Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2020: BOOTH TT3

The cannibals’ concupiscence is part of Isabelle Grobler’s on-going project the Cannibals' Banquet where the artist explores the politics of consumption.

 While her sculpture utilizes a variety of discarded and obsolete objects as a starting point, she creates surreal environments populated by hybrid machine -organisms constructed from urban debris.

Conceptually she is concerned with power and hierarchy in a world fractured by socio-political and cultural paradoxes. In the cannibals’ concupiscence, the artist considers the function of desire in the creation of culture and society. Reflecting on the idea that desire arises from lack or privation, the cannibal's concupiscence grapples with the psychological undercurrents of desire as a marginalizing force that resists clear representation.

It is then often described as perverse and polymorphous.

The work is dreamlike and anthropomorphic: based on reality, but reconfigured by the unconscious, where recognizable things and ideas have been shuffled and reinterpreted to produce a Kafkaesque ambiguity. The works vacillate, like Frankenstein's monster, between the threatening and the pathetic, representing a transformation of abject things into unclassifiable beings.