The exhibition's title draws inspiration from George Kubler's influential 1962 work, The Shape of Time, which presents a framework for understanding cultural artefacts as interconnected concepts evolving over centuries, punctuated by devations and pauses. The artworks in the exhibition embody this concept of time and concept of fragmentation, reflecting the era in which they were created while simultaneously connecting to past and future influences integral to their making.

An articulation of this concept begins with Laura Lima, whose practice intimately engages with materiality, often inviting organic matter, degradation and the passage of time as agents in the formation and long-term existence of her works. Her latest series of large-scale textile pieces explore Brazilian mythology, nature and the transformation of materials over time. The work invites temporal fluidity, allowing the textiles final form to exist in the future as time enables a shift in colour and shape, while the mythological past persists in thematic weight.

Sam Nhlengethwa and David Koloane extend this by centering the urban dweller within the dynamism of their metropolis of birth - greater Johannesburg. In this way, the cityscape is layered with the heaviness of the city's origin, its migratory nature and its collective anxieties, highlighting the ways in which people continue to produce their own para conditions of survival.

Press release courtesy Goodman Gallery.