The exhibition of works uses the story of In Search for Lake Victoria as a launch point .

In 1854 John Hanning Speke joined　Richard Burton on their ill feted expedition to Somalia. The party was attacked with Speke being taken prisoner by tribal warriors and stabbed with spears several times before he was able to free himself and escape. Even though Burton escaped capture he was wounded in the face by a javelin impaling both his cheeks. Two years later Speke and Burton went to Central Africa in search of the Great Lakes and both men hoped that their expedition would locate the source of the Nile. The journey was extremely strenuous and both men fell ill to a variety of tropical diseases. Speke went temporarily deaf after a beetle crawled into his ear and he was forced to remove it with a knife. After an arduous journey the two became the first　Europeans to discover Lake Tanganyika　(although Speke was blind with ophthalmia at this point and could not properly see the lak! ! e). They heard of a second lake in the area but as Burton was too sick travel, Speke went alone and found the lake which he re-named Lake Victoria. Dallas Seitz

In this group of works Seitz combines African imagery and traditional portrait sculpture with a seventies hobby “craft” aesthetic associated with macramé and ceramics, leather and wood working. Tribal art and its influence on contemporary art and skilled crafts of weaving and pottery to the origins of Cubism, is the underscore of Seitz’s investigations into the influence of colonialism on culture from the Victorian era to the present day.

As in previous sculptural works, objects made by his parents and grandparents are an incorporated element and by combining personal historical artefacts with a fictional ‘museum’ - informed by wider cultural history - Seitz comments on the subjective nature of the museum in a gallery context. ‘In Search for Lake Victoria’ creates a new ‘wing’ of Seitz’s ongoing project Sumeum of Kanmind.

The demand to which antiques respond is the demand for definitive or fully realized being. The tense of the mythological object is the perfect: it is that which occurs in the present as having occurred in a former time, hence that which founded upon itself, that which is ‘authentic’. The antique is always, in the strongest sense of the term, a ‘family portrait’: the immemorialisation, in the concrete form of an object, of a former being-a procedure equivalent, in the register of the imaginary, to a suppression of time.

And once again his remarks should be taken as equally applicable, by extension, to exotic objects; For modern man, in any case, changing country or latitude is essentially equivalent to plunging into the past (as tourism well demonstrates). The fascination for hand- made or native products, for bazaar items from all over the globe, arises less from their picturesque variety than from the anteriority of their forms of heir manufacture, and from the allusion they contain to an earlier world-invariably a throwback to the world of our childhood and its playthings. Jean Baudrillard. In The System of Objects.