Autumn Leaves

Autumn Leaves marks a critical juncture defined by the global rise of populism and nationalism, driven in part by growing anxieties over economic irrelevance. While artificial intelligence has not upended human labour, its rapid emergence has become a force in the national dialogue, amplifying public unease about where working people fit into a modernizing world.

This tension recalls the political fault lines of South Africa’s past, when the National Party capitalized on the economic dread of marginalized, unemployed white Afrikaners to take power in 1948. Today, South Africa finds itself once again navigating a precarious threshold between competing ideological poles and global alignments.

To explore this moment, the exhibition uses machine learning to generate visual interpretations of apartheid through the structural perspectives of two trees. The generative datasets merge archival films of the apartheid era with footage of the fast-growing Chinese Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) and the slower, indigenous Forest Elder (Nuxia floribunda). Where the Tree of Heaven surges upward toward the sky, the Forest Elder anchors itself through measured, deliberate growth.

Echoing Mao Zedong’s assertion that “there is great disorder under the heavens and the situation is excellent,” Autumn Leaves confronts the ethical stakes of our present reality: how new technologies reshape public narrative and political consciousness at a time of profound economic uncertainty.