Art o Rama 2026: Marseille, France

We are very excited to present existing and new works by South African multidisciplinary South African artist Dale Lawrence (b. 1988). The presentation brings together a group of sculptural works, for the gallery's first participation in Art-o-Rama.

Working across text, sculpture, performance, and installation, Lawrence blurs the boundaries between mediums to explore repetition, intimacy, and invention.

The exhibition brings together a body of work that interrogates the instability of language and the way meaning is constructed within a society saturated by information flows, social media, and disinformation. Each piece emerges from repurposed and recontextualized materials — adhesive tape, paper and epoxy resin, sound, animal fat, or ash — extending a reflection on the transformation of signs and the fragility of their meaning.

On the walls, Lawrence's text-based works originate in the language of everyday life: news headlines, television programs, advertising slogans, excerpts from books. The artist collects these textual fragments, reassembles them into new poetic compositions, then prints them in a typography inspired by computer language before encapsulating them in epoxy resin.

By isolating and transforming these familiar phrases, Lawrence reveals the malleability of language and its capacity to produce new meanings. Fixed in resin, these words — usually fleeting — acquire a physical and lasting presence. Between poetry, object, and image, these works invite a renewed way of looking at the mechanisms through which language shapes our perception of the world.

A sound work, Sometimes I try to pray (2026), extends this practice of reuse. Lawrence draws on recordings captured aboard the Foshan metro and a fragment borrowed from John Berger's Pig Earth, which he processes using noise-reduction software. But where this tool is normally used to eliminate unwanted frequencies, the artist instead retains the harmonics: isolating them, layering them, and drawing out of noise something akin to music. A passenger's laughter, the screech of a train's brakes, fragments he sorts through and mines until a melodic thread emerges. Composed of beef fat, brushfire ash, and encaustic, the piece diffuses this sound directly through its surface by means of a transducer, embodying at once degradation and reconstruction.

With Nameless and Friendless (2019), the gesture of fragmentation shifts toward the object. On the floor, the work brings together two wooden chairs from the artist's studio. Cut apart and then reassembled, they face one another in anticipation of an impossible dialogue. The severed legs of one prop up the other; both nonetheless remain caught in untenable positions. What Lawrence performs on language (extracting, dismantling, and rearranging) he here performs on form and function. Stripped of their use, the chairs become the terms of a mute syntax, in which the elevation of one comes at the cost of the other. The hierarchy is visible, yet sterile. Echoing Emily Mary Osborn's eponymous painting (1857), the work gives shape to unbalanced relations of power.