Christo Doherty

Current Review(s)

BOS - Constructed Images and the Memory of the South African Border War

Christo Doherty at Resolution Gallery of Digital Art

One Sunday afternoon, when I was ten years old, I found my father’s army photographs in a box in his his wardrobe. I remember one image in particular: a Polaroid showing him bare-chested and grinning, sitting in the sand looking directly at the photographer, wearing only his khaki hat and shorts. His rifle was lying in his crotch, and a beer rested on the sand nearby. I asked him who took the picture, and the circumstances under which it was taken.  To my puzzlement he spent some time just staring at the tiny photograph in silence. He said something about Rodney, his best friend, ‘the bush’, ‘bossies’, sunburn and boredom, and left it at that. I didn’t pursue it any further, until later, when I was eighteen years old, I decided, much to my father’s dismay, to sneak his box of photographs out of his bedroom in order to cut them into pieces for a matric art collage - a project that never materialised into anything that I could show to my art teacher. Until this day, my dad has said nothing about his year in the army and his stint on the border other than when, at a reunion braai of old army friends, he got drunk, hopped onto my bicycle and sped off into the wobbly darkness of the veld, ranting and swearing about God knows what. I realised then that what took place on the border was, for him, an unspeakable affair.

15 January 2011 - 12 March 2011

Listings(s)

'BOS - Constructed Images and the Memory of the South African'

Christo Doherty at Resolution Gallery of Digital Art

Through the use of constructed photographs based on images from the media coverage of the time, Doherty explores the effect on the national psyche of apartheid SA's border wars.

15 January 2011 - 12 March 2011

'Bos - Contructed Images and the Memory of the South African "Bush War"'

Christo Doherty at University of Stellenbosch Art Gallery

Through the use of constructed photographs based on images from the media coverage of the time, Christo Doherty explores the effect on the national psyche of apartheid SA's border wars that became an unspeakable episode for a generation of white South African men.

12 May 2011 - 23 July 2011