Archive: Issue No. 80, April 2004

The term globalisation is bandied about much these days with its concomitant implications of a borderless world. Two exhibitions currently showing in Cape Town, however, underscore the irony of the global village's promise of seamless integration. Borders of various kinds, it is revealed, take a heavy toll on humanity in today's world.

On the news front, geographical borders continue to form the backdrop to political strife. Ranging from Israel to Kosovo to South Africa's own immigrant influx of immigrants, the exhibition 'Borders and Beyond' offers a photographic insight into how the world is coping or failing to cope with border-related situations. The Photographers' Gallery offers viewers six visual narratives from Cyprus, Palestine, San Francisco, Switzerland, South Africa and Kosovo.

The unrelenting procession of oppressed humanity in various guises is saved from blurring into one grey mass of misery by a striking attention to detail and a talent for capturing the perfect moment in time in many cases. An image by Randa Shaath, for instance, distils the exact moment one man in a walking crowd of people turns around to look the viewer in the eye - drawing us in and implicating us in the situation.

Another striking image, by Joachim Ladefoged in his 'At Home in Kosovo' series, shows a man being searched by military personnel, holding a loaf of bread in one hand and some milk in the other. In this way, many images on exhibition come from a particular human angle and reinvigorate a public fatigued with negative images to view such situations anew.

In particular, Jodi Bieber's series of the repatriation of illegal immigrant Mozambicans caught in South Africa is very moving. The images, so reminiscent of apartheid-era oppression, seem to call for an empathy a short decade has arguably eroded.

Jean Brundrit's exhibition, 'Spaces In-between' at Bell-Roberts concerns boundaries of another sort. Her series 'A walk around the block with Goliath', which tracks the suburban chore of walking the dog, does patrol the physical boundaries of the circuitous route. But rather than a study in physical boundaries, Brundrit's photographs explore transgressions of other kinds.

In this exhibition, which forms a departure from works about sexuality, she interrogates aspects of violence and the violations of physical and psychological boundaries in South Africa today. As theorist Andrew Lamprecht writes in the exhibition catalogue, Brundrit sets up structures to examine lines of demarcation and interrogates lines of control.

There is nothing subtle about her methods. In 'Remember me, private lives/ public record', a series of pinhole photographs commemorate the murdered victims of the Sea Point Sizzlers massacre last year. Bold, sharp silhouettes of faces and hearts form a haunting obituary, carved directly into the actual negative. In this way, Brundrit pays homage to the victims through their erasure in an echo of their violent deaths. The brutal cut-outs stand in effective stark contrast to the gentle, slow art of pinhole photography.

This preoccupation with death is continued in another pinhole series called 'Roadside Attraction'. It captures the familiar sight of memorials in the shape of crosses erected to road accident victims, decorated symbolically with ephemeral flowers. And Shots from South Africa further explores the theme with two hard-hitting images of a bullet-ridden signboard and a bullet-pierced animal skin.

There is also a magnificent pinhole shot of Cape Town taken from a huge container set up at the Waterfront. The familiar skyline is superimposed with the outline of two figures in an intimate embrace.

At first, Brundrit's various series seem disconnected. But on reflection, each is in its own bizarre way an image of a very South African kind. Each series explores a casual disregard for life with the tragic consequences for all involved - either in death or wrapped in fear. The viewer is left wondering what it is about our society that makes the situations represented at once so commonplace and also unacceptable. There is some light, however, cast through memory of loss and longing for loved ones.

'Borders and Beyond' closes: April 10

'Spaces In-Between' closes: April 3