NRF|SAAO Cape Town Open Night

“Patterns of the Universe Lines Across Space and Time”

In this lecture Kamil will explore the intertwined relationships of art, science, culture and technology and explore how ancient indigenous philosophical frameworks in Southern Africa integrated observational knowledge of the universe into their world-views.

Kamil will recall the story of two independent solutions to navigating the open ocean – the British invention of the mechanical clock and Polynesian Wayfinding – illustrating the ways in which culture can profoundly influence scientific and technological progress.

He will also share his project developed in collaboration with astronomers and scientists at SALT and SAAO, “Event Horizon” – a series of artistic installations, exhibitions and an art-science instrument exploring the nexus between frontier science and ancient indigenous knowledge in Southern Africa.

Kamil Adam Hassim (b.1997) is a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores  how our relative cultural paradigms shape human perception, memory, and belief. Engaging both scientific institutions and indigenous knowledge systems, Hassim’s art is an exploration of the intersections of culture and technology and the use of nature and natural phenomena as an artistic language.

Hassim is one of the youngest artists globally to be awarded a residency at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and the only artist to have undertaken independent residencies across all major astronomical observatories in South Africa—including the (South African Astronomical Observatory) SAAO, the (South African Radio Astronomy Observatory) SARAO, and Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory HartRAO. These engagements have informed his enduring interest in the relationship between modern scientific practice and ancestral cosmological systems, and the entanglement of cultural and scientific worldviews.

At the core of Hassim’s practice is an inquiry into how cultural paradigms shape human perception and the kinds of information that become available through them. He draws upon cosmology, particle physics, indigenous epistemologies, and spiritual technologies—probing the thresholds between the scientifically knowable and the sensed, the measurable and the mythical. Informed by a praxis of Wayfinding, his work navigates the liminal spaces between science, art, and ancestral knowledge to propose new frameworks for understanding reality and agency.

His installations often form sensory architectures— multi sensory compositions of sound, optics, and custom-built instruments that invite audiences into expandedperceptual states. In Event Horizon (2023), exhibited at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, refracted light from a defunct astronomical prism became a medium for rethinking the visibility of suppressed knowledge systems under colonial epistemology.

In the Karoo desert, as part of the Fluid Boundaries and Tankwa Artscape residencies, Hassim enacted a counter-land art strategy—allowing the ancient landscape’s vast frequency field to recalibrate his perceptual rhythms and inform sonic improvisational works. During the FluidBoundaries residency in 2025, he is also collaborating with scientists at the department of Earth Science UWC and water researchers at UJ, extending his inquiry into the material intelligence of ecological systems.