13 May to 6 June 1998 During the past four years Keith Dietrich has been involved in retracing some of the pre-colonial and colonial migratory and trade routes which border the Kgalagadi (Kalahari) desert. These routes stretch from Kuruman in the Northern Cape to lake Ngami in Botswana, and the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. The Kgalagadi routes embody the metaphor of travel, one of the Setswana variants of Kgalagadi being "a journey that never ends". Taking the journey as a creative problem, Dietrich's intention is to deconstruct the complex histories of these routes and to visually recontextualise these within the contemporary histories presently being forged in southern Africa. Apart from their pre-colonial history, the Kgalagadi routes carry symbolic implications of colonial "penetration" into virgin and uncharted territories. His own responses to these routes have largely been influenced by the background of a European construct of Africa and the complex processes of colonising and "civilising" southern Africa. The wild and "formless worlds" of what Europeans saw as "primitive" African life lay open to the ordering impulses of European travellers, illustrators, naturalists, missionaries, hunters and colonial administrators, whose mission it was to awaken and convert what they considered to be an uncharted, unhistoricised, and unclothed world. This systemisation of "formless worlds" calls up the image of Adam moving through his domain, mapping, classifying, picturing and naming all of creation. In an attempt to visually review these issues, Dietrich has chosen to work within the broader illusionistic conventions of visual representation which formed colonial images. However, in contrast to these conventions which attempted to absolutise the relationship between the observer and the observed within the visual paradigm of a disembodied objective vision (emphasising certitude and measurability), he has included formal devices which simultaneously aim to subvert their hegemonic formal and iconographic contents which played a formative role in the complex discourse of European "civilisation" of southern Africa. His responses to the Kgalagadi routes have also involved similar documentary processes to those used by earlier travellers (charting, collecting, photographing and painting). Likewise, the subject matter of his works hinges on similar iconographic conventions, such as the depiction of the people, their material culture,fauna and flora, as well as geographic terrain. A crucial dimension to the colonial systemisation of Africa was to forge its past into the European historical convention of periodising history (i.e. Stone Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age and Technological Age), thereby emphasising an evolutionary sequence of historical events. In contrast to these conventions, Dietrich has chosen to emphasise the randomness of "historical" events by formally juxtaposing seemingly unrelated cultural and natural objects within an ambiguous relationship with the intent to visually challenge the anthropological convention that South Africa offers two histories, a natural history (into which indigenous people fall), and a cultural history (into which people from European fall). Discarded utilitarian objects (weapons, spoons, cups, pipes, equestrian gear, early and middle stone age tools, iron age, Victorian and contemporary ceramic shard, wagon parts etc.), and consumable products (tins, fragments of packaging, bottles etc.), were selected with a view to visually narrating the complexity of human contact and interaction in this country. During the colonial period, these routes were used by European adventurers, missionaries, hunters, naturalists and entrepreneurs (such as Andrew Geddes Bain, David Livingstone, William Oswell, Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, William Baldwin, Gustav Fritsch, Thomas Baines, James Chapman, and Cecil John Rhodes), to dramatise their own lives against the backdrop of a wild and romantic vision of Africa. A significant dimension to the colonial systemisation of Africa was also expressed by geographical, botanical, zoological and ethnographical illustrations which presupposed a value-free, universally applicable vision based on the advancement of knowledge for its own sake. In contrast to overt colonial conquest, this mode of conceptualising 'uncharted' territory through collecting, classifying, naming, recording and re-presenting was not simply a challenge to systematise the human or natural phenomena of the country, but can also be regarded as a means of taming and taking possession of the land. The relationship between Western ideas regarding aesthetics and the notion of cultural refinement (taste) has largely governed Dietrich's selection of images. Apart from examples of fauna, flora, and geography, the objects that he has collected as subject-matter for these paintings (mostly discarded utilitarian and consumable products) also focus on aspects of a proletarian aesthetic and cultural "entropy" as anti-types of bourgeois aesthetic values. Retracing these routes has been significant, as it is against this background that an attempt has been made to review the history of ideas, creeds and images that have mostly been imposed from the outside. It is an attempt to celebrate aspects of contemporary Africa that pass unnoticed, since they are not considered to be sufficiently exotic, picturesque or newsworthy.