01/10/2026
HyperFable, an exhibition curated by Johan Conradie, will take place at the Association of Arts Pretoria from 10 to 31 October 2026.
The exhibition explores how artists employ fantasy not as a form of escapism, but as a powerful strategy for critique, speculation, and world-building. Through invented narratives, mythical structures, hybrid realities, and imagined futures, the participating artists address the contradictions, anxieties, and aspirations that shape contemporary life. They occupy a fertile territory between the familiar and the impossible, revealing how imagination can expand the limits of what is thinkable, visible, and socially conceivable.
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek observes that “fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is the support of reality itself.” Fantasy functions as a generative structure through which reality is experienced, narrated, and contested. Within contemporary art, it becomes a critical medium capable of exposing hidden desires, unsettling dominant narratives, and constructing speculative worlds through which new possibilities may emerge.
This exhibition invites viewers into a constellation of imagined realities—worlds that illuminate the present precisely by exceeding it. In doing so, the exhibition asks how fiction, myth, and imagination might help us understand not only who we are, but who we may yet become.
