The Siege and the Sanctuary

Featured Artists: Alfred Kitsi & Jaden Wells

Alfred Kitsi — Oil & Mixed Media

Jaden Wells — Foil, Charcoal, Ink, Paper

The Siege and the Sanctuary brings together the artworks of two contemporary artists, Alfred Kitsi and Jaden Wells, whose works are framed alongside a social- historical archive of South African psychiatric history. This archive explores how South Africa’s mental health landscape was shaped by colonialism, racialised control and years of systemic violence. The Cape Town Slave Lodge and Robben Island are sites where institutional “care” was primarily about isolation, surveillance and confinement rather than treatment. The Mental Disorders Act of 1916 affirmed this approach and continued to justify this approach in the years of Apartheid with even more brutality. During Apartheid, psychiatric institutions enforced racial segregation, forced Black patients into demanding, physical labour, and applied Eurocentric medical standards that did not consider local cultural values. Within this system, many people were expected to “perform wellness” just to avoid institutionalisation, criminalisation, or losing their livelihoods. After Apartheid ended, poor policies and underfunding left public clinics struggling to survive and the stigmatisation of mental health was still an issue that needed to be continuously addressed.

Alfred Kitsi works against this historical backdrop of structural violence and approaches psychological disruption through the idea of the “siege” this has on the mind. Kitsi works within the genre of horror and surrealism and draws on haunting imagery to treat horror not just as an artistic style, but as a direct way of showing what it feels like to lose control of your mind, body and surroundings. His artworks address the psychological and spiritual territory of fear, distortion, and the human condition which brings about internal anxiety and an external threat into the open. Kitsi turns the discomfort of psychological collapse into something to look at directly and exposes the vulnerabilities that institutions and social expectations try to hide.

In contrast to Kitsi’s style of confronting fear directly, Jaden Wells’ artwork moves towards restoration through an ongoing process. Wells’ practice is rooted in his own struggles with mental health and turns his creative labour into a daily, physical form of healing. Wells' art practice consists of slow, labour-intensive cycles of making and un-making to counter the mental disruption and tries to make the mind a “sanctuary.” Wells’ is influenced by the philosopher Wesley Cray and his idea of “imbued artefacts” which argues that conceptual art is a physical object that carries an idea. This can be seen across Wells’ artwork as he cares more about the meditative process behind each piece rather than the final or finished artwork. Drawing on Cray’s philosophy, each artwork is made significant by the fact that it carries meditation, mindfulness and a search for restoration through repetition. Working with everyday materials such as aluminium foil, charcoal, ink, and paper, Wells transforms the mundane through repetitive, labour-intensive methods that emphasize mindfulness and healing.

-Aaliyah Ahmed, OCTH Head Curator