The Edge of Resistance
RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2025 – Group Exhibition
The Edge of Resistance
Curatorial Statement – RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2025
At a time when cultural noise, environmental precarity, and existential instability define our era, The Edge of Resistance brings together six artists whose practices confront, unravel, and reimagine the systems that shape our lives. Featuring Mncedi Madolo, Mario Soares, Hannalie Taute, SYNC (Shani Ynclan), Andrew Mogridge, and Claire Lichtenstein, this exhibition explores how resistance manifests at the intersection of material disruption, symbolic language, and the deeply personal.
Each artist operates with an acute awareness of the tensions that lie beneath surface appearances. Their works offer layered vocabularies, rich in texture, metaphor, and critique, that position resistance not as mere defiance, but as a generative act of self-definition, renewal, and truth-telling.
Mncedi Madolo filters the chaotic rhythms of Johannesburg’s inner city through a visual language of collage and iconography. His Afro-futuristic figures are embedded in textured compositions made up of torn posters, brand signage, and spiritual symbolism. Madolo’s work interrogates the overwhelming flood of voices, instructions, and expectations that urban Black life is subject to reclaiming identity through the very visual noise that threatens to erase it.
Mario Soares works with tactile materials, soft sculpture, organic forms, and spiritual motifs, to evoke the entangled lineages of African identity, memory, and belonging. His practice offers quiet yet powerful meditations on healing, rootedness, and the spiritual dimensions of resistance. Soares collapses time, creating works that feel ancestral and speculative, bodily and sacred.
Hannalie Taute stitches subversion into salvaged rubber. Her embroidered narratives, often surreal or darkly comic, deconstruct myths, fears, and inherited roles. By reclaiming cast-off materials and populating them with hybrid creatures and satirical icons, Taute’s work confronts the absurdities of contemporary life with both tenderness and rebellion. Her labor-intensive processes embody a slow, deliberate form of resistance.
SYNC (Shani Ynclan), with her multidisciplinary and eclectic visual language, challenges viewers to decode her densely layered artworks that blend acrylic, ink, embroidery, and pop-cultural symbology. Her pieces wrestle with existential tension, identity politics, and cultural critique posing questions more than offering answers. SYNC’s work vibrates with emotional urgency, philosophical inquiry, and a refusal to be boxed in.
Andrew Mogridge builds conceptual frameworks that question the absurd logic of social systems, bureaucracy, and belief. Through subtle, often text-based interventions and object arrangements, he reveals the quiet violence and irrationality embedded in the everyday. Mogridge’s resistance is cerebral but sharp pulling at the seams of normative thought with surgical precision.
Claire Lichtenstein draws on organic forms, ecosystems, and the metaphysics of pattern to explore the balance between natural order and chaos. Her layered compositions mirror cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration. In her work, resistance is rhythmic and regenerative a slow unfolding of interconnection between body, nature, and the unseen.
Together, these artists do not claim resistance as a singular act, but rather as a continuum shaped by history, lived experience, and the relentless push to imagine differently. The Edge of Resistance is where transformation begins. It is a space of friction, contradiction, and creativity, a threshold where the personal becomes political, and where art insists on possibility, even in the face of rupture.
