Where Fragments and Belonging Meet
Gallery MOMO turns its attention to Vivien Kohler, whose assemblages place the city, the discarded object, and the human figure in the same field of attention. Born in Cape Town and long based in Johannesburg, Kohler works with materials that have already lived other lives.
His practice centres on liminality in the post-Apartheid urban landscape. Figures appear amid replications of packaging and fragments of found material. The works do not illustrate displacement so much as carry its physical residue. Packaging becomes a visual marker of transience. Discarded objects retain traces of prior use. Together they form surfaces where memory and the present remain unfinished.
This year Kohler exhibited at the FNB Johannesburg Art Fair, presenting work that extends his long engagement with reconstruction and belonging. The presentation has informed a new body of work now under way, one that continues to examine how identity is assembled from what remains.
“I am drawn to the spaces between what is remembered and what is forgotten, what is broken and what can be reconstructed,” Kohler says. “My work seeks to illuminate the duality of lived experience by depicting, with an air of surreality, meditative moments of the individual, mentally cocooned from, yet physically enveloped by life’s detritus.”
Kohler’s concept of “A Place Called Home” treats belonging as something continually negotiated rather than fixed. Home is shaped by histories; relationships and the materials people carry with them. The same logic governs the studio. Objects once discarded are reclaimed, layered and painted. Their displacement from original purpose mirrors the way lives are reordered by migration, economic pressure and the ordinary passage of time.
He received his National Diploma in Fine Art from the Ruth Prowse School of Art and Design in Cape Town in 2000. Solo exhibitions include r3: FORM4re (2019) and This too shall come to pass (2022) at Gallery MOMO, Clay Opera and At the Still Point of the Turning World at Sulger-Buel Lovell in London, Residuum at Ilse Schermers Art Gallery and De(re)tritus at Lovell in Cape Town and Given to Fly at AVA Gallery. He has also shown in group exhibitions across South Africa, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the USA. Awards include the Thami Mnyele Sculpture Award in 2017.
“Living and working in Johannesburg has shaped the way I see,” Kohler notes. “It is a city of extraordinary contrasts where wealth and poverty, hope and hardship, history and the present exist alongside one another. These conditions have taught me to recognise both the fragility and the resilience of the human spirit, and to find meaning in what is often overlooked.”
His work is held in private and public collections, including the Nando’s Collection, the Hollard Collection, SAB, Fusion UK, the UNISA Art Gallery Collection, and the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art Contemporary Art Collection (Switzerland). Vivian Kohler is represented by Gallery MOMO in Parktown, Johannesburg.
The spotlight places Kohler’s current practice within Gallery MOMO’s ongoing presentation of artists working with the material and social conditions of contemporary South African life.
