Image: Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg
A walkabout led by the curators will take place on Saturday 17 October 2026 at 12:00; the exhibition will be opened by curator, author and researcher Stacy Hardy. The exhibition is curated by Ciara Struwig, Renzo Filinich and Stacy Hardy, with Sam Kentridge, Twiggy Matiwana, Gabrielle Mudiwa, Sahar Carter and Vuyokazi Ngemntu.
Rather than staging a familiar opposition between the analogue book and the digital interface, ‘Technics of the Page / The Last Human Reader’ places the artist’s book beside artificial intelligence as predecessor, companion, irritant and saboteur. The book is not the opposite of technology: it is already a machine—a hinge machine, a memory machine, a sequencing machine and a concealment machine—as well as an imagination engine.
The exhibition moves through technical beings, memory systems, generative machines, networks, hallucinations and that which refuses capture. It asks what happens when books and archives increasingly circulate as data, metadata, predictions and extractable patterns, and what remains stubbornly material, illegible, embodied or resistant.
These books must still be turned, unfolded, rotated, decoded, listened to, peered into and sometimes performed. Artificial intelligence enters the exhibition as an unstable apparatus for thinking about memory, authorship, classification, prediction and reading.
The title ‘The Last Human Reader’ is not a prophecy but a provocation: what counts as reading when the reader may be human, collective, machinic, ancestral, distributed or imagined?
