Riley Grant

Riley is a Johannesburg based artist, musician, DJ and student currently completing his Honors in Fine Arts at Wits University, with a specific interest in aesthetic forms and languages capable of articulating the cultural anxieties of our time whilst resisting capitalist subsumption – this forms the foundation from which he thinks about contemporary cultural production. He does not suggest that his work is the new form of political art that we urgently need. Rather, it is the earnest result and humble beginning (for him at least) in thinking through and struggling with the challenge of finding aesthetic modes that can act as potentials for cultural critique. Whilst this is not the immediate content of his work, it is the position from which he works from.

He is currently working on a long-term multimedia project titled “Materiality of the Immaterial”, which briefly put, tries to put form and materiality to the seemingly immaterial or invisible monstrous megastructures that underlie this particular type of globalised capitalism, as a strategy to foreground its destructive nature. He looks to cloud computing, which has been presented as something adjacent to the ‘natural’, but whose physical infrastructure depletes the natural resources on which it relies.

Riley’s work is realised through a multi- disciplinary practice, combining elements of sound, video and spatial installation, creating an immersive environment in which the content of the work can be understood viscerally in the hopes of provoking meaningful interest and viewer engagement surrounding global and local problematics of late techno-capitalism.