bettina
malcomess






Bettina Malcomess is a queer writer and an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their artistic practice inhabits multivocality and density, embodied research and material investigation.  

Malcomess' writing and creative research looks for new archival vocabularies, ways to rethink the densities of historical material in a present marked by urgent ecological and political questions. Since 2016 they have been producing artistic works with analogue film and sound that inhabit the entanglement of technology, memory and history: a series of unfinished articulations in counterpoint voices. Their work is an attempt to queer the signal by inhabiting and signalling their own queerness, while accounting for whiteness as both position of power and unreliable articulation.

Their media encompasses 16 and 8mm film, moving image installation, live cassette and magnetic tape sound pieces, 35mm photography and drawing. Theirs is a long engagement with collections of material located in personal archives, museums and national archives on the African continent and Global South, spanning contemporary, cold war, apartheid and colonial periods. Their artistic practice and current research attempts to show how the perpetuation of colonial uses of technology fundamentally reshape the human and more-than- human sensorium. The film cycle, Sentimental Agents (2019-2024), culminated from  years of research into sites, photographs and films of the South African War (1899-1902). These films show the entanglements of cinema and media within the nervous system of empire, an immersive information field of signals, light, sound and transmission. Analogue media become a means to make visible the anxiety of archives, their representational ommisions and violences.

Malcomess’ new work centers on the afterlives of colonial era information technology in our present, showing how information systems have fundamentally reshaped the human and non-human nervous system. Documenting the landings of fibre optic cables haunted by imperial telegraphic infrastructures alongside natural science collections, a story of post-natural entanglements unfolds over a long historical timeline. A way to re-materialise and thus re-inhabit the colonial nervous system that shapes our  contemporary imagining of the planetary and ecological.






Malcomess shows with Galerie Nagel Draxler , Berlin and has exhibited and performed in many contexts: Lagos Biennale (2024), Wits Art Museum Johannesburg (2024), Matik Matik, Bogotá (2024), Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg (2018), PAC, Milan (2017), Dakar Biennale (2016), Venice, Joburg Pavilion (2015),  Betansalon Paris (2015), Dresden Museum (2013), Iziko South African National Gallery (2010).

Part of her Sentimental Agents film cycle was shown in the aclaimed feature essay documentary on race in post-apartheid South Africa, Milisuthando (2023) directed by Milisuthando Bongela.

Malcomess is also a writer and has published various academic book chapters, essays in artist books and has co-authored two books, Mapping the Sensible: (de Gruyter 20 and the well loved Not No Place: Johannesburg Fragments of Spaces and Times (Jacana, 2013). They are currently working on two fiction writing projects.

Sentimental Agents film cycle:

H/uman

8mm film
2022

Anne Historical lighting assistance: Gretchen Blegen Sound design assistance: Dion Monti With an intervention by Sello Pesa Duration: variable 40 ‘ to 50 ‘ Medium: Sound and





Postnatural Networks 

Digital Video Still
2025- ongoing
A still from work in progress for towards a film, publication and exhibition shot at sites where oceanic networks of fibre optic cables and older telegraphic cables make landing. A mapping of human, post-human, natural and post-natural ecological entanglements. This still was shot near the site of the fibre optic seacom cable landing in Mthunzini, east coast of Kwazulu Natal in South Africa.



joining room







Malcomess runs a platform for collaboration and experimentation called joining room, with ongoing collaborative relationships with artists in Johannesburg (South Africa), Lagos (Nigeria), Bogotá (Colombia), Maputo (Mozambique), Luanda (Angola), Berlin (Germany), London (UK) and Santa Maria (Brazil). Joining Room has hosts studio residencies entitled weightless arrangements in Malcomess’ Johannesburg studio. Curatorial projects include Season 3  at William Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea, co-curated with Bhavisha Panchia. This collaborative experiment included artists Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Abri de Swardt, Lebohang Kganye, Chad Cordeiro, Nathanial Shepard and Gabriel Goliath, and was an exploration of sound based practices under the title: Writing for the Ear, Writing for the Eye.


the joining room 
weightless arrangements

#1 Momento Mori 
2022
                                 

Adrian Fortuin
35 mm handprinted photograph


A photographic series developed in Malcomess’s Johannesburg studio, current location of the joining room. The studio was converted into a darkroom for a month and a series of neighbourhood night walks, ‘dirty walks’ led by Myer Taub led to the production of a photographic series by resident artist Adrian Fortuin.






Two Tempests (for the River that Swallowed its Mouth)

the first tempest
16mm film 
2022








Two Tempests (for the river that swallowed its mouth) was commissioned by the Social Impact Arts Prize and shown at the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch (2022). The work attempts to address the ecological legacy of apartheid era infrastructures. The Gariep dam, originally the Verwoerd dam, was a major apartheid geo-engineering project fueled by a nationalist imagination of infrastructure, symbolic of white custodianship of land and natural resources. Built in the late 1960s, the dam radically altered the flow of the Orange River, and the surrounding ecosystems of the Karroo, and flooded several burial sites, both indigenous and those linked to concentration camps of the South African War (1899-1902).







new research




Malcomess works historical archives to  embody the vertigo of a history we cannot speak. Placing herself in her moving image and performance work is a means to stage her own whiteness as implicated witness, a mask, a set of gestures that inhabit the queer politics of drag employing and fragmenting that which is out of date, amateur, discarded. Often the work references neurological conditions, narcolepsy, aphasia, neglect to understand (after Fanon) the afterlife of coloniality in the psyche and the body. Malcomess’ sound and film works are based on a material archival practice, which has also produced a substantial body of published work in book, chapter and artist book forms. An archive can be a personal tape collection, the detritus and ephemera that form remains at an ecological or historical site, a museum on a Free State farm, or a national collection. This is research into the minor details of minor histories at the fragile intersection of  timelines with no common present.





Postnatural Networks

Archival research
2025-ongoing
Archival research into the entanglement of medical understandings of somatic (human and animal) nerve networks with information networks.  Historical ideas of neurophysiology are modelled on telegraphic systems, and on the study of electricity in animals, from ancient idea of ‘animal spirits’ to the study of electric fish: eels, rays, torpedos. These human, non-human and more-than-human kin are gathered in a postnatural (neither technological nor natural) ecology that is shaped by the idea of the network. But this technologisation of ecology and the sensorium has it’s origins in colonial information systems like telegraphy and railways, which organise bodies and knowledge as territories.

Apahasia
Magentic Tape, Live Performance
2017

PAC, Milan

moving image






Moving image work began with their work on the  South African War in 2017, producing a substantial body of work in 16, 8mm and HDV formats for the film cycle, Sentimental Agents.






Sentimental Agents film cycle:

Found film scan
16mm
2022
A Charlie Chaplin film is found in a storage space with an 8mm bolex camera, a camera with a fault, that lets light into the shot.  The film is about the failed delivery of a piano, in fact stolen and eventually destroyed. In the Sentimental Agents film cycle, the piano becomes a substitute for the camera that which claims the body, the landscape, the image as its property.




















       


















Two Tempests (for the river that swallowed its mouth)


HDV film still 
South Africa
Cinematography: David Wein
Direction: Bettina Malcomess
2022The film makes an analogy between an apartheid era dam and the text of Shakespeare's 'Tempest', where Prospero's conjuring of the magical storm through his manipulation of the nymph Arial is read as an allegory for the control of nature and weather by technology.  Caliban (played by Masai Sepuru) wonders the geological section of the Natural History Museum in Pretoria.  Prospero has enslaved him and Arial in order to extract their knowledge of the island’s natural resources.


Two Tempests (for the river that swallowed its mouth)

HDV film still
South Africa
Cinematography: David Wein
Direction: Bettina Malcomess
2022
Two Tempests (for the river that swallowed its mouth) was a moving image installation with sculptural elements, vitrines of collected ephemera and films in 16mm and digital format, commissioned by the Social Impact Arts Prize and shown at the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch (2022).

The dam becomes a kind of surface onto which several narratives, fictional, mythological and historical, are projected. Here in-camera effects are explored with objects placed in relation to the field of the frame as forms of obfuscation, playing with changes of scale and mediation.







 This website attempts to inhabit Malcomess’  multidisciplinary, transmedial way of working. Film and photographic stills, moving image clips, documentation of live work, installation, sound and publication are placed in two collumns in non-chronological order, while some work is grouped by medium, bodies of work recur.

A kind of montage style navigation of work emerges across the last 10 years, so that at times images from different bodies of work appear alongside one another. This alleatory version of the ‘infinite scroll’ allows for chance combinations and non linear engagement emulating the way the internet and social media have reshaped attention.  But this also revisits Benjamin’s usage of montage in The Arcades Project (Die Passagenwerk) as a political gesture of recombination that returns agency to seeing/reading. 

More so, across the work certain repetitions and rhythms emerge: gestures, forms, objects. This is artistic practice as a wayward methodology that attempts to queer and inhabit historical density as means to re-imagine and re-occupy our mediated and forgetful present.



Two Tempests (for the river that swallowed its mouth)HDV film still 


South Africa
Cinematography: David Wein
Direction: Bettina Malcomess
2022
A shattered hoya lens, a lolliop are used to create in-camera effects with objects placed into the field of the frame as forms of obfuscation, devices to emphasize scale and unreliable narration in a montage film about a dam built  during apartheid.






Sentimental Agents film cycle


Found film scan
16mm
2022
A Charlie Chaplin film is found in a storage space with an 8mm bolex camera, a camera with a fault, that lets light into the shot.  The film is about the failed delivery of a piano, in fact stolen and eventually destroyed. In the Sentimental Agents film cycle, the piano becomes a substitute for the camera that which claims the body, the landscape, the image as its property.







Two Tempests (for the river that swallowed its mouth)


HDV film still 
South Africa
Cinematography: David Wein
Direction: Bettina Malcomess
2022
Hands appear across my work as a device that makes visible the cinematic and performative gesture, a figuring of whiteness as unreliable subject of knowledge, but also as an attempt to empty out the gesture, or queer it’s symbolic meaning and power.



sound






Malcomess works with analogue sound in a practice that attempts to queer the signal, embedded in  an anarchive of collected, found and remediated  magnetic and cassette tape , alongside a field recording practice.  An ongoing body of live and recorded work, often in collaborative constellations  working with improvised and scored works.




Echolalias

sound composition & installation with magnetic tape (23’30’’)
12th Dak’art Biennale
2016


Three reel-to-reel tape machines are set up in a conversation about early cinema, memory and translation within the colonial and anti-colonial moment. The composition was recorded live in my studio in Johannesburg with electronic musician, Dion Monti. The sound recording consists of a scored composition of hand made magnetic tape loops that play in a sequence so that at certain moments two machines play different versions of the same voice sample, creating an echo effect.

The third voice that enters is my own. The language switches continually between French and English to tell the story of cinema, translation, language and colonial memory and cinema archives through collections of found analogue tape recordings.




























) Neglect

Live sonic performance with magentic tape
With an intervention by Sello Pesa
Duration: variable 40 ‘ to 50 ‘


Centre for the Less Good Idea, Season 3:
Writing for the Eye | Writing for the Ear
Curation: Bettina Malcomess and Bhavisha Panchia




 Anne Historical plays the role of a technician attempting to fix an analogue Artificial Intelligence constructed out of magnetic tape loops and analogue projectors, with a glitch: this AI suffers from Neglect. Neurological damage to one of the cortical hemisphere’s affects one’s ability to recognise objects, people and sounds located on the left or right sphere of perception. The analogue AI becomes a metaphor for our inattention, for the half we neglect.

The material quality of magnetic tape is such that it will always contain ghosts or echoes of previous recordings, and so erasure is impossible. The machines are material substitutes for the condition in which speech is lost: where language becomes sound. They are treated as nervous systems and Malcomess is at once technician, doctor, patient





photography





Film photography in 35mm and other analogue formats forms a part of a practice that constantly attempts to materialise archives as mediations. Malcomess does not often work with archival material itself, but with the presence of the artist’s hand in the archive, and the archival as surface onto which history is projected.









































installation






Installation, site specific performance and intervention has always been a part of my practice, a sort of spatial research and experimentation in museums, public spaces, galleries and the stage.