Cape Town

Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises. 
- Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

STEVENSON is pleased to present The Garden, a solo exhibition by Jo Ractliffe. This new body of work was in part commissioned for and first shown in Out of Place, her acclaimed career survey at Jeu de Paume, Paris (on view till 24 May).

Building on the foundations laid in her previous series, Landscaping, the images in The Garden were taken during long-distance drives across the west coast of southern Africa. For Landscaping (2022-24), Ractliffe moved close to the subjects and features of her images, capturing the details of geographies altered by industry in abstracted terms, spotlighting the tension between visible and non-visible forms of violence. Here, the artist developed her framework in dialogue with Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’, in which harm is diffused across time and space, leading to actions and outcomes not being viewed as violence at all. In The Garden, the artist moves closer still, focusing on the relationship between the landscape, its cultivated features and its inhabitants, offering an intimate view of time, social structures and the psychology of place. Inspired in part by the existential gardens of Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, Ractliffe approaches these personal environments as frameworks for understanding the political, spotlighting how they manifest both the use of agency as well as the structures that curtail it. She writes:

In the mid-1980s, small pieces of land across the townships began to change. Neglected corners, dumping grounds and overgrown lots were cleared and turned into gardens – people’s parks, as they became known. Tables, benches and swings were made from oil drums, car tyres and bits of wood. Many were named after figures of the struggle or slogans of liberation – Biko Park, Sisulu Park, Freedom Park – and some included simple monuments to those who had died. These parks emerged at a time of growing unrest. In 1985, when a State of Emergency was imposed and troops sent into the townships, communities organised themselves into street committees to defend their neighbourhoods and coordinate resistance to state violence.

I thought of these parks when I first encountered Nicholene Dampies’ garden in St Helena Bay. In January 2024, taking a detour past the harbour, I came upon her garden, made with her son Johnray, on public land across from her house. It is a riotous assemblage of unlikely objects: toys, figurines and ornaments, alongside bits of furniture – even a sculpture – salvaged from the local dump and transformed into an ever-changing tableau.

These black and white images, taken between 2024 and 2026, articulate the complicated coexistence of subsistence, resistance and self-expression. Ractliffe, known for using the landscape to draw attention to the unseen traces of history, now exhibits photographs that fall within the genres of portraiture and still life to elucidate lived experiences on the Atlantic coast that interweave precarity and creativity. As Remi Onabanjo observes in the catalogue accompanying Out of Place, this series ‘is the fruit of long conversations, careful looking, and long drives’. Over Ractliffe’s sustained engagement, the featured families and individuals describe how their gardens are grown despite threats of relocation due to property developers, and in anticipation of the collapse of fishing due to mining. The images of tenderly curated collections of objects and plant life offer a narrative of autonomy exercised despite ongoing dispossession. Ractliffe concludes:

So what makes a garden? A garden may contain a world. Or make a world – like the fantastical playground creatures Mariska Prins crafted for her children out of car tyres. Or provide an escape from the world – like Veronique Cloete’s little patch of vegetables, inspired by a TikTok video, which calms her at night. Some are memorials – like the garden Myrtle Lewis made for her late husband, with the modern stone sculpture he salvaged from the local dump. And some gardens are about ritual and beauty, like retired teacher Petrus Mannel’s rose bed, meticulously cared for, restoring order to the world.

The exhibition opens on Saturday 16 May, 10am to 1pm. The Garden takes place concurrently with I keep coming back here, I don't know why, a group exhibition curated by Aza Lithalethu Mbovane.