SEARCHING for someone. A still from Minnette Vari’s Eleventh Hour. Photograph courtesy Facebook.

THE IRREVOCABLE EMPTINESS of loss is the subject of the video piece and related artists’ books that comprise this intimate and raw, broken yet focused work of Minnette Vári. It’s a lot less abstract than her previous bodies of work and while it is unashamedly personal for Vári, it retains a delicate obscurity with which it is able to simultaneously reach deep and relentless into the heart of who we all are as vulnerable mortals who don’t know where the next body blow is coming from. Or the next big loss that will redefine us.

The video work is but seven minutes in length. It features an anonymous search party exploring an unspecific landscape. As you watch it, however, you become immersed in its urgency and lose all sense of time. And as you stand there, transfixed and weeping, you feel that you wouldn’t be doing justice to the loss by leaving the gallery after just one viewing. Each time you watch the sequence of these seekers in their overalls with their torches and their circles of light, with its zigzags of static and its panning across a landscape, you nurture a secret hope that they’ll find who they’ve lost; that the world will be able to turn again, and that the roaring bloody agony of loss will be sutured.

Each time, of course, you know that this cannot be. And because the work is structured around the trope of loss rather than more specifically, the loss is mine as it is yours, and that voice you long to hear in the soundscape of wind and breath is one you’ve been missing ever since that someone, that almost anonymous ‘you’ to who Vári refers in her text, left you.

Accompanying the exhibition are three unique artists’ books, constructed in a landscape format. These works contain digital prints that draw from the film and are worked up with an energy specific to the medium of monotype. Here, ink is dragged across a surface, drag marks peppering and pocking the underlying photographic vagueness, there there’s a sense of humanity moored in the landscape, but too ghostly to hold onto.

As the film unfolds, and the more you watch it, you find yourself casting your gaze beyond the reach of the search party, in the hope that maybe you can spot the one who is missing. Of course, you can’t, but as your eye reaches through the nameless space of the landscape, so you realise its unfriendliness, its barrenness, the call of the nightjar that resonates with eerie loneliness and you acknowledge that the world is a quieter, more alone place because your someone is no longer there. More than that gesture of searching for someone, however, is the one in which Vári argues, by dint of the work’s title and the written material in the monoprints, obscured by drops of what could be tears, that loss happens at the proverbial eleventh hour: when it must.

This magnificently subtle, carefully crafted body of work never ponders into specifics; instead it gnaws at the kernel of what makes us tick. And Vári takes the simple and complex beauty of her aesthetic into a space previously untrammeled and more profound than ever.

• The Eleventh Hour by Minnette Vári is in The Viewing Room, Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, until August 19. Call 011 788 1113 or visit goodman-gallery.com