THE CURATORS WRITE OF THE EXHIBITION:

Our Fathers engages the notion of patriarchy as an emotional economy, as well as a system that promulgates an unequal distribution of power. Our Father, another name for the Lord’s Prayer intrinsically represents patriarchy as a form of social organisation whereby society is governed by a system, in which the father is the supreme authority in the place of worship, family, community, country and work environment. 

bell hooks states in Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom “Patriarchy has no gender” and yet gender is a politically and socially coerced category, in patriarchy’s syllabus of teaching. One that effects the most intimate of spaces, the family.

Artworks have been drawn from artists whose oeuvre either specifically, or consequentially, investigate the idea of “father”.

The failure of the father and the greatness of the father. The loss of a father, or abandonment by the/a father. The imagined idea of what a father is, was or should be. This exhibition presents the works of 24 different artists. The artworks have been selected by the curators, because of their ability to engage the various roles played by the father; leader, guide, military, business, home.Our Fathers exhibition is a considered investigation of the challenges faced by, or reflected on, by children of the father; the personal, the social and the political, and other images.