WINDHOEK– Local photographer, Paul van Schalkwyk is exhibiting at the Franco Namibian Cultural Centre (FNCC) starting next Wednesday.
His exhibition, A Pristine Land Interrupted, takes the form of an installation comprising multimedia sourced from Paul’s flying adventures over the Namibian landscape. The exhibition presents the viewer with a multi-faceted experience of familiar and unfamiliar Namibian landscape locations, which prompt a fascination with the aesthetic of an aerial viewpoint with its ability to see the unseen. Simultaneously it probes one’s own association with the land and how our voyager meanderings come to take effect. It points to wider issues of climate change and thus it has as much to do with our need to reassess our relationship with the planet as it is to do with our observation of it.
The exhibition is also a narrative spanning ten years of Paul’s quest for a pristine land such as a chronicle that has ironically thrust him into a dilemma from which he cannot escape. His yearning to seek out the unblemished, to photograph it and to share it has become a double-edged act of admiration and interruption. It includes high quality aerial photographic prints, video/audio recordings of Paul’s flying missions, textual transcripts detailing research and GPS coordinates and physical assemblages from Paul’s airplanes.
The exhibit will start at 18h30 and entrance is free.