iJusi portfolio no.3 T +27 (0)72 6580 762 C +27 (0)83 6894 461 us@rookeandvanwyk.com www.rookeandvanwyk.com
iJusi portfolio no.3
Expanding the local vernacular.
IJusi is an experimental magazine established during the early years following South Africa’s first democratic elections. From the onset iJusi posed an important question: “What makes me South African, and what does that ‘look’ like?” As was the case with the Soviet Union in 1917, the new social order begets a new visual order. With the demise of Apartheid iJusi set out to gradually piece together the various cultural polemics, political dichotomies, and social potentialities that have evolved following South Africa’s transit post1994, with the subtext: ‘If we live in Africa, we should look like Africa.’ Garth Walker released the first issue of iJusi in early 1995 from his small studio in Durban; then called Orange Juice Design. From its inception iJusi effectively showcased the burgeoning visual culture of a newborn South Africa. Resultantly, iJusi has come to be recognized for its depiction of the quality in diversity of South African culture, disseminating this message across the globe. So too, iJusi’s influence on South Africa’s
creative community is unparalleled. Subsequent issues of iJusi have made invaluable contributions to ongoing discourses surrounding representation and identity in South Africa, specifically within the context of Graphic Design, Illustration, Typography, Writing, Photography and Publication. IJusi is independently published by Walker in a small print run, roughly twice yearly from his Durban based graphic design studio, now called Mister Walker. The magazine is theme-based, with previous issues focusing on anything from death, pornography, religion, and race, to typography, photography and storytelling. Collected and viewed together, all thirty-odd issues of iJusi are a concise visual record of South African society since independence, incorporating all the subtleties of transformation, negotiation, and transition. IJusi is a reminder that design can have a conscience, and that creativity is the bonding agent for any society.Nearly two decades after the first issue was published, and nearing thirty published issues,
Ijusi has become an historic visual record of South African creative output, as well as an insurgent of afro-centric design. IJusi is often satirical, readily utilizing parody, but the publication has never been a negative or even critical commentary on South Africa. Rather, iJusi is a path of discovery, helping to establish the wealth of talent, rich traditions, hope and strong sense of heritage within South Africa, with its diverse cultural backgrounds, each with their own contribution to make, exposing a creative poignancy and visual vocabulary that is unrivaled anywhere else. Collaboration is a key term, and iJusi has often cross-pollinated with other influential, like-minded outfits, such as BitterKomix, Disturbance, Rooke Gallery and Dutchmann. Despite having a print-run in the low hundreds, iJusi has developed towards near-cult status, largely due to its rarity and the fact that it has never been commercially for sale. IJusi has always been free, handedout to anybody who sees virtue in its perspective. The fact that
iJusi is Africa’s only experimental design magazine is also a factor in its popularity amongst collectors. Recent additions to the iJusi brand are the portfolios, which were implemented in order to keep the magazine published. In collaboration with the Rooke & van Wyk gallery these portfolios are curated spaces, usually sourcing work from artists who have submitted to iJusi magazine. Such is the reach of iJusi that the portfolios feature in prominent collections, including of the world’s foremost art museums. Despite having existed on a wing and a prayer for so many years, iJusi is still in print, thanks to the generosity of various participants and collaborators, from printers and suppliers who have offered their talents and services gratis over the years to artists and designers showcasing their work. Reaching the end of its second decade, iJusi magazine, funded by sales of the iJusi portfolios, has turned into a canonical body of work, testaments to a developing
country effectively dealing with various socio-economic stratifications and cultural dichotomies. More so, iJusi is a cultural institution, thanks to the combined efforts of South African artists and designers that are actively taking part in this ongoing Cultural Revolution. IJusi portfolio #3 is the culmination of the iJusi canon thus far. Curated by world reknowned photographer Pieter Hugo, this third portfolio contains ten of South Africa’s most prolific photographers, including: Roger Ballen, Jabulani Patrick Dhlamini, David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, Dean Hutton, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zanele Muholi, Daniel Naudé, Jo Ractlffe, and Mikael Subotsky. The portfolio deconstructs notions of cultural otherness, outsider stereotyping, and political entropy. With subtle conceptual undertones Hugo’s curatorial slight-of-hand makes for an invaluable contribution to a twenty-year long tradition. by Shane de Lange. 1
Dean Hutton 2
Dean Hutton (b. 1976, Johannesburg), formerly known as Nadine Hutton, is predominantly known as a photojournalist. Her idiosyncratic manner of telling stories about ‘Otherness’ in South Africa is well established. Hutton’s socio-political stance finds its grounding in her tenure as chief photographer at the Mail & Guardian newspaper from 1997 to 2006. She has also worked as a freelance photojournalist for other major newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Observer, TIME, and The Daily Telegraph. With a Higher Diploma in Journalism from Rhodes University Hutton’s use of documentary photography teeters on the brink of radicalism, often incorporating video, installation, intervention and performance art. Hutton’s breakthrough came in 2011 when she discovered Queer theory during a trip to New York. The notion that one can negate the traditional binary perceptions of gay and lesbian, and nonetheless align oneself with queerness was a selling
point for Hutton. Notwithstanding the fact that she has been openly Lesbian since 2004, queerness seemed to be a more relatable term for Hutton; one with which she could develop her artistic vision. Hutton’s work can thus be described as an investigation into queer visual culture in South Africa. Her pursuit of this contested cultural geography is an attempt to situate South Africa within the global paradigm of Queer theory. Such narratives are in flux, and thus her work is constantly shifting, moving the representation of the ‘Other’ or the ‘Victim’ into a vision of collectivity and evolution. Hutton often utilizes collaboration with other artists, particularly those working in the realm of Gay politics. She mentions Zanele Muholi, AthiPatra Ruga, Nicholas Hlobo, and Tracey Rose as allies in this regard, because they also explore the openness and layered perspectives innate to queer sensibility, rather than reduce issues to petty matters of patriarchy and masculinity. To be
queer is still understood by many South Africans in a derogatory manner. Hutton attempts to reframe the word, rerouting perceptions towards awareness of the ‘Outsider’ existing very much ‘inside’ the sphere of the ‘norm’. Hutton’s personal stance embraces the liminal, and her work reflects this in its ability to blur boundaries. Having situated herself as Queer, Hutton also attempts to alter the somewhat narrow visions that define what it means to be African. She rejects the idea that white South African’s are not African. An unorthodox view of the marginalised and disenfranchised forms a large part of Hutton’s approach to the liminal, including abused women and the white underclass. Three exhibitions form the bulk of Hutton’s work, including I, Joburg (2012), I Have Fallen (2006 – 2009), and Written on Her Face, My Mother’s Story (2008). In I, Joburg particularly, Hutton uses the uncompromising city
of Johannesburg as her muse. Hutton dismantles the perception of Johannesburg as a place where people fear to tread, affirming herself as a legitimate and rightful resident. She erases the idea that she must be the fearful white woman not willing to leave the confines of her security fencing and surveilled home in the Southern suburbs. Johannesburg is as much a part of Hutton’s identity as her Queerness. Never willing to succumb to the image of the victim, Hutton tells the story of individuals that form the heart of Johannesburg. Negating any dogmatic emphasis on difference, Hutton highlights the humanity of the diverse people that live in the city, whilst negotiating issues of representation, oppression, marginalization, and classification. Through a kind of visual metonymy, Hutton delivers her subjects to the viewer. She does so boldly in the face of symbolic castration, transforming the term ‘Queer’ into an expression of collective pride and dignity. 3
David Goldblatt 4
David Goldblatt (b. 1930, Randfontein) is arguably an institution in South Africa. He has worked as a professional photographer since the early 1960s, and has developed a seminal oeuvre that can be understood as a critical dissection of South Africa’s society and landscape over five decades. More specifically, Goldblatt has concisely documented the ghostly impact of Apartheid during its peak and in its wake. Known for his lucid brand of humanism, Goldblatt’s images make apparent the unerring vestiges of the South African socio-political landscape. At the heart of Globlatt’s artistic enquiry is an inherent curiosity towards the manner in which values are constructed and marketed, tolerating the interpretation of a dominant moralism that still exists. His dissection of past metanarratives, including the affects and emulation of such power structures today, subtly yet critically unwraps the universal reasonings for Apartheid to have existed.
These values, acting as alibi’s to oppression and degradation, are still etched into the landscapes, personalities, and architectures of the present. Goldblatt captures this oscillation of power and history, tolerating a brief yet poetic insight into the context of people’s lives before and after Apartheid. His images are rooted in conflict and dissent, evoking palimpsest-like portraits of Apartheid, subtly enforcing an engagement with the consequences of our morals, truths, and norms. From this context he communicates how frivolous certain separations in society can be, specifically regarding issues of class, race, and status. Goldblatt’s depictions of a stillfragmented, yet somehow cohering South African landscape have been widely dispersed and exhibited extensively abroad and locally, notably being the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York in 1998. Aside from his prolific career as a photographer,
Golblatt has been actively involved with community developments and cultural establishments. Most notably in 1989, as an attempt to introduce photography to disadvantaged communities and bridge the often-elitist artistic and cultural rift between rich and poor in South Africa, Goldblatt established the Market Photography Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg. Over the years this school has contributed enormously to the development of South African photography, and South Africa’s position as a dominant player in the world. Amongst its alumni are some of South Africa’s greatest talents, including: Jodi Bieber, Zanele Muholi, Sabelo Mlangeni, Musa Nxumalo, and Nontsikelelo Veleko. Goldblatt has exhibited at the acclaimed Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) exhibitions in Kassel, Germany. His Retrospective, David Goldblatt – Fifty-One Years, was exhibited worldwide, including a show at the Johannesburg Art
Gallery (2005). He is represented by the Goodman in Johannesburg and the Stevenson in Cape Town, with multiple solo exhibitions and publications from both galleries, including TJ: Some things old, some things new and some much the same (2010), In Boksburg (2009), and Intersections Intersected (2008). Amongst his numerous accolades, Goldblatt is the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, and the 2010 Lucie Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the University of Cape Town (2001), and an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand (2008). He features in many collections across the globe including The Victoria and Albert Museum (London), The Biblioteque Nationale de France (Paris), The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Modern Art (New York), and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 5
Zanele Muholi 6
Zanele Muholi (b. 1972, Durban) is a Johannesburg based photographer and Gay rights activist. Although Muholi has been known to use colour photography she is known for her ongoing series of black and white portraits, which explores Gay and Lesbian identity in Black African culture. She works predominantly in the genre of portraiture in an attempt to create an archive of sorts, mapping a marginalized community for posterity. Muholi turned to portraiture because of its documentary qualities, allowing her to help women commemorate being openly Lesbian in mainly Black communities that are for the most part indifferent towards Gay issues. Her work is an endeavor to make Gays and Lesbians in Black communities more visible and accepted, where alternative lifestyles are largely ignored, eschewed, dismissed as ‘non-African’, and even the most
basic human rights are not affrded to individuals who live such lives. Culturally constructed indignity and misplaced social engineering surrounding Gays and Lesbians in South Africa is at the heart of Muholi’s work. She challenges the commonly accepted argument that homosexuality is non-African. Provoked by hate crimes against Gays and Lesbians in South Africa, especially regarding acts of ‘corrective rape’, Muholi’s images attempt to unmask the humanity of her subjects. By exposing the presence of corrective rape Muholi openly condemns the dwindling population of South Africa’s queer and transgender community. Ultimately Muholi’s work communicates the message that to be Black, Lesbian and African is by virtue a political statement in a society that remains submerged under Eurocentric, patriarchal, and heterosexual ideologies.
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Sabelo Mlangeni 8
Sabelo Mlangeni (b. 1980, Driefontein, Mpumalanga) is a Johannesburgbased photographer. He moved to Johannesburg in 2001 to study Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop, completing his studies in 2004. His first solo show titled Invisible Women was held at the defunct Warren Siebrits gallery in Johannesburg in 2007. He is currently represented by Stevenson, where he has exhibited his most impactful work to date, notably Country Girls (2003-2009) and Ghost Towns (2009-2011). Mlangeni took-up photography in the small towns and rural areas he encountered growing up, documenting the commonplace, abject desolation, particularly in his home province of Mpumalanga. Mlangeni works exclusively with black-and-white photography, portraying the often ignored and unspoken aspects of life in rural South Africa. His explorations of Outsider politics and cultural idiosyncrasies in towns such as Driefontein, Ermelo, Bethal, Piet Retief, Standerton and Sekunda are a testament to a drastically changing society struggling to hold onto its heritage, whilst straining to maintain its integrity in an increasingly globalized world. Perceptions of Gay culture and
the affects of urbanization on rural cultural conventions and traditional rites of passage are important themes that Mlangeni deconstructs. He challenges traditional African stereotypes about homosexuality and gender, depicting often-unseen yet unadulterated, intimate yet non-voyeuristic visions of the artist’s world as a Gay man. Mlangeni ironically finds virtue in traditional rites of passage because they forge a sense of commonality, which he embraces in the context of the Otherness. The performative qualities of Mlangeni’s images tend to traverse these opposing worldviews, in which urban and rural, homosexual and heterosexual all fall under the auspices of tradition. Reiterating the perennial bond between anthropology and photography, and reflecting upon pertinent issues often seen as taboo in rural communities, where tribalism vies against liberalism, Mlangeni exposes an indifferent world where Gay African men find their sense of belonging and identity. Mlangeni’s subjects are far from affluent; life is not easy for them. This impoverishment is apparent in the rural environments that Mlangeni
portrays alongside the often hidden lives his subjects live. His depictions of small rural towns, all but forgotten, dissect the notion of ‘uSis’bhuti’, bringing African Gay life to the fore. The term ‘uSis’bhuti’ describes the manner in which young boys sometimes act like little girls. Mlangeni questions the narrow view implied by ‘uSis’bhuti’, shunning the fact that Gays are seen as un-African, or a by-product of Anglicisation, globalisation and democracy. Mlangeni’s depictions of small towns, practically abandoned, on the edge of nowhere, communicate an important shift that has taken place within most African communities. The opportunities and freedom afforded to urban dwellers have never reached these towns, emphasizing age-old scars left unattended, and debts left unpaid. Mlangeni’s portrayal of spaces-inwaiting and people-in-transition ultimately tells the story of the migration of traditions and the rootedness of cultural space. The remaining landscape is eerily surreal and isolated, suspended in time, ultimately painting the picture of Gay life in the backwaters of the South African countryside.
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Mikhael Subotzky 10
Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981, Cape Town) is the only alumnus in the history of the prestigious Michaelis School of Fine Art to achieve a mark of one-hundred percent for his final year. He has since become a world-renowned artist, currently represented by the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. He is the youngest photographer to become an associate member at Magnum Photos, and the first South African artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. He openly declares the influence of David Goldblatt, which is likely one of the most important photographic oeuvres to capture South Africa’s colonialist history, evidenced through his characteristic depiction of the landscape and its people. Subotzky utilises the divide between the rural and the urban, emphasising the ambiguity that exists within social perceptions of inside and outside, accepted and rejected, enlightened and alienated, the diffuse and the concentrated. His investigations
are grounded by various culturally assumed socio-political norms and perceived ‘A priori givens’ within South Africa. He does so in the wake of Apartheid, but goes further to uproot the underlying opposition between oppression and emancipation, examining the somewhat bi-polar grasp that most South Africans have in their attempt to build a new identity in an often apathetic and infantile democracy; jaundiced and anchored by its unjust past marred by racial segregation and quasi-totalitarianism. In this way Subotzky reveals the historicoeconomic hierarchies and constructs of class, ethnicity and status that exist in PostColonial South Africa. More specifically, he finds his niche and artistic voice in the context of localised power structures, such as notorious prisons, famous gangs, iconic architecture – all signifiers of authority and control, products of containment and repudiation. His images document the broadly accepted politics of inhumanity,
degradation, prejudice, victimization and desperation to be found in many sectors of South African society, tracing the remnants of a recycled Apartheid infrastructure. The prison is an overarching archetype in relation to the city and its structures, be it in the form of power, architecture, institutions, or narratives placed in contrast to the land and its supposed catharsis. The prison is an analogy leading to the central point: the vast integration of typecast individuals - citizens, denizens, criminals into a dominant political system, segregated into castes, creeds and classes, adhering to a constructed system of discipline and punishment, which succeeds at the exploitation of human beings as opposed to liberating them: prison society. To compliment his anthropological inquiry, Subotzky introduced dystopian elements of Orwellian fiction, coupled with the poststructuralist discourse of Foucault – all elements that inform the core of his work to this day.
Informed by the tradition of documentary photography, Subotsky’s work stresses mechanisms of control, power games, and territory wars governed by augmented structures and prosthetic institutions that stunt growth more than they develop and sustain; where the overall maturation of South Africa is quelled in favor of a select, elite few and their material interests, whilst the proletariat increasingly becomes indifferent; passive-aggressive. His work displays South Africa’s tumult and disorder in developing an infrastructure that is able to consolidate the effects of Apartheid, failing to contain social degeneration, particularly regarding issues of class and status in a country plagued by endemic poverty, crime, and violence. An ode to Plato’s Cave, after the dust has settled, the cultural revolution is imprisoned in an ivory tower; this is absolutute freedom, total establishment, all in preparation for more dust to settle. 11
Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen (b. 1950, New York) is an internationally renowned photographer living and working in Johannesburg. He started his career in the 1970s after moving to South Africa from the United States. Before his arrival to South Africa, and parallel to obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Ph.D in Mineral Economics from the University of California, Ballen spent five years globetrotting. He met his wife on his first visit to South Africa, returning to Chicago where he used the photographic material from his journey as the subject matter for his first series of photographs titled Boyhood, also published as the artists first book in 1979.
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After completing his studies he returned to South Africa to work as a geologist. His work allowed him to travel South Africa extensively, learning about its socio-political eccentricities under Apartheid, and the curious existence of certain marginalized communities in rural areas. Arguably, Ballen’s early documentations of South Africa gave rise to his most prominent series of photographs, comprised of images that he took of backwater hamlets, ‘dorps’ as they are called in Afrikaans. This series culminated in
a publication called Dorps in 1986; now highly collectable and recently re-printed in its second edition. Dorps displays Ballen’s fascination with architecture and interior spaces, communicating the ideological hold that was ingrained in every facet of South African society during Apartheid.
works, by the mid 90s Balllen’s attention moved towards a merger of architectonic narratives and physiognomic social studies, with often disturbing characters and piercingly discursive props. The most significant example of Ballen’s hybrid-brand of documentary and posed photography can be seen in his publication titled Outland (2001), followed by the aptly titled Circa 1980, Ballen’s documentation Fact or Fiction (2003), culminating of the local archi-political vernacular in his famous Shadow Chamber connected to the Apartheid series (2005). Outland and Shadow regime began to evolve, finding a Chamber went on to worldwide natural progression towards the commercial success, both published documentation of local individuals by Phaidon publishing. A key and inhabitants native to the rural stylistic trait in all Ballen’s work villages that he had visited on from this period is that his images his travels. Ballen revisited the are simultaneously painterly perspectives that he used in Dorps, (expressive) and sculptural focusing primarilly on the people (gestural) in a manner that has not in these rural towns, which he been associated with photography later published and titled Platteland: in the past. Images from Rural South Africa (1994). This evolution towards the Ballen’s most recent series, titled precarious subtleties, mannerisms, Boarding House (2009), revisits gestures, and behaviors of many elements of both previous individuals would prove to be a Phaidon publications, interrogating precursor to his more recent, the formal relations of power popular work. between people, environments, and objects. Also published by Although there are hints of staged Phaidon, Boarding House evolves subject matter and more cerebral upon Ballen’s rich textural, theatrical elements in his earlier textual, and pictorial oeuvre. A
dominant theme in Ballen’s latest work is the manner in which ideological epidemiology filters down to the masses , theatrically directed through the reflection of his own psyche, stemming from his older work. Balllen’s work is illustrated in numerous supporting publications including: Boarding House (2009), Shadow Chamber (2005), Fact or Fiction (2003), Outland (2001), Cette Afrique’ (1997), Platteland (1996), Dorps (1st ed. 1986, 2nd ed. 2011), Boyhood (1979). Unseen works, is the only body of work not included in these publications, which was exhibited at the Rooke Gallery in 2009. His work features in many key collections including: Brooklyn Museum (USA), Johannesburg Art Museum (RSA), National Gallery, Cape Town (RSA), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL), and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (UK). Awards include: the Art Directors Club Award for Photography (2006), Photographer of the Year by the Rencontres d’ Arles (France, 2002), Best Photographic Book of the Year by PhotoEspana (Spain, 2001), and the Sani Festival for Best Solo Exhibition (Greece, 2000). 13
Jabulani Patrick Dhlamini
Jabulani Dhlamini (b. 1983, Warden, Free State) grew up in Soweto, and his photographic work to date reflects this fact. His career in photography began in the streets of the township taking snapshots of the everyday and commonplace.
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From his humble beginnings Dhlamini went on to study at the Vaal University of Technology where he attained a National Diploma in photography in 2009. Dhlamini’s brand of documentary photography focuses on the township lifestyle reflecting his experience growing up in Soweto. His portrayals of Black African identity in the townships communicate a sophisticated message of a common heritage and often-turbulent surroundings. Dhlamini’s awareness of what it means to be African is explored through his depiction of ordinary people within their individual environments, in their personal living spaces, set within the place that occupied his childhood. The faithfulness implied in Dhlamini’s images suggest a level of honesty and authenticity that lovingly displays the identities of his subjects. He makes
sure to establish that these identities are founded upon the conditions of their surroundings and the circumstances of their lives. Dhlamini’s first major body of work came with his first solo exhibition titled uMama, held at the Market Photo Workshop Gallery in 2012. uMama was produced under the mentorship of world-renowned World Press Photo alumni Jodi Bieber. As the title uMama implies, the exhibition honors African mothers, documenting the day-today trials that women must face whilst trying to raise their children in the townships. His intimate and pressing portraits dissect the role of women in the context of township life, effectively framing the notion of motherhood in contemporary South African society. Dhlamini extends his inquiry into images of young men, the sons of the single mothers that populate his work. His depiction of these young men is a commentary on his own experience becoming a man without a father figure in his life. In this way, through an immixture of rawness and the urbane, Dhlamini captures the heart of African people living in the township of Soweto.
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Daniel Naude 16
Daniel Naudé (b. 1984, Cape Town) is a Cape Town based photographer. Since 2007 Naudé has focused his attention on two prolific bodies of work: Africanis and Animal Farm. Following the philosophical undertones of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, both bodies are a concise photographic record made in the pursuit of the Africanis (a feral, naturally inbred breed of dog that populates the semi-desert landscape of the Karoo). The spirit of discovery set by historic artist-explorers such as Samuel Daniell inspired Naudé to live a nomadic and expeditionary life in search of the Africanis. Naudé tells an intimate, deeply engrained socio-political story of the people and the animals that live, or once lived, alongside them within the unforgiving yet aweinspiring geography of the Karoo. The Africanis is meant to imbue a sense of irony in relation to mans dominance over the land, turning
these dogs into analogies that poeticise South Africa itself. In this Orwellian world the dialectic that connects bondage and deliverance becomes apparent, where humans exist alongside domesticated animals in opposition to the feral, migrant dogs. This milieu of the domestic, wild and civilised questions mankind’s trivial grasp over nature and the land, and the manner in which history has been constructed accordingly. In a country still dealing with the memory of Apartheid, Naudé’s photographs call for reconciliation. At this juncture the Africanis, with its disparate and composite heritage, serves as a token of dissent and descent. Naudé surveys the South African landscape, cataloguing its now untamable canine inhabitants, comparing them to their once domesticated past – a backdrop that plagued them and still haunts
them. Naudé’s compositions are concise and considered, placing the viewer in a position of reverence towards the renegade dogs. Naudé uses the camera angle as a mechanism to portray the virtue, dignity and character of the Africanis. People are treated differently; placing the viewer in a position that looks down upon them, or at best situates them on level terms. The desolation of the people in Naudé’s landscapes communicates the affect of control and the fear of the outsider or untamed. Relaying this against the contest between ‘fallen-man’ and ‘escaped-beast’, Naudé takes the viewer on a journey where it becomes impossible to define the contrast between civilized man and wild animal. In this way Naudé negates any assertion of superiority, insinuating that humans and animals find level ground in their shared corruption: none come from pure origins, none are free from sin. 17
Jo Ractliffe 18
Jo Ractliffe (b. 1961, Cape Town) is a Johannesburg-based photographer and lecturer. Ractliffe completed her M.F.A. degree with highest honors from University of Cape Town, and during the 1980s she lectured in the Fine Arts departments of both Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town, before moving to Johannesburg in the early 1990s to take a full-time lecturing position at the University of the Witwatersrand. Ractliffe is internationally renowned for her photographic canon, which often utilises the disciplines of installation art and video. Her combination of documentary-fiction and sublime-truthfulness creates a critical engagement with the medium of photography, emphasizing its varying practices and disciplines within the context of Africa. Her conceptual approach exposes the often distorted interests and differing ‘truths’ created by the socio-political landscape of Southern Africa. Traditional
universals such as time, place, history and memory are not A priori givens in Ractliffe’s world; they are merely viewed as transient and constructed. This is especially so given South Africa’s turbulent past, where the ideas of the privileged minority took the place of objectivity and truth. The vanguard of Ractliffe’s oeuvre consists of three series: Terreno Ocupado (2008), As Terras do Fim do Mundo (2010), and The Borderlands (2013). Together, these three bodies of work gradually explore the spatial and temporal traces of strife and dissention. Of particular interest are the shifting topologies and fragmented demographics that Ractliffe exposes, resulting from South Africa’s ‘Border War’ during the 1970s and 80s, which involved Angola and Namibia (then known as South West Africa). The image of the ‘militarised landscape’ is key to understanding Ractliffe’s current work, making the territory itself physiognomic: a character in its own right. Her images capture ignored and forgotten
places significant to war, negating the commonplace depictions of the subject, which are normally connected to the South African Defense Force (SADF) and its movements during the border war. Absence takes on the appearance of presence in Ractliffe’s images, particularly regarding the remnants of withdrawal out of conflict territories and the resultant entropic decay that follows. Radcliffe’s earlier work echoes this ambiguity between absence and presence, past and present. At the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale she exhibited a film titled Balaam, which would later form part of a broader investigation called End of Time (1996-1999). This work studied the movements of the Karretjie Mense, a semi-nomadic community in the Karoo region of South Africa, and their efforts to find work at the various farms in the region. It was the result of a road trip through the Karoo on the N1 highway, where Ractliffe stumbled upon three dead donkeys on the side of the road
presumed to be the property of the Karretjie Mense. Ractliffe’s desire to know why the donkeys where killed, the lifeblood of these travelling people, inspired her interest in the forensic qualities of photography, recording the ebb and flow of absence and presence, attempting to solve the mystery of that moment. The archaeology of the moment is especially relevant at sites where conflict once existed, making End of Time a clear precursor to her current work on war. Meditations on the spatial and temporal qualities of the landscape and its history form the core of Radcliff’s inquiry. Following from this, Radcliffe’s black and white photographs amplify the silence that follows trauma, communicating the manner in which past dissent manifests itself in the present. Through erasure absence becomes apparent in the present, exposing the ephemeral as timeless. The landscape is a palimpsest in this regard, a territory that we occupy, and an occupied place that preoccupies us throughout our lives. 19
Pieter Hugo 20
Pieter Hugo (b.1976, Johannesburg, Gauteng) is a Cape Town based photographer documenting the innate eccentricities of various rituals, backgrounds, customs and conventions in contemporary Africa. From bourgeois lifestyles in Ghana and Liberia, to extreme pop-culture versus underground sub-culture in Nigeria, to the tragic tedium of suburban South Africa, Hugo portrays the affect of Western culture, specifically regarding constructs of ‘otherness’ and ‘outsider’ politics. His images portray inherited obsolesces, polemic handme-downs, and ad-hoc influences from the West, and the residuum of corporate interests, exposing Africa as a complex yet abused and corrupted resource. Following the tradition of documentary photography, Hugo hinges his approach upon the periphery, the fringe, and the marginalized. Even with the richness and vastness of Africa and its many cultures, built upon fractured negotiations, nuances of difference, and contested geographies, the continent still sits with the pit of colonialism sinking deep into its socio-economic core. Within this murky, often corrupt
space there is a high probability of finding strange hybrids and cultural chimera’s. South Africa is at the forefront of this schizophrenic cultural paradigm, where heritage, tradition, and fraternity all permeate to reinforce mutations of age-old colonial issues. In this vein, the first series that established Hugo as an internationally recognized artist is Look Aside. Created between 2003-2006, this series focuses on superficial prejudices that play a pivotal role in the fabrication of the status quo; documenting people who have appearances that make other people ‘look aside’. He brings to the fore our preconceptions, making us question our own unfounded perceptions about otherness and difference. These portraits include people with disfigurement, blindness, and albinos, meant to be unsettling, uncompromisingly extracting an awareness of apathy and pathos. These images imbue a sense of disbelief and repulsion, urging one to encounter difference upfront using dramatic frontal portraits, exposing the artifice of the status quo. Hugo decinstructs what constitutes the norm, specifically
reflecting upon the invented realities of race, class, and the like. Other important series’ include The Hyena & Other Men (2005), Nollywood (2008), Permanent Error (2010), where Hugo dissects the imitation of the West and infestation by the West in some form or other. He pairs strife with its counterpoint in opulence, power with its antithesis in fragility, forged in the remains of multiple, distinct cultural identities, all struggling to match the pace of a ubiquitous, hegemonic drive for progress and profit, largely to the detriment of the proletariat and the environment. Kin (2013) is perhaps the subtlest series that Hugo has produced in this regard, with every image becoming a meditation in juxtaposition to the next image. Each image entices one to truly observe, curated in narrative clusters, not seeming to have any clear coherency, but somehow crafting a uniform story about the notion of ‘home’. Kin is about the slightof-hand situations in life, piecing together moments that sometimes bind us and other times divide us. Consisting of varying, contrasting
scenes taken from different locations across South Africa, Kin oscillates from private to public with ease and sensitivity, revealing the gulf between the affluent and the impoverished in the aftermath of South Africa’s colonial past, with all the troubling socio-economic factors that have fallen into place as a result. As the name suggests, Kin is about family and how in a country fraught with violence and desolation, with an unhappy past and an uncertain future, can one maintain the sanctity of roots and bloodlines. Hugo finds distinctiveness in the many altered and contested geographies that he has photographed across the continent. His images create a relationship between portraiture and landscape, inseparable yet worlds apart, depicting a continent where the people and the land have an intrinsic bond, where the familiar and the unfamiliar cross-pollinate and the uncommon finds level ground with the commonplace. He shows us the innate materialism of the occident in contrast to the resultant mutations that presently characterise Africa, making possible the impossible fusion of the civilized and the anarchic. 21
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Copy, layout and design by Shane de Lange. shane@gilgamesh.co.za | +27 (0)72 383 5091
What makes me african? T +27 (0)72 6580 762 C +27 (0)83 6894 461 us@rookeandvanwyk.com www.rookeandvanwyk.com