Notes

Kim Lieberman’s painting, Every Interaction Interrupts the Future, was nominated for the FNB Vita Art Prize in 2001, together with works by artists Moshekwa Langa, Kathryn Smith, Clive van den Berg, Jan van der Merwe, and Robin Rhode. On sheets of unprinted perforated paper usually used for printing postage stamps, Lieberman depicts eighteen figures in silhouette. The figures are derived from photographs of family and friends and from images in books and magazines such as National Geographic. They represent different cultures and historical periods and are connected by the perforations in a geometric grid. Lieberman uses blood red, a colour she describes as ‘a very attractive colour, a magnetic compelling colour, a colour we have inside us [blood], a link to our ancestors, to our past, to our history, to the history of humankind. It is a link between all people’.¹ The oil in the paint bleeds out of the silhouette, creating an aura or energy field around each one. The number of figures, eighteen, is significant because in the tradition of Gematria, a numeric system that is a component of the Kabbalah, it refers to chai, which means life.

1. Kim Lieberman (2003) Every Interaction Interrupts the Future. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, page 18.

Exhibited

NSA Gallery, Durban, FNB Vita Art Prize 2001, 7 August to 8 September 2001.

Market Theatre Gallery, Johannesburg, FNB Vita Art Prize 2001.

Literature

First National Bank (2001) FNB Vita Art Prize 2001 (text by Clive Kellner), Durban: First National Bank. Illustrated in colour on page 9.

cf. Kim Lieberman (2003) Every Interaction Interrups the Future (text by RoseLee Goldberg and Rory Doepel), Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery. Similar works illustrated in colour on pages 28 and 29.