Jonathan Sölanke Gathaara Fraser: The Past Will Be Like the Future: Circle Art Gallery

“ I have been thinking with and about the body as a doorway to insight, history, practices of care, connection, violence, beauty and more and more.”

-Jonathan Sölanke Gathaara Fraser-

Across different cultures and cosmologies, a commonly held theory is that events occur recursively. This idea has been expressed in concepts such as the wheel of time, the ouroboros, reincarnation among other seasonal cycles. Jonathan Solanke Gathaara Fraser’s second solo exhibition, The Past Will Be Like Thethe Future, adds to this school of thought, offering work that speaks to the recurring nature of embodied experience. The process of memory-making, that is, contextualizing and logging an experience, is self-referential and often scientifically mysterious. Artists with gestural practices such as drawing, painting, dancing and playing musical instruments can attest to another kind of consciousness that is somatic, instinctual even, in contrast to rote memorization or intellectualization. Conventional western approaches to education teach that the latter is the privileged mode to learn, and therefore experience life. Fraser’s practice invites us to reconsider this, foregrounding embodied thinking as a way to meet this work spanning drawing, installation, and sound. What does it mean to intergrate the mind-body? What does it mean to disavow dissociation and engage interoceptive sense? What does it mean to trust that which is difficult to name?

The pick of the draw

“The matter of an artwork is charged with all of the navigations through time and space that we bring to bear on the work surface.”

In a mind map developed in 2023, Fraser teases out a personal relationship to drawing that orients his practice; to draw is to inscribe an experience, to defer or deduce information, to think, to bring in together – each instance guided by attention, care and curiosity. Within this framework, the permutations of drawing are continuous and infinite with each interaction. The artist is implicated in the making and the staging, and after, so is every observer of the work.

Anchored in the phrase “Repetition Legitimises,” Fraser developed an eight-step process that he moves through non-linearly when building a drawing. The artist considers physical substance, availability and accessibility in his choice of media and material. He works with a host of solid and liquid colour media, whose pigment, viscosity, opacity, hardness and particle size produce different effects on the paper or cotton canvas he uses as his substrate. The structural quality of the materials also offer room to explore. Being the base for the work, they allow for experimentation with the distance between the observer and the work. Cotton canvas for instance lends itself to draping and holding form. This quality creates an opportunity for the artist to play with what tension and slack can do for the composition; what is hidden, what is visible, and from which angle. A Map of the World, 2025 most exemplifies these investigations.

In the series of drawings A Deluxe Space-Time event, (2022) Fraser presents multiple studies of live matter in various stages of decay, alongside a vitrine with a selection of these remains. Made in graphite on watercolour paper, the multitude of twenty-four drawings installed in an undulating pattern in pairs, triads, quads, or singularly high and low, read as a drawing in 24 parts. In the gallery, the process of drawing continues with the body. Come closer, move further, .Read the work as a unit, or in fragments. what is to the left of you, what is to the right? Consider the light and shadow. How do you feel? What do you remember?

You too, are drawing.

There are also notions of (in)stability at play in his compositions, where clear lines are interrupted by seemingly random intrusions– shapes, translucencies, bleeds and pops of colour, gestural marks, pieces of sewn-on canvas. Fraser makes use of techniques like marouflage, creates stencils and instruments to form the alphabet of shapes and marks that make up his visual language. These elements are applied subjectively across different compositions; what is an intrusion in one work might seamlessly blend into another. Finally, the ambient soundscape tops off this play of physical material, enhancing the immersion into mindscapes made flesh. The overall effect is compositions that are alive and liquid.

When is a leaf not a leaf?

There is a deep vulnerability to the body and embodiment that is an intrinsic part of this experience. Systems such as white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism weaponize this vulnerability by creating hierarchies of embodiment that place certain modes of being as expendable Other. Animal over plant and fungi, Human separate from and above animal, human hierarchies of gender, race, age, ability- brutally carving out the most “supreme” embodiment. The titles of Fraser’s work give us departure points for threads of curiosity, many of them about these hierarchies of being. Our Lady of Sorrows, HeLa, (2023), for instance, contemplates agency, autonomy and divinity as experienced by Henrietta Lacks and Mary Mother of Jesus. For both these women, their bodies are a source of life-saving miracles for the world that lives beyond them, but there is also an egregious violation of their agency for the purpose of these miracles. Nakuruitis, 2025 follows the mysterious wasting and death of cattle on a settler’s ranch in 1930s Nakuru, to experiments on labourers’ diets on the settler’s plantations, to the establishment of the field of nutrition and dietetics. The black body here is deemed endlessly expendable: as labour, as acceptable to deprive of sustenance for the sake of “science”. Fraser’s body of work gives a grace and dignity to the people of these stories whose bodies are offered neither and, in this way, He too becomes a portal for care and the possibility of mending to flow through.