What is Berman Contemporary's Project Room?

And it's fitting that it should come from Berman Contemporary, a gallery that has carved out a distinct image for itself, thanks in part to its focus on emerging women artists in South Africa. This gallery is already a place where you can find new takes on old forms, unique materials and mediums, and conceptually exciting works – the group exhibition Happy women's day, I guess… is a wonderful introduction to the varied artists it represents. The Project Room adds to this, and provides experimental and genre-defying works a platform in Johannesburg.
The second instalment: Un_i[n]verso

An accomplished composer, visual artist, and musician, Iadema cuts across music, video, and installation, creating works that distort meaning and materiality. In the audiovisual piece Un_i[n]verso, panning footage of vast lifeless landscapes is joined with ambient soundscapes that Iadema creates from pixel readings of the images on screen. The image cuts and the sound breaks, grows more uncomfortable, as cartographies and architectural grids collapse into each other. Buildings and structures in states of decay and destruction fold into carved out land, vast and dense. The sounds thrum in your ears. You wonder: Are these objects really formless and empty? And then, quiet.

Un_i[n]verso does not just absorb you, it thrusts you into a seemingly strange world where transparency and solidity, light and dark, disquiet and harmony, coexist, before reminding you that this is your world. There is a meticulous beauty to the chaos in Iadema's work, and through audio and video software, he creates a dialogue between image and sound, highlighting their relation to each other.
The artist's text for Un_i[n]verso reads, "It is the viewer who is the subject and at the same time the observer of the work. The works reveal themselves as an immersive experience due to the viewer’s position in the story." This experience can be quite disconcerting, and the works are meant to be evocative. The best way to get a sense of Un_i[n]verso is to watch it for yourself, and for this you have until Wed, Jul 30, 2025 to see it at Berman Contemporary at 223 Creative Hub.
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