"It took a moment of pushing and pulling at the moveable walls for our curatorial team to figure out how much space to give Kemang Wa Lehulere’s Cosmic Interluded Orbit (2016). The installation has remarkable presence. It is so very still. Yet, on the chalkboards, these whizzing diagrams, abandoned experiments in magical science – it is these, perhaps, that turned those dogs to gold. Read as an interlude, as its title suggests, everyone’s on a space trip, with the room gone to the dogs. Wa Lehulere is an alchemist. No other artist in South Africa is able to grasp so firmly onto history’s long tail and pull out infrastructure for the imagination. He works best with dimension, where frames and objects jut and push into the room. Modest materials (chalk, bricks, blackboard, repurposed school desks) and these ceramic dogs have recurred throughout his practice. As George Mahashe wrote, Wa Lehulere’s works historicise key moments in this country’s history and 'simultaneously inscribe the diversity of concerns animating South African and some diaspora artists; ideas like a fascination with outer space as well as other scientific and occult tendencies.' Writing in 2016, Mahashe bemoaned the exclusion of these themes from a dominant discourse that pigeon-holes these artists only into 'conversations about politics of the gaze or some form of self-representation…that only lives within an economy of filling a gap in the Euro-American archive and history.' One wonders how long the orbit will take, what the teacher might have to share on his return."

– Sightlines wayfinder