In Die Vallei van Adem, Juandré van Eck turns ceramics into an exhibition that can be heard as well as seen. His sculptural vessels respond when visitors pick them up and gently tilt them, drawing air through water to produce different tones.

Each vessel is built from two connected ceramic chambers. Their size and construction affect the sound they make: smaller forms produce higher notes, while larger vessels resonate at lower pitches.

The result is not a fixed soundtrack. As people move through the gallery and activate different works, individual sounds meet, overlap and disappear. At times the vessels operate almost like an improvised choir, with the character of the exhibition changing according to who is in the room.

Die Vallei van Adem develops ideas from Van Eck’s Cycles of the Mind, which won the 2025 Sasol New Signatures Visual Arts Competition. Rather than simply expanding the earlier work in scale, the solo exhibition pushes further into the relationship between ceramic form, air, water and sound.

Participation is built into that relationship. The sculptures are completed objects, but their voices remain dormant until someone handles them. Breath becomes both a physical mechanism and a recurring idea: air enters the vessel, moves through water and returns as sound.

The exhibition follows Van Eck’s Merit Award in the competition in 2024 and his Overall Winner award the following year, which included the opportunity to develop this first major solo presentation.

Die Vallei van Adem is presented alongside the 2026 Sasol New Signatures exhibition, offering visitors the unusual chance to see this year’s finalists while also encountering how a previous winner has developed one idea into a substantial new body of work.

Images courtesy of Pretoria Art Museum and Juandré van Eck.

Exhibition Details

Juandré van Eck | Die Vallei van Adem

Venue
Pretoria Art Museum
Pretoria, Gauteng

Exhibition Dates
10 September – 9 November 2026