One-night stands in white mustangs

A solo exhibition by Amogelang Maepa

4 June  – 325 July 2026

Curated by Karolien van Zyl

One-night stands in white mustangs begins in language and continues in clay. Each sculpture emerges from a poem written before the clay is touched. The works do not illustrate the texts; they translate rhythm, repetition and internal pressure into form. Desire operates here as a system rather than catharsis, structuring how material gathers, repeats and resists resolution.

Across the series, desire registers materially. Intensity gathers rather than disperses. Porous surfaces, thickened edges and areas of distortion suggest accumulation instead of completion, as if pressure from within has forced its way outward. Cellular textures, clustered deposits and ruptured skins convey the effect of force acting on matter over time. Each work holds the trace of processes that have built up, spread and unsettled.

Desire is approached not as fulfilment, but as recurrence. Forms repeat without stabilising. Surfaces retain what has passed through them. What remains is residue – the mark of intensity rather than its release.

The exhibition extends this logic beyond the objects into the surrounding environment. Reflective surfaces disrupt a single point of view. Objects, space and viewer enter the same circuit, where encounter is brief, partial and repeated.

The exhibition sustains a condition rather than a narrative. No single work resolves what it begins. Meaning does not settle; it lingers in a state of aftermath.

Something has happened. Whether it mattered remains undecided.