Christine Dixie

Visited the IAS from July 2025

Christine Dixie is a Senior Lecturer in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa. Dixie has a proclivity for printmaking, but her practice often includes incorporating her print works into film or elaborate installations. Recent exhibitions include, The Binding Project, The Abyssal Zone, Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things and Trade-Off. During her stay in Bayreuth, Christine gave three public-lectures at the Jean Paul Art Space, the first lecture was entitled @Bathurst St., Makhanda. In this work she examines the colonial legacy that haunts the town of Makhanda, Eastern Cape, South Africa, where she lives and works and where her 1820 settler ancestors once owned a haberdashery shop. The work juxtaposes the ways in which the town’s colonial past merge with its digital present.

The second lecture was on a set of prints entitled Harbouring Fanon. These prints evoke a non-mimetic portrait of Franz Fanon through a depiction of some of the literal harbours Fanon travelled to in his lifetime. The images track his life from his birthplace in Fort-de-France, Martinique, to the place of his untimely passing in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. The prints merge the concept of harbours as both a literal place, a space in which ships are anchored, and merchandise, ideas and languages are exchanged, with the concept of giving harbour or shelter to a particular vision of the world.

The Abyssal Zone is a multi-media installation by Christine Dixie combining sculptures, ‘veils’ and video projection. This was the focus of the third lecture. With The Abyssal Zone she dropped several depths below, evoking another sort of expansion and desire to acquire a different sort of power and wealth, one that is not on land but that lies on the ocean floor and is ironically tied to green energy. The unfathomable depths and wondrous lives lived below the surface of the sea, the vastness of the galaxies and the equally unfathomable layers of the unconscious gravitated together in the blue-lit space of this installation which conjures up the liminal space of the night, dreams, and hauntings.