Autoportrait (2022/3) is a three-channel video installation detailing the artist’s performative, bodily interaction with three objects: a human skull, one of his late mother’s favourite dresses, and the skin of a Livingstone’s Turaco bird (circa 1872). The work was developed during the course of 2022 and exhibited in its final form in 2023.

Thom states, “One of my most vivid memories of my mother is a photograph of her as a small child, somehow standing with both her feet on my grandfather’s outstretched left hand. Frozen at the moment, she appears precariously balanced between the forces of gravity and light, youth and old age and that of human care and joyful carelessness”. The photograph now serves as the prompt for a more in-depth, artistic investigation into the material poetics and mnemonics of death and loss.  

In channel one, a large-scale projection on the gallery wall, Thom stares straight into the eyes of a human skull for 10 minutes. His body barely moves and if it were not for the slow changing of the natural light in the video the viewer might think the image a photographic still. In the second channel shown on a flatscreen television next to it, a dead bird seems to rest peacefully on the artists outstretched hand. However the bird is suddenly dropped, disappearing from view every sixty seconds. The third video is shown lying horizontally on a small screen embedded in large pile of soil. The viewer looks down toward the soil recalling how one might visit a grave. However the video is a documentation of Thom taking his mother’s favourite dress for a walk raised high above his head through the streets where he lives. Shot directly from below the dress appears like a floating blue apparition, swaying from side to side and melting into the blue skies and clouds far above it.

Key terms: memory (the writings of Théodule-Armand Ribot and to a lesser extent Henri Bergson refer), grief and public grief, performance and video installation; found objects as memory aids (mnemonics – the Von Restorff effect and the isolation paradigm).

Walkabout video: https://youtu.be/aiNMP3Bk-Is?si=Yts3m9xhKBzckVUY

Photographic Credits: Alet Pretorius: Performance photographs, Carla Crafford: Drawing Photographs, Space & Installation photographs: Kalashnikovv Gallery and Johan Thom