“I am mainly interested in how the body, the world and the artwork are all brought together in a perfomative material relationship through which they all become singularly meaningful entities.”(Johan Thom, 2018)

Johan Thom (b1976 Johannesburg) is an artist, artist/curator and academic based in Pretoria, South Africa. He is senior lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Pretoria and senior curator for Fried Contemporary Art gallery as well as head curator for Aardklop, The Potchefstroom National Arts Festival (2017- ongoing), South Africa. His works have been exhibited at The Venice Biennale (2003), The Canary Islands Biennale (2006), Iwalewahaus (2008), The Tate Modern (2015), Goodman Gallery South Africa (2015), The Johannesburg Art Gallery (2004, 2006), the Pretoria Art Museum (2018) and numerous other spaces. Thom holds a PhD In Fine Art from The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London on a Commonwealth Scholarship (2014).

ArtDependence Magazine: Do you have any thoughts on whether that’s a responsibility of artists, reflecting our time is important within the political context? 

Johan Thom: What we term an artist today is someone who creates artworks (objects, videos, installations and so on) in some self-conscious relationship to their given context.

In that sense I do not think it is possible to make artworks without them being a direct result of external influences. Some artists may wish to highlight such influence(s) in their work while others may not.

I think artists must continue to work in different ways otherwise things quickly become one-dimensional and boring.

AD: What is your main interest as artist? What form of self-consciousness is applicable to the art-making?

JT: I am mainly interested in how the body, the world and the artwork are all brought together in a perfomative material relationship through which they all become singularly meaningful entities. On an easy level this explains my interest in performance art. In performances In performances and video installations such as ‘Theory of Flight’ (2006), ’Figurehead’ (2010) and ‘Challenging Mud’ (2008)  I utilise raw materials such as honey, oil, soil and gold and even animals along with my body to set up a dynamic sensory and conceptual relationship with the audience. With more complexity, this focus on the perfomative drives my expanded interest in making sculpture from volatile unstable materials and other processes that I am not completely in control of.

I made a whole series of sculptural artworks recently from polyurethane foam that rapidly expands and oozes as you cast it. For example, I made a huge ecological disaster at the Nirox Foundation last year in South Africa using weeds, glass, wood, bronze and polyurethane foam. This was as much a comment on that environment, a virtual utopian garden, as it was on the changing status of public sculpture and art in South Africa at the time.

In another example I simply cast my body weight in molten copper out on the floor as a self-portrait. Of course copper is oligodynamic material, meaning that it is ani-bacterial. In a kind of reversal of the Portrait of Dorian Gray, this self-portrait will never get sick, age and die whereas I of course will.

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