Folie à Deux presents works by two artists who have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue over the last decade, as partners in life and art. Directly translated, the title means ‘the madness of two’.

In French, for instance, it’s used to describe a couple who are always engaged in love and conflict; anything that generates enough friction to create either a downward or upward spiral. It is also a term used in psychiatry for a complex disorder characterised by the contagion of a specific delusion shared by two or more people.

Yet for their residency, the artists come as one. Theirs is a madness shared with the Earth and all of its output — a timeous theme in our information age. Folie à Deux also concedes to the beauty and passion of the co-dependent romance of human life with the Earth, the stories we tell to make sense of it, as well as our attempts to contain, manage, and manipulate it.

The exhibition groups six of the artists' works into three distinct pairs (one work by each), echoing the resonance of their engagements, and the different associations that emerge when brought together. Central to both of their practices is the transformation of matter — whether living, non-living or human — in states of entanglement and flux. Existing in states of tension or balance, the works implicate the past as an active participant in the present, drawing on the self-referential, physical, and metaphorical properties of the materials to touch on themes of extraction, entropy and regeneration.

A fitting home for this show, the Cradle of Humankind brings to the fore the origin of our species as well as the five mass extinction events that have occurred since life first emerged on Earth 4.6 billion years ago (notably, several of the materials in the works predate these events). This symbolic framework places in stark relief the absurdity of certain human endeavours in the modern world.