Propitas

With the quasi-trademark of Propitas, the artist makes a fictitious consumer offer that targets the attitudes, expectations, fears and desires of the average middle-class household. Through imaginative play with elements from South African insurance, security, marketing and spiritual industries, the exhibited artworks make offers and promises for the propitiation and soothing of fate and, as such, suggest serenity for the implied consumers.

As quasi-consumer products with fictitious pseudo-transcendental aspirations, the artworks offer reconciliation, with a satirical tendency, between the supposed and mutually contradictory needs and desires directed at both the consumer market and religious institutions. By thematically addressing the largely concealed role that insurance companies play as interveners against fate the need to navigate, negotiate and reduce uncertainty within middleclass lifeworlds is exposed. The artworks thematise man’s deep-seated search for nurturing, security, meaning and enchantment as they come to the fore in advertising campaigns and the characteristic branding of certain modern religious and spiritual actions.