'Reality Check � Contemporary Photography from South Africa' � Berlin
Lisa Schmidt
February in Berlin. The city is cold and grey. Walking along the Chausseestrasse in Mitte, one can view a quite different scenery looking through the big windows of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (NBK).
Photography from South Africa is the focus of the art display inside. The Kunstverein has a history of exhibiting contemporary photography from different countries. Starting in 1994 other spotlights were on Australia, Canada, Brasil, Japan and European countries, such as Finland, France, Greece and Hungary. South Africa is the first African country shown.
This geographical presentation form seems to be en vogue in Europe. But for me personally it always feels inadequate to present art country- or continent wise, as it concentrates the view on a single, local aspect and advertises the background and regional provenance of the artists. But there is of course a chance in this presentation, which often functions as a first recognitition step for younger artists.
In recent years, many exhibitions headlined South African art. Only last year the Kunsthalle Vienna showed 'Black, Brown, White' on South African photography. In comparison the Berliner exhibition is smaller and more focused. Some photographers such as David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, Jo Ractliffe and Andrew Tshabangu are presented again, but fortunately only Tshabangu�s work doubles. Whereas 'Black, Brown, White' included vintage prints of the 1980s by Omar Badsha and David Goldblatt, the main focus in Berlin is the post-apartheid photography.
Here two tendencies are demonstrated. They can be explained as a documentary and not-documentary approach to the medium. The strong South African tradition of documentary photography is reflected in works by David Goldblatt, above all, but also in Guy Tillim�s series about the urban architectural restructuring of Johannesburg and the prison portraits by younger Mikhael Subotzky.
The 'not-documentary' photography is marked by Jean Brundrit�s sly political but also beautiful conceptual photograms If my house went through airport security (2005/6) and the elaborate tryptichs The Blue Collar Girl (2004 onwards) by Bridget Baker. Baker is the only one in the show, who can�t be well-defined as a photographer, as she stages the setting, but doesn�t take the photographs herself, instead she is working with a team comparable to a movie shooting.
Curator Pam Warne did a good job in presenting the twelve photographers, dedicating each photographer a separate wall. She roughly divided their work in two big rooms showing the tendencies already mentioned. The works in the entrance room call out 'South Africa' to a European visitor. AIDS, poverty and colonialism are some of the topics displayed. Interestingly all women artists are included in the second room, which shows mostly works which cannot be labeled country wise.
Jo Ractliffe�s enigmatic series Real Life (2002-2005) is one example of this. She photographed the ground of and sky above her garden at nighttime or at twilight. The dream- like quality of the series is created by the day time, the weird angle and the colourful illumination of the stone animals (and one real dog) by the camera flash. The 24 pictures are hanging in a cluster in one corner surrounding the viewer with this garden and its strange inhabitants.
There is a tendency for the artists on the exhibition to use very large format prints for their work. This corresponds to a development that started at the class of Bernd (and Hilla) Becher at the Düsseldorfer Art Academy. A new aesthetic, and immense sizes (2 x 3 m) took photography in the 1990s into a different contemporary art (and prize!) sphere, next to paintings and installations. In the last fifteen years more photographs have been created for gallery walls than in any other period in the medium�s history.
This story of success gets more and more twisted in today�s exhibited photographs because it seems to equal 'larger is better'. In the exhibition of the NBK one can observe that this increase of size doesn�t necessarily help improve the image. As David Goldblatt does in his series In the Time of Aids (2003-2004), Santu Mofokeng also bllows up his prints to 100 x 150 cm. His billboard images are engrossing, but it might add to their documentary appeal if one could see more of them, in a larger series, even if the size of each print would have to shrink.
The catalogue is very helpful for the interested visitor, as there are no wall texts to detect in the exhibition rooms. Especially the introduction to the history of South African photography by Patricia Hayes helps to create a better understanding of the works shown. That the photographique techniques are mentioned accurately is useful, as the aestethic of an ink jet print on cotton paper and a gelatin silver print cannot be differentiated in a book. There is only one thing bewildering about this catalogue and that is the graphic design, which is awfully old fashioned.
The exhibition 'Zeitgen�ssische Fotokunst aus S�dafrika' was shown in the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein until March, 11, 2007 and travels afterwards to Chemnitz, Sindelfingen and Bochum.The accompanying catalogue costs 19 Euro. For more informations see www.nbk.org.
Lisa Schmidt is an art historian based in Germany.
