Associate Professor Johan Thom chats about his recent exhibition, Things Appear and Disappear, why he chose a career in the arts and what he loves most about UP.

The latest exhibition by Associate Professor Johan Thom, coordinator of the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Fine Art division, is full of skulls. But they are not ominous, or glib, or even menacing – unless you come close to the suspended bronze replica of one that is automated to swing in a circular motion, almost touching a brick that is also swinging.

Prof Thom’s skulls invite one to engage and ponder.

His drawings of skulls, layered with everything from blackboard paint to soil, twigs, leaves, charcoal and burnt ashes, are the most intense. In contrast, the projection of a large skull against one wall, staring at an image of Prof Thom’s own head, is striking and full of light.

The exhibition, Things Appear and Disappear, was shown at the Kalashnikovv Gallery in Braamfontein, Johannesburg for two and a half weeks in February.

“[It was about exploring] grief and loss and trauma, and the reality of living in South Africa in an open-ended, poetic kind of way,” Prof Thom said, “That’s why the title is Things Appear and Disappear; people appear and they disappear. It’s almost like a violent cycle that is ongoing.”

“Johan’s work always manages to highlight the big questions that life asks,” said Matthew Dean Dowdle, co-founder of the Kalashnikovv Gallery. “Death, identity and displacement are all commonplace.”

As a young boy, Prof Thom recognised the power of art to communicate. He grew up in a home where making art and creating things was the norm. His father spent a lot of time tinkering in his workshop. His mother, Berna Thom, who also had a string of degrees in art, was a contemporary artist who exhibited regularly.

Even though they lived in Boksburg in the early 1980s when the town was, according to Prof Thom, “a conservative pit”, his mother took him along to contemporary art exhibitions in Johannesburg. “I grew up thinking this is normal,” he said.

That might have sparked his passion for art, but he said his temperament played its part in his choosing it as a career. His brother grew up in the same household yet didn’t veer towards the arts, instead opting for a career in radiology.

“I liked creating things; I liked this idea of generating a vision of what the world could be,” Prof Thom said. “I liked the idea that art could communicate, could help facilitate change.”

Things Appear and Disappear is about change and uncertainty – not only about what happened in the world over the past two years, but also in his own life: his mother passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic. “She was a formidable force in my life,” he said.

She had influenced his life choices – from attending the now-defunct Pro Arte School for the Arts in Pretoria to studying towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture at UP, culminating in a PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London.

His mother also influenced Things Appear and Disappear, and is the exhibition’s unseen presence. There is no portrait of her, neither is there any explicit mention of her. But she is omnipresent. It is her dress blowing in the wind that is the image on a tablet placed in the centre of a mound of earth in one corner. And that mound of earth, which is part of the exhibition’s video installation, is inspired by a photograph of her as a child.

“There is such hopefulness in that image; such freedom,” said Prof Thom, whose own image with a skull is opposite the mound of earth. “She’s young and her whole life is still ahead of her. It’s like she can still fly and achieve so much.”

At the opening on Saturday, 4 February, Prof Thom stood between the moving skull and brick while he read from various texts. These included Czech writer Milan Kundera’s novel The Incredible Lightness of Being and an extract from one of the professor’s personal diaries about a visit to a cathedral in Siena, Italy where he saw St Catherine’s severed head, which was sealed in wax upon her death in 1380.

The value of his performance, he said, is that it “suddenly unlocks these objects [the brick and skull] in a different way than say, merely looking at them from afar. You realise there are bodies at stake. There’s memory; there’s a repository of ideas”.

Prof Thom likes performance. On his website, johanthom.com, there is a photo of him standing on an artwork on the floor made of flour, reading from one of his diaries.

“It’s a way of not treating objects as isolated meaningful entities,” he said. “Objects are meaningful because we interact with them and they leave their marks on us.”

Even the talk he gave in September last year, with the same title as the exhibition, was described as a performance lecture. It was part of a symposium titled ‘The Question of “Africanness”’, presented by both UP and the University of the Witwatersrand’s African Centres for the Study of the United States, as well as the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in the US, and NIROX Sculpture Park in Kromdraai, Johannesburg.

Prof Thom will be expanding the exhibition with a limited-edition book about it, and possibly presenting the show abroad.

International collaborations are part and parcel of Prof Thom’s research. This includes working with Associate Professor Basak Senova, who teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and their postgraduate students.

Prof Thom enjoys being at UP.

“The University is incredibly well looked after,” he said. “From a management and facilities perspective, it’s very, very organised. And that’s hugely important, not only for staff, but for students too – to have access to a beautiful campus where the administration is well orchestrated and artistic research is prized.”

He also thinks that “overall staff happiness is high”. “Despite whatever conflict might be raging elsewhere in the country, there exists a sense of stability at UP that is worthwhile cherishing.”