Disturbed Currents: Art for a Warming World

Presented by The Kingdom of the Netherlands in South Africa and ORMS

Special Outdoor Project Featuring Thirza Schaap and Nina Barnett 

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Each year, the outdoor spaces of Shepstone Gardens become the largest exhibition space at RMB Latitudes — an immersive garden of art, nature and discovery. This year, in response to the ever-pressing global climate emergency, RMB Latitudes, The Kingdom of the Netherlands in South Africa and ORMS present a powerful outdoor activation by artists Thirza Schaap and Nina Barnett.

Both artists — one Dutch, one South African — work with ecology as their point of departure. Both ask us to pause and look differently. And both have created practices that compel us to reimagine our relationship to place, material and meaning.

Schaap, known for her acclaimed Plastic Ocean series, creates deceptively beautiful compositions using discarded plastic collected from beaches. Her work is seductive at first glance — bright, playful, almost pop. But within seconds, the viewer’s delight gives way to discomfort. This is the paradox at the centre of Plastic Ocean: the aesthetic appeal of waste becomes an unsettling mirror for our throwaway culture. Schaap invites us to reckon with consumption, grief and what we choose to treasure.

Barnett, meanwhile, turns her gaze underground and upstream.

Her installation at RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2025, Carried and Spilled, brings attention to the material presence, the origins and destinations of  Johannesburg’s water — from its spruits, rivers and aquifer to the urbanised bodies of  dams, swimming pools, water features and piped flow. Shepstone Gardens is located on the  Witwatersrand Ridge, a rocky outcrop that bifurcates the city’s northern and southern  areas. The ridge was named, by early white settlers, for the glistening water that flowed  over the quartz outcrop in seasonal, summer falls. These waterways have been largely  covered by concrete and tar, but their former presence, echoed in the ridge’s name,  indicate a continental divide that separates two distinct watersheds. Rain falling on the  north side of the ridge will find its way to rivers like the Jukskei, the Hennops, the  Sandspruit and the Braamfonteinspruit, which flow towards the Crocodile River, then the  Limpopo, flowing east towards the Indian Ocean. Rain to the south finds the Kliprivier and  further on, the Vaal River, which joins the Orange River to flow westwards towards the  Atlantic Ocean. The ridge is a site of watery origin, and of geological, gravitiational  division.  

As the water flows outwards, it carries material messages: of extraction and pollution, of  flood or drought, of activity and stagnation along its course. These messages show the  entangled nature of moving water - both human and environmental, its form constructed by  an interplay of elemental force and anthropogenic infrastructure. The water flowing south  may carries remnants of Langlagste Mine Dump and Turfontein Race Course, of  Goudkoppies Water Treatment Plant and Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve, while the  northern flow carries elements of Houghton Golf Club, Johannesburg Zoo, Alexandra  Township and Tswaing Meteor Crater.  

This installation takes its form in relation to the many artificial water features that are  placed throughout the Gardens, that offer an echo of the ridge’s former watery nature.  Water collected from flowing and still bodies of the city (from rivers, boreholes, ponds and  poolings) are pumped from labeled tanks into a suspended clear tarpaulin. A small drip  emerges from the hanging water, landing on a pile of water-based ink drawings on  handmade paper. The paper-based drawings, depicting relationships between geological,  social and infrastructural landscapes, will slowly become water-logged and disperse over  the course of the Latitudes Art Fair, as the dripped water forces the paper to return to pulp,  and the ink to separate and bleed. The installation continues in the Japanese water garden, where the names of water containers - from POOL, to SWAMP and BASIN — are  placed under the waters flow, summoning the varying forms that this liquid materiality may  take, the cavities it may temporarily occupy.

Nina's practice spans drawing, moving image, and installation, all rooted in the body’s relationship to scale, time and terrain. At RMB Latitudes, she invites us to think with water — not just as infrastructure, but as a living presence with agency, history and a future we must care for.

Together, Schaap and Barnett’s projects hold space for discomfort, wonder and critical reflection. The exhibition calls to imagine futures shaped by care, consciousness and collective action.

This outdoor exhibition is an invitation to look closer, think deeper, and act differently.