What are the opening hours?

Wednesday 11:00 - 16:00 Thursday 11:00 - 16:00 Friday 11:00 - 16:00 Saturday 11:00 - 16:00

POOL

POOL is a Cape Town based arts organisation supporting experimental practice and new knowledge through collaboration and the commissioning of practitioners.

POOL is an arts organisation committed to supporting artists and curators by working closely and commissioning new work. POOL champions emerging practice and experimental artist and curator-led work and research initiatives.

10/05/2024

It's the final two days to view the group exhibition, Things take time, time takes things!

Join us this Saturday for the finissage starting from 3pm for a happening with Amy and Neil Rusch, followed by a walkabout with participating artists and curators, ending with a Dead Symbols rehearsal with artist in residence Vusumzi Nkomo, and Fernando Damon and Rowan Smith.

Participating artists include: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Thato Makatu, Maja Marx, Mitchell Gilbert Messina, Jody Paulsen, Amy Rusch, Jonah Sack, Inga Somdyala, and Vusumzi Nkomo as artist in residence.

POOL is hosted at Field Station which is a pilot initiative enabling transdisciplinary arts-based programming at the intersection of art and nature, community and critical urbanism. It is realised by the City of Cape Town Arts and Culture and Green Point Park.

The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the City of Cape Town, Field Station and the National Arts Council South Africa Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme.

Thanks to Matt Slater for the documentation

07/05/2024

Please join us this Thursday at the L***a, 18:00 for 18:30 - 19:30, for a film programme curated by Mitchell Gilbert Messina drawing on film that informed Messina’s recently commissioned film installation, Noon Gun, for the exhibition, Things take time, time takes things.

Noon Gun (Mitchell Gilbert Messina, 2024)

A city’s citizens live under the looming threat of a gun that is fired at noon every day.

Powers of Ten (Charles and Ray Eames, 1977)

Beginning with a shot of a couple enjoying a picnic, then zooming out incrementally by powers of ten, the film offers a glimpse of everything from the edge of the known universe to the molecules on a person's hand.

Babfilm/Scenes with Beans (Ottó Foky, 1976)

An extra-terrestrial arrives on a planet inhabited by beans and observes their daily lives, including a traffic accident, farming, a football match, and the launch of a spaceship.

The Black Tower (John Smith, 1987)

A man finds himself haunted by a mysterious black tower in London that appears to follow him wherever he goes.

The screening is free and all are welcome, though seating is limited please DM or to reserve a seat.

This programme is supported by the National Arts Council South Africa Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme.

27/04/2024

Join us for the public programme for the exhibition, Things take time, time takes things

plotting
Reading group led by artist in residency, Vusumzi Nkomo
Monday, 29 April and 6 May, from 17:00 - 19:00

black propositions in three acts
open studio: act i; sonic lecture: act ii; talk: act iii
Vusumzi Nkomo
Wednesday, 1 May, 17:00 - 19:00

Film Programme
Curated by Mitchell Gilbert Messina
Thursday 9 May, 17:00 - 19:00

Exhibition Finissage Saturday 11 May:

A Remembering - Where water was winds continue to blow (In a nutshell)
Amy and Neil Rusch sail a boat with Inga Somdyala in Green Point Park
Meet at Field Station, 15:00 - 16:00

Exhibition Walkabout
with artists and curators, 16:00 - 17:00

Dead Symbols, plotting: an open band rehearsal
with Vusumzi Nkomo, Fernando Damon and Rowan Smith, 17:00 -19:00

Field Station
Green Point Park, East Gate Entrance
Corner Vlei Road & Helen Suzman Boulevard
Cape Town

Opening Hours: Wednesday - Saturday 11:00 - 16:00
Or by appointment, [email protected]

05/04/2024

The opening event for the group exhibition, Things take time, time takes things, has been rescheduled to Thursday, 11 April at 16:00 - 19:00

We’ve taken this decision to ensure that outdoor artworks aren't compromised by events and road closures in and around Green Point Park.

Rescheduled exhibition opening : 11 April 2024, 16:00 - 19:00

Exhibition duration: 12 April - 11 May 2024

02/04/2024

POOL is pleased to present Things take time, time takes things, a group exhibition co-curated by Amy Watson and Bella Knemeyer. The exhibition considers questions of duration, place and memory across social, political and ecological contours. Its title refers to hidden stories, whether hidden in plain sight, just beneath the surface, and etched into bedrock. These stories speak of hidden interiors, of memories, of personal archives, and the many trade-offs that come with them: the time taken to evolve, for dust to settle, to develop a sense of perspective, to rewild a landscape, to establish common ground. Or conversely, how time forgets, conceals, weathers and erodes a full story. Through ten installations within the gallery and the surrounding park, the exhibition includes works that surface landscape and its relationship with time, engaging different temporalities including; the recent past, the time of home, celestial time, arctic and geologic time, a daily cannon metronome, the annual rings of a tree and the incremental growth of lichen. Working through site specificity and placemaking, many participating artists have worked in-situ to explore experimental process-driven work, allowing artworks to reveal themselves durationally, and through interruption. Manifest in the colour matching of landscapes, field recordings, support structures and the maquette in abeyance, anthotypes developing in sunlight, and inscriptions made by wind.

Participating artists include: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Thato Makatu, Maja Marx, Mitchell Gilbert Messina, Jody Paulsen, Amy Rusch, Jonah Sack, Inga Somdyala, and Vusumzi Nkomo as artist in residence for the exhibition duration.

The exhibition is made possible through the support of the City of Cape Town, Field Station, National Arts Council South Africa Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme.

01/03/2024

Final days to see Abri de Swardt’s ‘Kammakamma’ at POOL X Field Station.
Open Wed-Sat, 11-4pm

RSVP for the closing reading group session, To See with the Ears and Speak with the Nose II, meeting this Sunday, 3 March, at the confluence of the Liesbeek and Swardt Rivers.
RSVP [email protected]

Selection of installation views by Mia Thom

27/02/2024

Join us on the weekend of the 16th and 17th of March for a beehive making workshop in Khayelitsha, and presentations and the cross-pollination of ideas with local and international beekeepers, gardeners and artists in Green Point Park.

Beehive Making - A Different Way is a free workshop led by Klaas Vlegter hosted, assisted by Dunja Herzog & Sthembiso Thembalezwe Mntambo of NYOC, hosted by Xolisa Bangani at the Ikhaya Garden. In this practical workshop participants will learn how to fabricate low-cost beehives using locally reclaimed and sustainable materials in order to support bees through alternative hives.

Saturday 16 March 2024, 9:30am – 4pm
POOL x Ikhaya Kulture Garden
Ikhaya Kulture Garden
Isikhokelo Primary School
Idada Street, Site C, Khayelitsha
Cape Town

RSVP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfjJcEhnBpBG63La9hZv6MMD8ilI0IZ_Kz9sX261HZGFrHY5g/viewform

Free admission, including lunch and refreshments

The Art of Bees and Gardens is conceived and hosted by Dunja Herzog and Thembalezwe Mntambo of NYOC. Participating practitioners include: social engineer Xolisa Bangani; Indigenous plant specialist Simangaliso Ngalwana; artist and farmer Vuyo Myoli; Beehive maker and beekeeper Klaas Vlegter; earth artist Izabeau Pretorius; archaeoacoustics researcher Neil Rusch; visual anthropologist Aladin Borioli; and artist Simnikiwe Buhlungu.

Sunday 17th of March 2024, 9am - 6pm
POOL x Field Station
Greenpoint Park
Eastgate entrance
Corner Vlei Road and Helen Suzman Boulevard
Cape Town

RSVP [email protected]
Free admission, including lunch and refreshments

Dunja Herzog and Thembalezwe Mntambo's year long project, Hiving and HUMing, centres bee logics, temporality and imperatives in support of the agency of bees. Examining the cyclical relationships and sensing capacities that exist between bees, plants and humans the project works toward developing restorative reciprocation. Using swarm logics in both the research and the form of the project itself interdisciplinary collaboration is centred in developing new knowledges.

The project is developed in response to prevailing narratives of bees as insects of utility for extraction. Foregrounding bees’ vital ecological function, methods of communication, spiritual significance, knowledge, rituals and modes of sensing, Herzog and Mntambo challenge the rationalisation of bees and beekeeping as extractive. Hiving and HUMing invites us to strengthen our kinship and renew sensitivities to the natural world through listening, observing, feeling and through acts of solidarity, in so doing catalysing a continuum of eco-systemic symbiosis.

This project is made possible through the generous support of Pro Helvetia Johannesburg - Swiss Arts Council, City of Cape Town, Field Station, Aargauer Kuratorium, Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt, Kulturförderung Basel-Landschaft, Erna and Curt Burgauer

12/02/2024

On Confluence and Recurrence
Exhibition Walkabout
with Abri de Swardt and Saarah Jappie
Saturday 17 February, 11:00

To See with the Ears and Speak with the Nose
Reading Cycle II
with Abri de Swardt and Sinethemba Twalo
Saturday 24 February and Sunday 3 March, 11:00
RSVP [email protected]

The river asks the same question at a different time
Screening Programme
Saturday 2 March, 17:30 for 18:00

To See with the Ears and Speak with the Nose is the second iteration of a reading cycle initially commissioned by POOL and Oceanic Humanities for the Global South, WiSER in 2019. The cycle traces the echogenic qualities of water, its reverberating hums, its fluidity, its capacity for saturation, which impel a becoming (other)wise. Through textual immersion in which boundaries between literary and theoretical genres become porous and dissipate against and within each other, the cycle enunciates wetness as a conduit for the affective capacities of words. The title points to the sensorium of cetaceans, suggesting a trans-position of our own orientations to embrace hydromechanics as a gesture of (dis)solution, a streaming of bodies, and a pooling of temporalities. De Swardt and Twalo invite attendees to consider water as non-neutral, as a q***r archive, as a social witness and force.
The new cycle specifically turns its focus to fluvial ecologies – rivers, their confluences and tributaries, canals and embankments, their estuaries and mouths – as hybrid, mutable and transitional hydro-commons. Through situated reading and conversation, the cycle asks how do we listen to, orientate ourselves towards, become literate in, and coexist with, rivers?
RSVP to [email protected]

The River asks the Same Question at a Different Time is a screening of recent moving-image works by local and international artists grappling with how bodies of water communicate, are instrumentalised in, and transform, geopolitical conditions of place. The sequential flow, plural chronologies, and narrative mobility inherent in moving-image correspond to the very materiality of water.

25/01/2024

If the river’s mouth could speak, what would it say? Enacting the possibility of river mouths as storytellers and historiographers, Abri de Swardt’s Kammakamma is the opening episode of the second work in a moving-image trilogy that visually, archivally and sonically explores the Eerste River in South Africa as witness and carrier of submerged narratives. The Eerste River’s nomenclature derives from Simon van der Stel, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) colonial governor who in 1679 annexed land for settler agriculture at the first (Dutch, ‘eerste’) river he encountered after Cape Town, over time erasing the names the river had in indigenous tongues. Structured in an iterative unfolding towards feature length, Kammakamma (2022 – 24) is a synchronised two-channel video projection which transpires along the river through three geographically, temporally and affectively distinct yet interconnected chronicles written by De Swardt, poet and novelist Ronelda S. Kamfer, and historian Saarah Jappie. Its title draws from slippages between the Khoekhoe language terms for water (‘//amma’) and similitude (‘khama’), with ‘kamma’ absorbed into Afrikaans to mean ‘make believe’. Through this interplay, Kammakamma considers the river as a source of shifting stories, and as a saturation point for understanding the effects of climate and catastrophe.

De Swardt's Kammakamma has been developed through the Social Impact Arts Prize 2022 and production residencies at the Gallery University Stellenbosch (GUS) and Nirox Foundation. The project forms part of An Accumulation of Uncertainties, a programme of commissions curated by Sinethemba Twalo of NGO (Nothing Gets Organised) and Amy Watson of POOL, realised as part of the World Weather Network, a global coalition of 28 arts agencies formed in response to the climate crisis.
The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the City of Cape Town, Field Station, National Arts Council South Africa Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme, the World Weather Network and British Council Creative Commissions for Climate Action, and wherewithall.

20/01/2024

Today is the last day to experience Zayaan Khan’s installation, open from 11am today. We are closing with a listening session, ‘Killing the flowers will not delay spring’, this afternoon by Future Nostalgia from 5pm to 8pm. All are welcome!

22/12/2023

POOL is pleased to share the public programme for Zayaan Khan's exhibition, A Practice in Light and Death, taking place from 28 December until 20 January 2024.

Printing Solidarity: Collective poster-making for Palestine
with Leila Khan of Kanaladorp
28 December 2023
2 - 4 pm
Limited to 10 individual bookings
Bookings [email protected]

Dancing Sodas for children
Learn how to create your own wild soda, using fruit, honey and your best dance moves,
(2 yrs +)
13 January 2024
11 - 12 pm
Bookings [email protected]

Cyanotype printing of light and brine
14 January 2023
2 - 4 pm
Bookings [email protected]

Killing the flowers will not delay Spring,
a listening session, and the exhibition closing
with Atiyyah Khan of Future Nostalgia
20 January 2024
5 - 8 pm

POOL's exhibitions and public programmes are always free and open to all.

Address

Green Point Park, East Gate Entrance, Corner Vlei Road And Helen Suzman Boulevard
Cape Town

Opening Hours

Wednesday	11:00 - 16:00
Thursday	11:00 - 16:00
Friday	11:00 - 16:00
Saturday	11:00 - 16:00

Website

http://www.pool.org.za/

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