PRESS RELEASE
WILMA CRUISE | Why are we here?
May 9 – Jun 8, 2026
WILMA CRUISE | Why are we here?
Opening reception: 9 May 2026 at 11:00
"Looking through my old catalogues, I discovered that sculpture had been foregrounded in my exhibitions. Apart from Wordfees in 2023, my two-dimensional work has played second fiddle to the sculpture. In Why are we here?, the position is reversed.
Nevertheless, the 2-D work reflects the same concerns as the 3-D work. I explore the conundrum of the division between human hubris and the animal world, that which the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, calls the “abyssal rupture”, and which I refer to as the “space between”. My diary pages expressed my thoughts and musings over this question of the division.
The diary started in 1993 at an exhibition called Nicholas - October 1990 held in the Goodman Gallery, which deliberated on the murder of my nephew. Nicholas Cruise was aged 23 in 1990. He worked for the then banned ANC. He was killed by a letter bomb sent to his firm by a right-wing cabal. I commemorated his death in 1993. In addition to sculpture, I recorded my response to the tragedy in diary form. A4 pages were placed in a wooden box. The pages acted as a parallel text and attracted a lot of interest. Subsequently, the pages have grown from musings in a box to small pages on a wall in the 100-page diary and finally to 2x3 canvases. However, iconographical concerns are the same.
Sometime in the late 60’s, I began to use Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass as a metaphor for our chaotic world in which evil men and women are valorised while the ordinary person suffers. Thus Alice and her cohorts, the White Rabbit, Humpty Dumpty, and the Cheshire Cat feature prominently in the works."
- Wilma Cruise
