Absa Art Hot Spot
Empowering African fine arts
Artist Bio
Kai Lossgott is a South African interdisciplinary artist, object, body, and lens-based practice encompasses performance, photography, writing, drawing and film.
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Lossgott was born in Marktoberdorf, Germany. He has a degree in journalism and media studies at Rhodes University in South Africa, as well as a degree in theatre. He received a diploma in fine arts at the University of South Africa in 2004 and completed a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Cape Town in 2008.
His work has been exhibited in institutions throughout South Africa, such as Johannesburg Art Gallery and Museum Africa, as well as in private galleries. At international level, his work has been shown at the Biennale in Dakar, Arnot New York Museum, the Whitechapel art gallery in London, and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
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Lossgott holds curatorial projects in motion image, reflecting his interests in the interdisciplinary, intermodality, urban and environmental problems.
Artist Statement
In a human-made era of global social and ecological challenges, when that which we call ‘the environment’ is urban for the majority of our planet’s human inhabitants, the Kai Lossgott asks what it means to be human. Kai has looked for answers in the places that seem to be the most overlooked due to their familiarity, such as the ecology of the city and the household objects we discard.
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Since the first industrial revolution, what we have called ‘nature’ now refers to something made by human beings. This is a retro sci-fi about the habits of our ancestors, and the potential future in store for us. Kai is fascinated by the shifting value placed on the same objects over time: in their journey from a supermarket shelf to the chaos of the dump, back to the order of the anthropological museum display. This speculates that practices of collecting, hoarding and abandoning define the human relationship with ‘thing’ and perhaps our identity as a species.
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As human beings and a consumer, enquiring into the world as an African artist, Kai is ultimately concerned with knowledge itself. He wants to know how our inherited worldview may be reshaped when we realise through shifting contexts that we are not looking at the universe, it is looking at us.
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This artwork is part of a much larger series from his 2017 solo exhibition in the Absa Gallery entitled, hunter-gatherer.