Universiteit Stellenbosch University. MA Graduation Degree Show 2016

Artist list

Nora Kovats

Imagining Paradise explores the extent to which the aestheticized garden can articulate a mythic Western imaginary of a paradisiacal and exoticized fantasy of the East. The Western construct of the ‘Orient’ as exotic, erotic, alluring and ultimately ‘other’ may partly be attributed to the splendour of Islamic ‘paradise gardens’, together with imports such as foreign plants, Eastern novelties and magnificent stories such as the Arabian Nights narrative. Likewise, the ‘discovery’ of America fuelled European imaginations, resulting in the obsessive collecting of rarities in botanical gardens, heated glasshouses and in ‘cabinets of curiosities’. Kovats’ work aims to subvert and simultaneously indulge in the Western fascination with the exotic in a series of highly symbolic contemporary jewellery objects that offer glimpses of a fragmented botanical paradise.