Layers of meaning

Hank Willis Thomas’s solo exhibition,Forever Now, is his first in South Africa in more than a decade. It brings together text-based lenticular images, retroreflective archival work and sculptural forms that create a bridge between America and Africa, between the past and the present and between individual and collective memory. “For me, the title of the show,Forever Now, is thinking about the ongoing struggle for humanity to reach its ultimate manifestation,” Thomas tells me.

“The struggle for all of us to become the best of who we are. It’s an urgent one but it’s also a timeless one.” “I’m celebrating a moment, a timeless moment, a flash photograph of it, you see the faces and the people, kind of who made this, who witnessed this moment and made it really beautiful. The work is often kind of encouraging myself and viewers to reflect on moments that we don’t always appreciate.” The exhibition is anchored by an idea Thomas has long articulated: love is not merely a sentiment but a verb, a “call to action”.

The principle manifests most tangibly inLove Rules, a neon sign that cycles through shifting letters to form messages of love, including “love rules”. The work honours his cousin, Songha Willis, who was murdered in Philadelphia in 2000. “Love is a verb of action,” Thomas explains.

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“Its meaning goes beyond the romantic idea of it. Love is an invitation to people to stand up and be generous every day of their lives. It is not an action of receiving but rather an action of giving.

My question is: What do you do to give love? How is love breaking the rules you have in your life?” This interrogation of love is inseparable from Thomas’s broader inquiry into race, identity and historical memory. Across the gallery, lenticular and retroreflective pieces draw from South African archives and American visual culture alike, inviting viewers to peer beneath their surfaces.

A series of images of rectangular lines in bright colours on top of white canvases is revealed to be something deeper once Thomas shines a light on them. Beneath the red, green and blue lines are portraits of South African icons Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela and Nelson Mandela hidden within the abstraction. “Even when you look at this,” Thomas says, tracing the lines, “you see how his eyes are highlighted, his lips …I do my best to make work that can be beautiful and have a meaning on one level, just to the naked eye.

But then I love the idea of putting something beneath it that makes you reimagine what you just thought you already knew.” In this layering, Thomas reminds us that perception is never neutral; understanding requires effort, reflection and imagination. The philosophy extends to his sculptural work as well.The Embrace, inspired by Thomas’s permanent memorial to Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King in Boston Common, isolates intimacy as a form of collective action.

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