'Home Lands - Land Marks: Contemporary Art from South Africa' at Haunch of Venison Gallery, London
by Amy Halliday
Thrown into relief by the recent xenophobic violence in South Africa, 'Home Lands - Land Marks', curated by Tamar Garb, maps the historic and geo-political traces of memory, narrative, identity and ownership as they play out across the contested landscape of contemporary South Africa. Acclaimed as the first major show of contemporary South African art in London (and, indeed, in the UK) since the advent of democracy in 1994, it represents a critical attempt to avoid the 'survey' paradigm in favour of a more incisive interrogation of 'the indeterminate structure of things now'. The seven exhibiting artists are drawn together by the poetics of site and sign; the way in which language, location and representation intersect in their work to chart both personal and public terrain.
Despite the attempted material plurality of the exhibition, which includes William Kentridge's anamorphic landscapes, Berni Searle's performative projections, Nicholas Hlobo's sensuously-worked installations, and Vivienne Koorland's painted burlap surfaces, photography is the medium most strongly represented by familiar stalwarts David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng and Guy Tillim.
Tillim's Jo'Burg Grid 1 and 2 (2003-7), comprising 16 individual photographs arranged like adjacent plots on a municipal map, frame the jagged reality of urban dispossession and decay. In the derelict high-rises of Johannesburg, life unfolds on stairwells and rooftops. A rumpled duvet lies warm from a body's recent imprint, makeshift wallpaper is torn from newspaper frontages - each fleeting image etches poverty onto edifice.
Intensely focused and saturated with colour amidst the shifting Jozi palette of smog and steel, Tillim's works find a more expansive backdrop in Goldblatt's large-format prints. While many document incomplete housing development projects, Goldblatt has most recently followed the visual path of the Aids ribbon as signifier of the way in which HIV is affecting both the nation's physical and psychic terrain. Tracing its trajectory on the country's material surface, Goldblatt's In the Time of Aids series includes the rock-face commemoration of an individual, the transformed curves of a roadside route marker, and the rhythmic red symbol on a row of township lavatories.
Visual parallels are strongly curated between this photographic series and Hlobo's Umthubi, in which the masculine ritual space of the kraal, delineated by erect wooden stakes, is woven through with pink ribbon, which simultaneously evokes a uterine landscape and draws on the notion of weaving as 'craft' as well as 'women's work'. The enclosure speaks both to his Xhosa heritage, and to a sense of expulsion (figured through the rubber ball attached to yet outside of its walls) from the traditional bounds of identity, which do not accept him as a homosexual man. In the performative space of the kraal (and, by extension, the gallery itself), perceived boundaries between sexuality and gender, public and private, tradition and modernity, urban and rural, are demonstrated to be fluid and contingent.
Mofokeng negotiates public and commemorative space through the ciphers of township advertising (building on his well-known apartheid-era work) and the controversial renaming of streets and districts. His ongoing Billboard series wryly exposes the way in which democracy has become shackled to materialism in post-apartheid South Africa, such that struggle rhetoric becomes consumer slogan in MTN's bid for cellular supremacy: Y'ello Freedom!. Most poignant is a photograph of an intersection in Potchefstroom (2007) in which the recently renamed 'Nelson Mandela Rylaan' (Afrikaans for ëNelson Mandela Driveí) has been partly painted over (with the obscured letters still visible) to produce a completely different attribution: dela Rylaan. Reflecting an upsurge in right wing commemoration and sentiment surrounding the Boer war hero Jacobus De La Ray - who is immortalised in music video format in one of YouTube's most popular current clips - Mofokeng's formal handling (including heightened contrast) underscores the strongly contested field of signification surrounding heritage and identity.
The largely monochrome nature of the photography on the exhibition is echoed by Kentridge's 2003 series of anamorphic landscapes: charcoal drawings mounted on tables, and circling mirrored columns. The drawings themselves are distorted concentric renderings of city and land (drawn from photographs of childhood haunts) which come into focus only as the viewer approaches the mirrored columns. Trees and skyscrapers loom into illusionistic reality, rising like mirages from the flat drawings once distance is breached. Although the drawings themselves are two dimensional, they are experienced 'in the round' - they have no edges, and there is no fixed viewing point. There is also no way to view the entire piece simultaneously; perspective is partial and meaning deferred endlessly across the reflective surface. This mercurial mode of apprehension presents an engaging alternative to the more linear fixity of the photographic prints that line the gallery's walls, likewise reflecting the manner in which site and sign are specific to the (historical, socio-cultural and physical) placement of the beholder.
Koorland's work jars somewhat with the rest of the exhibition, providing the only significant point of weakness. Images and text drawn from apartheid archives, as well as from popular national iconography (including the protea, as well as 'Bokkie', South Africa's own lachrymal Bambi figure who implores motorists to guard against forest fires) are transferred to hand-stitched canvases that bespeak the layering and construction of meaning over time. In this exhibition, she also responds directly to the photography on the show, depicting a red ribbon drawn from one of Goldblatt's images (Red Aids Ribbon, 2007), and engaging with Mofokeng's 'Plaas Moorde' Memorial Crosses outside Polokwane (2007) by transcribing an archived sign (Sign Painting, 2007): 'any Kaffirs trespassing will be shot'. The piece seems crudely out of place, even offensive, not only for its nomenclature, but in its lack of effective mediation or critical rendering. Somehow her works specially created for this show - Rivonia Map, Sign Painting, King Protea, and Who Drew Bokkie? - feel alternately over-determined or little more than direct pictorial quotation, falling short of her usual visual and intellectual nuance.
More finely honed - and thoroughly evocative - is Searle's Alibama, in which she draws on and complicates the historical and cultural associations of the Afrikaans song Daar Kom die Alibama (a reference to the sighting of a confederate slave ship in Table Bay Harbour in 1865). A vibrant mainstay of the annual Minstrel carnival, the song is sung, instead, by a mournful Malay chorister while the camera pans from a shot of Searle and her young son to sunrise scenes from Signal Hill, with windswept black streamers bespeaking both continuity and bereavement. The muffled sound of the Noon Day gun heralds a cinematic shift to a red paper boat floating in a water bath as black streamers release their eddying ink in cross currents around it. Searle's voice imparts the lyrics of the song to her son, who sings along hesitantly. Eventually, the boy drifts to sleep; nostalgia seeps into lullaby.
Searle had planned to mount a new (unfinished) work, a spontaneous response to the recent attacks of xenophobia in South Africa. However, it was decided that the piece was too raw, an emotion similarly expressed in her struggle to respond to a visitor who challenged her, and curator Tamar Garb, as to the place of the exhibition given recent events. According to Searle's description, the unseen work features edited journalistic clips of charred victims and their belongings by torchlight, followed by a lengthy, penetrating close-up of her face: first struggling and silent, then weeping. It will be interesting to see how - and if - the piece develops (and in what context it may be exhibited in the future) as the ongoing reality of xenophobia likewise leaves its traumatic residue on the nation.
Formally compelling and thematically strong, with a number of entirely new or recent works on display, 'Home Lands - Land Marks' is a slick and successful exhibition. Firmly rooted in the contemporary South African landscape, it not only traces the legacies of the past, but also maps the diverse present, one in which the idea of 'home' emerges as a shifting sign in and of itself.
Amy Halliday is an Art History lecturer for an international study programme in Florence and currently lives in Siena, Italy
Opens: May 31
Closes: July 5
Haunch of Venison
6 Haunch of Venison Yard, London W1K 5ES
Tel: +44(0)20 7495 5050
Fax: +44(0)20 7495 4050
Email: london@haunchofvenison.com
www.haunchofvenison.com
Hours: Mon, Tue, Wed, Fri 10 am - 6pm, Thu 10am - 7pm, Sat 10am - 5pm
