Art_Africa_2016_03_

THAT ART FAIR / JACQUES COETZER 22/22 ARTAFRICA

FEATURE / THAT ART FAIR

JACQUES COETZER

Jacques Coetzer is a South African artist who fuses traditional and new media

to explore everyday life. Coetzer makes “art inspired by doubt, faith and

survival in the middle lane.” Much of his recent work, made around the world

and across Africa, deals with climate change philosophy.

At THAT ART FAIR, Coetzer will be showing Epoch Counter, a large-scale

wall installation. The Epoch Counter is a manual / annual device that displays

the year count using a set of wooden modules each bearing a different cultural

reference to the Anno Domini era, based on the incarnation of Jesus of

Nazareth, the central figure in Christianity. Dionisius Exiguus, a Catholic monk,

in the year 600 devised the Anno Domini calendar system that is still used all

over the world today (abbreviated as AD or BC). The calendar era to which it

refers is based on the traditionally reckoned year of the birth of Jesus Christ,

with AD denoting years after the start of this epoch, and BC denoting years

before the start of this epoch. Anno Domini is sometimes referred to as the

Common Era, Christian Era, or Current Era (abbreviated as C.E. or CE). CE

is often preferred by those who desire a term not explicitly related to Christian

conceptions of time.

Jacques Coetzer, Epoch Counter, 2010 (ongoing). Finnish plywood modules with printed text.
196 x 480 x 1.5 cm, installation size variable.

ARTAFRICA