolding, infrastructure, building and construction – less about affect and more around what produced it and what can change.
Most of the artists this year seem to be concerned with backend and processing, as if tuning into a collective consciousness of making and reconstruction. There may be some political and social genealogy in this.
Exactly ten years ago an upsurge of emotion erupted in our country as a public monument, shrugging off its supposed benign presence on a university campus, becoming a vivid sign of the continued and unchecked presence of coloniality. And by extension a symbol of the persistence of abnegation and vulnerability of the majority of our people in this country.
Ten years ago, the Rhodes Must Fall movement began as a singular performative response to a monument and became a global movement. The courage of students to point out the neglect of care and undermining of hope emerged in many respects as an urgent shout to the gatekeepers, policymakers and capital holders of our country not to ignore the overwhelming, unabated landlessness and poverty.
It is not without significance that this has been followed by what seems like a propensity for looking more deeply into cause as well as effect, for depth and for building.
Scaffolding implies reconstruction amidst disparate elements, literally throwing light on areas that are dark, on relationships, collectives, and collaboration. A search for congruence rather than fragmentation, and for a backend that is more generative, discursive and not prescriptive, a backend that can enable us to find relationships within a society that weighs us down, and to surface with confidence. Five large scale installations lead in this vein.
Using light in several forms, ‘Infrastructures of Freedom’ by the LightUp Collective considers the depths of structure in informal settlements, and engenders a participatory celebration of human potential to collaborate and recreate.
Working with similar subjects, ‘Camp’, by the renowned visual artist Serge Nitegeka, considers displacement and makeshift structures built by refugees, at once a testimony to precarity and survival. As opposed to ‘Infrastructures of Freedom’, in ‘Camp’, where strategically installed light radiates elusive hope, audience members experience at a distance the dogged will to live.
From Switzerland, as part of a partnership with ProHelvetia, Florian Bach’s ‘HALID’ brings together six spotlights containing high-pressure discharge lamps that illuminate a large wall. As an artist interested in ‘decrypting’, South African-born Bach creates an installation that unpacks and subtly reveals the brutal reality of surveillance systems, made particularly stark when set against the lush, green landscape.
In the centre of the fourth work, scaffolding itself and a constructed pavilion help us explore the intricate beauty, allure, collapse and decay of South African cities. Clark, Juterbock and Prins’ ‘City Lights | Izibani Zedolobha’ affords us an immersive exploration of the workings of a city. It is that movement inside a shell, rich with visual materiality, that talks to our capacity to delve deeper into finding solutions and possibilities for all.
Finally Haffejee, Lamola, Essa and Mbadi’s ‘Come Dance With Me’ uses kinetic scaffolding of several five-metre tall figures – made out of a light-weight, semi-transparent fabric – to appear as if they are dancing. Air blowing up continuously from below keeps this scaffolding soft, sinewy and moving. The invitation to dance by the artists is seductive, and we hope the audience will see this as a celebration of hidden histories, of women and labour.
Legacy as scaffolding that is both positive and negative – and in need of transformation – runs through other works. Several consider historical matter as a contemporary concern, a marker to relook and shift focus.
In its architectural, skeleton of form, referencing the broader Cape Winelands, ‘Ghost Landscapes’ by Tarmahomed and Naran, provides through sets of relational aesthetics a way to invite the past and reform present and futures. The historically submerged histories of farm workers and land, land that they have relinquished throughout history, form the basis of Swiss artist Sophie Guyot’s ‘Everywhere’. Coming from a history of small-scale farmers in Switzerland, Guyot uses a workshop process to engage farm workers and develop the artwork collectively.
Gina-Rose Bolligello continues this crucial work in Contemplation: The Working Farm – a mixed-media piece that looks at legacy as a means to make choices of still fragile futures. Film, photographs, transparent, layered images printed onto Perspex, wine barrels, dust and soil are all deconstructed and reconfigured.
Artists wrestling with history work to find the object that captures unease, complexity and paradox in history, and to arrive at some kind of metaphor for this, layering Jess Bothma uses the historical figure of the Trojan horse, replete with wings and flames. ‘Dark Horse’ is a light sculpture that navigates the many sided, subjective modes of reading history, its fragility in its recreation but its potential and necessity for conjuring hopeful futures.
Like Berco Wilsenach’s ‘In Die Sterre Geskryf / Written In The Stars’, which takes our vision beyond scaffolding and structures of personal, political and social visions into a sense of depth and boundlessness, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s film ‘Polyhedra’ provides us with a scaffold of dazzling and poetic cosmology. Screened in the open air, with the sky itself as background, the Milky Way in time lapse, shifting expanses of earth and stars all take us into the polyhedral structures of the infinite.
Many of the artists provide structures as a launching pad for a dizzying wealth of ideas. Castle and Brady’s installation ‘Repast ll’ is an exhaustive collaborative work that creates atmospheres to key into the elusive relationship between memory and nature. Karla Nixon’s visually rich work and whimsical ‘Pssst, look at my feed’ provides fiercely relevant commentary on social media, and Elgin Rust and Jane Appleby’s distilled and meticulous light sculpture, ‘Cloud’ made out of discarded plastic bottles, considers waste, water and environmental precarity.
French artist Antoine Schmitt rounds up these meditations on whimsy and gravitas, in his evocation of two infinite streams of pixels, drawn to each other and annihilated at the same time, titled with tongue firmly in cheek, ‘Fatal Attraction’.
Spier Light Art began all those years ago, with a very clear mission: to reveal the potential for this particular artform to engage, play, illuminate and elevate, working with its unique character and potential. There is clear signal in this edition that artists are going much further, using the form as a springboard to more, as a way to connect with a collective need to build from the inside, to provide firm scaffold to sit in time and history, and to look beyond pressing darkness, up into the open sky, towards hope and sustenance.