ONLY connect: A piece on show from Hunter-Gatherer.

WHAT DOES IT mean to be human in this relentlessly throw away world in which we live? This is the kind of question which comes under the loupe of Kai Lossgott in his quietly dramatic exhibition Hunter-Gatherer, bringing together, as it does, a broad range of detritus and references, playfulness and poetry.

You may think of Belgian poet and conceptual artist, Marcel Broodthaers as you peruse this body of over 80 pieces, quietly placed alongside one another, works which overlap each other as they document time and serve as an ecological catch-all as they turn your eye and your head in unexpected directions.

You may think of work made by South African artist Alison Kearney in Switzerland about the aesthetic value of ostensibly throwaway domestic objects, as you look at the plastic garments worn by Lossgott in which he collected objects from the world, during recent residencies.

You may, indeed, think of Colin Richards’s meticulous water colour paintings of traditional divination objects as you try to make sense of the order of things Lossgott has established in his installations and prints, performances and filmed work. And in his artists’ books.

Lossgott doffs a proverbial cap to all of these practitioners, sampling the roadkill he finds as he draws lines that describe forms and others that rupture worlds. Hunter-Gatherer is an exhibition about what art is in our throwaway culture, and as you find yourself pondering the materiality of his UV-prints on foil or on household tissue, as you are mesmerised by the array of tiny bottles containing specimens, and evoking a beam of light in a darkened room, you find yourself cast among the poetry and the thinking of this unusual and thoughtful artist. It’s a deep and bold exhibition, but one that on the surface is demure as it is almost elegant.

Concept segues with achingly beautiful line work as photograph segues with found object in this contemporary extrapolation of the conventional definition of the San lifestyle. What does Lossgott, the artist as a persona on the streets of Europe hunt for and gather? Clues and gestures, meanings and disused NikNak packets, fluff and nonsense, ants and seeds … you name it, there’s a taxonomy somewhere in this exhibition into which everything meticulously fits.

It’s an important exhibition, which confronts the throwaway soul of contemporary society, as it reveals an engagement with the world which is unique and beautiful as it is audacious and not the kind of thing you might expect in this gallery space which reeks corporate through its very pores. Not only corporate but commercial: Hunter-Gatherer is a complex body of work that teeters gleefully and self-consciously between academic inaccessibility and the need to woo a buyership. The unabashed magnificence of many of the pieces grab you by the eye, but they do so in an abstract way. When the image of a plastic carrier bag evokes a priest praying, arms akimbo; when the post-consumerist world is so meticulously and earnestly explored as it is here, something magical happens and the time invested in each bit of human detritus lends it a solemn value, but one not unspiced with self-deprecation and utter levity.

• Hunter-Gatherer by Kai Lossgott is on show at the Absa Gallery in the North Towers in downtown Johannesburg until June 15. Park in the bank’s parking garage on Polly Street (off Main Street) and take the elevator up to UG – and bring your ID. Call 011 350 3003. The gallery is open from 08:30 until 16:00 Monday to Friday.