21.01.11
Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography
Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, Sponsored by Standard Bank
12 April – 17 July 2011
The first UK exhibition of contemporary South African photography from the last ten years will be shown at the V&A this spring. Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography will feature over 150 works by some of the most exciting and inventive photographers living and working in South Africa today. The exhibition will present the vibrant and sophisticated photographic culture that has emerged in post-apartheid South Africa. The works on display respond to the country’s powerful rethinking of issues of identity across race, gender, class and politics. The photographs depict people within their individual, family and community lives, practicing religious customs, observing social rituals, wearing street fashion or existing on the fringes of society. All the photographers question what it is to be human at this time in South Africa.
The 17 photographers in the exhibition range from established practitioners David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng, mid-career stars Pieter Hugo and Zwelethu Mthethwa to a new generation, fresh to the international stage, including Zanele Muholi and Hassan and Husain Essop. Each photographer will be represented by one or more series that imaginatively question the conventions of portraiture, ethnographic studies or documentary photography.
Jodi Bieber
A documentary photographer who has worked in countries across the world, Bieber focuses on her native South Africa for the series ‘Real Beauty’. In a country where traditionally attractive full figured beauty is losing favour to Western body shapes, her photographs depict the diverse appearances of a variety of South African women, shot in the location of their own homes. Each subject was asked to project their own personality and fantasy into the photographs. The body of work reveals the often complex relationship between image and identity.
Kudzanai Chiurai
Chiurai was born in Zimbabwe but trained as an artist in South Africa where he now lives. He addresses issues facing his new country including xenophobia, displacement and black empowerment. His rich and humorous series ‘The Black President’ critiques the representation of political power by depicting an imaginary cabinet with such figures as the Minister of Finance dressed in a floor length fur coat and gold chain, referring to popular culture as well as the tradition of African studio portraiture.
Hasan and Husain Essop
Twin brothers based in Cape Town, the Essops only use their own images within their constructed photographs, so as not to involve others in the transgression of Muslim law. In the series ‘Halaal Art’, they explore their religious culture and depict themselves in various locations showing the preparation and serving of a Halaal meal as a ritual process comparable to planning a work of art. The work refers to the cycle of life and death as well as the contradiction between modernity and tradition, and Islam and the West.
David Goldblatt
Since the early 1970s, Goldblatt has photographed his native South Africa, observing its social, cultural and economic divides. On show will be ‘Zimbabwe Refugees Taking Shelter in the Central Methodist Church’, a bird’s eye view of a displaced mass of sleeping bodies, arranged foetus-like on benches and the floor. On display for the first time will be a series depicting ex-offenders posing self-consciously at the scenes of their crimes alongside texts telling their stories.
Pieter Hugo
Hugo is often drawn to uncomfortable subjects whose distinctive features, clothing and settings all reveal details about their social situation. In a startling portrait of a new South African family, Hugo captures a white couple, the man gripping a prosthetic leg, the woman proud but poor, sitting on a discarded car seat with a black infant tenderly held on her lap. Figures from various African locations such as the Hyena Men of Nigeria – a set of travelling performers who also sell traditional medicines – or the Honey Collectors, all pose self consciously for the camera, their lives laid bare for perusal.
Terry Kurgan
Kurgan is interested in the nature of photographic transactions and she often establishes relationships with the people and community she works with. For ‘Joubert Park project’, she engaged with the culture and economy of a number of street photographers who take portraits in the park, one of few green spaces in inner city Johannesburg. In addition to buying the unclaimed photographs produced by these commercial practitioners, she also made a series of formal portraits of them. The accompanying captions list the personal details of each photographer including their name, place of birth, date of relocation to Johannesburg and how long they have worked in the park.
Zwelethu Mthethwa
Mthethwa’s large, sumptuous colour compositions address the economic and political realities of present day South Africa. For the series ‘The Brave Ones’, ceremonially dressed Zulu boys and men from the Shembe religious community wear pink or tartan skirts, white shirts and bow ties, rugby socks and tribal hats. This spectacle is usually reserved for an annual religious festival and Mthethwa has set them against an Arcadian landscape of bright green. The mixed visual code of dress, references Scottish Highlanders who were based in Natal in the late 19th century as well as masculine and feminine fashion.
Sabelo Mlangeni
Mlangeni’s black and white images include ‘Country Girls’, an intimate portrait of gay life in rural areas. The series provides an insight into scenes of aspiration, drag queens and glimpses of the everyday. In ‘Men Only’, Mlangeni documents the routines of tenants in a hostel on the fringes of Johannesburg, which is reserved for the use of men. The pictures hint at the violence, sexual abuse and illegal trafficking activities taking place within the walls of the hostel.
Santu Mofokeng
Mofokeng addresses difficult issues in a subtle way. His works register the blight of AIDS without depicting it directly. In the series ‘Child-headed Households’, he pictures the new reality of families formed of sibling communities who fare for themselves. ‘Black Photo Album’ is a slideshow installation reworking 19th-century, colonial portraits of Black South African families. His series ‘Chasing Shadows’ represents a set of caves used both as a Christian prayer site and a place of traditional healing.
Zanele Muholi
Muholi’s work addresses the sexual and gender identity of being LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) in South Africa by challenging the traditional modes of picturing black women’s bodies in photography. In the series ‘Faces and Phases’, she refuses gay and lesbian stereotypes by photographing individuals across the social spectrum from a soccer player to a dancer, a scholar to a human rights activist. While gay rights have been enshrined in the new South African constitution, Muholi, an activist, attempts to address the issues of violation and prejudice this group still faces. In the series ‘Beulahs’, she uses costume, both traditional and contemporary to depict gay men who subvert common preconceptions of sexuality and beauty.
Jo Ractliffe
Ractliffe draws on a range of photographic practices and her work captures the ephemeral elements of desire, loss and longing. For her series ‘Terreno Ocupado’ she traces the routes of the Border War fought by South Africa in Angola in the 1970s and 1980s. Her powerful photographs document the casual traders and vagrants that live out their lives against the backdrop of colonial murals and dilapidated building remains. In the vibrant Roque Santeiro market, business is conducted and human beings demonstrate their resourcefulness against a backdrop of poverty and ruin.
Berni Searle
Searle’s large scale works often feature her own body. Her series ‘Once Removed’ pairs three photographs of her upper body, wrapped in white fabric and decorated with black flowers which disintegrate as the series progresses, with three photographs of her lower body, also swathed in white, where a symbolic lapful of black flowers similarly appears to melt, resulting in fluid dripping to the floor. Referring to ritual practices, bodily excretions, staining and marking, veiling and revealing, the works reference ethnographic ‘documentation’ while
refusing to yield any clear ‘insight’ into a culture or a people.
Mikhael Subotzky
Subotzy is influenced by the history of documentary photography and this series of works draws attention to the fear of crime and violence which permeates South Africa. The large-scale series focuses on the guards employed for protection by the middle and upper classes. It includes an outdoor dining party scene of well dressed suburban types sitting in their street under the safeguard of the watchman who looks over them. Other photographs in the series show the wendy houses that guards sit in to defend the house and property of their employers.
Guy Tillim
Tillim’s series ‘Petros Village’, arose from a commission to document a famine struck village in central Malawi. Choosing not to offer a spectacle of starving and helpless villagers, Tillim instead explores the subtle relationships between people, spaces and things in prosaic and everyday scenes. His portraits of the villagers are not focused on exposing their poverty, but rather conveying their sense of dignity. Lingering on threads and fragments across expanses of spaces from the foot of a child running to a chicken on a leash, reaching away from a saucepan it may be cooked in, these powerful images present a highly personal view of village life in Africa.
Nonsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko
Playing with the vibrant language of fashion and street culture, Veleko’s photographic projects question how individuality is perceived and assumed in an urban post-modern city. The series spotlights young people who creatively construct their identities with colourful and flamboyant clothes, positioned against different urban backgrounds. In the extended study of one figure ‘Sibu’, Veleko scrambles modern and traditional signifiers in hybrid and inventive combinations. Tribal, modern, urban and rural accessories and costumes are creatively
combined against modern, urban backdrops.
Roelof Petrus Van Wyk
Van Wyk’s series ‘Young Afrikaners – A Self Portrait’ is a commentary on the Afrikaners, descendents of the original Dutch settlers. Renegotiating their relationship with South Africa after the end of Apartheid, he draws on ethnographic traditions, historically reserved for blacks, as a way of both redressing the past and documenting the diversity of this group. Collectively, the series reveals Van Wyk’s own self portrait. The series also subverts the conventions of the golden age of Dutch portraiture, which coincided with the first Dutch settlers in South Africa, by positioning the subjects in a formal head and shoulders pose but facing in unconventional directions.
Graeme Williams
For ‘The Edge of Town’ series, Williams developed the language of street photography in order to move beyond the conventional documentary approach used so systematically in the Apartheid era. He travelled to over 100 towns around the country to capture the spaces occupied by South Africa’s marginalised communities. Working only using the early morning and evening light to create the long shadows and vibrant colours of his multi layered images, each are skilfully framed to create unexpected juxtapositions between the subjects. The close up nature of the scenes shows Williams’s transition from observer to active participant in the photographs.
Victoria and Albert Museum
South Kensington
London SW7 2RL
www.vam.ac.uk
- Average Article Rating 0 Stars
-
Your Rating
Login Required!
Sorry - You must be a registered user & logged in to rate this.
Login | Register
Back to Categories