A multi-media installation by Christine Dixie.

The Abyssal Zone is dark, silent, and secret, inhabited by uncanny, luminous creatures which float above shifting sands. The sea floor gleams with gold, platinum, titanium, copper, cobalt, and manganese, minerals that are critical for batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles.

In the 17th century, European ships floated across the ocean, enticed by lands of gold and the promise of fortunes. Stars guided the ships; elusive planets lit the dark surfaces.

If a ship had sunk, it might have come to rest on a seabed that held the very minerals it searched. This shadowy place is now threatened with the judder of collectors, the throbbing of tracked mining vehicles and pulsing bottom crawlers that spew toxic sediment plumes. Even the most remote, seemingly inaccessible parts of the planet are now threatened.

In the disrupted order depicted in this work, place and space are inverted. Fish, still glittering and beautiful are now inedible and swim alongside spacecraft. Our dreams are haunted by reverberations from the Abyss, perverse echoes of sky and sea, water and air, sustenance, and poison.

About Christine Dixie

Christine Dixie is a Senior Lecturer in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University. The colonial history that haunts the town of Makhanda, where she lives and works has compelled her preoccupation with Europe’s legacy in Africa.

Typically, Dixie’s print series are part of a body of work that also finds expression through films or elaborate installations. In this way her art is not limited to a specific medium, and as with films has a narrative quality to it, presenting a developing story, which advances with each image, further blurring the boundaries between the present and the past.

Her work is included in national and international collections including The New York Public Library, The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, The Iwalewahaus Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Standard Bank Gallery and the SABC Art Collection, The Iziko National Art Museum

Christine Dixie’s “The Abyssal Zone“ was first shown at the University of Bayreuth during the Cluster’s New Year Lecture 2026. Afterwards it has moved to Iwalewahaus’ exhibition room at FZA where it will be shown from 25.02.–08.04.2026.

Opening hours: 11am–4pm