INTERNATIONAL REVIEW:
VIENNA
Black, Brown, White: Photography from South Africa at Kunsthalle Vienna
by Lisa Schmidt
Feed your eyes (not your pockets)... is written with black pen on a white piece of paper stuck to the cardboard wall of a room. A young woman poses firmly in front of the camera, in her finest church clothes, her hands folded together. She looks at the camera seriously. She knows the photographer will give her a print of the image later, and she wants to look 'presentable'. The cooking pots next to her are shining, all glasses are washed.
This colourful interior-portrait by Zwelethu Mthethwa, is one of the photographic images shown on 'Black, Brown, White: Photography from South Africa', an exhibition that runs at Kunsthalle Vienna until June 18, 2006.
The exhibition includes around 160 prints by six photographers and a video work each by artists Berni Searle and Thando Mama. As you walk by Omar Badsha's black and white prints framelessly clipped to the wall, and pass the entrance to the video installation We are afraid by Thando Mama, you enter a large room which contains around 60 photographs, both black and white and colour prints from the grandseigneur of South African photography, David Goldblatt.
Goldblatt is the centre of the exhibition. The quality and quantity of his works shown here, spanning the period from the National Party 50th anniversary celebrations in 1964 to examples of his most recent series, Intersections: Monuments, some made only last year, affirm his status.
Next to Goldblatt there are many younger artists to discover. The curating team - Gerald Matt, Thomas Miesgang and Jyoti Mistry - included different generations of South African artists, providing links between the generations, and reflections on the historical changes in the country. The grainy prints of the KwaNdebele (Commuters) by Goldblatt from the 1980s are interesting when compared with Andrew Tshabangu's Taxi Commuter series from Johannesburg, made around 24 years later.
Colour photography seems to have appeared only after apartheid ended. As such, the exhibition stresses the notion that the style of photography is directly linked to the political background of the nation. Omar Badsha's black and white prints of the Indian community in Durban, with their strong social documentary style, support this idea. As part of the legendary independent photographic agency Afrapix, he used the camera as a cultural weapon in the struggle for liberation.
In opposition to these prints, the 'funky' room, as curator Miesgang called it, includes large colourful interior-portraits by Zwelethu Mthethwa, with their 'commercially-styled hyperreality' (Michael Godby) and the oversized memento mori portraits by Pieter Hugo. Both series were made after 1994. Hugo's pictures from the Bereaved series are the most disturbing images on 'Black, Brown, White'. Clean magazine aesthetics and chic presentation are combined in these fine lambda prints, laminated onto thin aluminium plates, the images shot in extreme close up, larger than life size (152 X 125,5 cm).
The three head shots are of men who died of AIDS-related illnesses, photographed at a morgue in Khayelitsha. An apparent closeness to death is always disturbing for the viewer, but compared with the 19th century photographs of dead people, which were a quite common subject, the size and skilled use of colour, the beautiful orange and reds on the skins of the men, make these more brutal. While one instantly wants to turn away from them, they also hold the eye.
The exhibition does not include photodocumentary icons of South African photography such as pictures from the riots in Soweto or Nelson Mandela leaving Robben Island. The show instead focuses on the appeal of the unspectacular - pictures which tell 'little' stories.
Unfortunately, and maybe still for many years to come, the European view on South African photography has to be linked documentarily and politically to the past and present problems of the country. The camera holds in this sense its naïve appeal as a tool for objectivity.
The English/German catalogue comes in a nice, handy format. The lines of images are separated by short stories or poems by South African writers, including Mafika Pascal Gwala and Lebogang Mashile, most of them here in their first German translation. There is also an extended parallel programme to 'Black, Brown, White' which includes a South African film programme in the Viennese Filmmuseum, a literature programme and a collaborative production by the Schauspiel (Public Theatre) and Johannesburg's Market Theatre.
Berni Searle's video About to forget (2005) is well placed at the end of the exhibition. This visually beautiful work is shown on three large screens. Using as a source family photographs, the artist cut out silhouettes of groups of figures in red crêpe paper, laying these in water. In opposition to the photographic process where the image is fixed on the paper by immersion in liquid, here it washes the colour out. In the end only a faded and scarcely visible shape remains.
Lisa Schmidt is a young art historian based in Germany who served an internship with ArtThrob in Cape Town some years ago.
Opened: February 24
Closes: June 18, 2006
Kunsthalle, Vienna
