ABSTRACT
In 2012, I walked into an art gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, and encountered a group of photographic artworks picturing people and places, buildings and landscapes. Hasan and Husain Essop’s exhibition Remembrance featured pictures (74 cm × 240 cm) curated to hang evenly throughout the gallery space. At first look, the activity within the frame seemed straightforward. The theme shared by the pictures is that of location and setting; and the photographs picture well-known global religious sites, both ancient and modern, and capture staged scenarios that explore religious and cultural practices (Garb 2011, 107). Digitally produced, some (but not all) of the photographs consist of hundreds of individual still shots shot on a tripod, one section at a time, and then meticulously stitched together. At first look, the activity in these scenes seems straightforward and easily describable: the artists, Hasan and Husain Essop, toured the various sites as part of their Muslim religious practice, and took snapshots as they travelled. But as I continued looking, something
strange happened, because the object of my view started fluctuating between high visual definition and blurry incomprehensibility.
