Andrew Griffin’s work stood out from the rest, partly due to the sheer scale of his prints, but also because of his intimate take on the exhibition theme. His three prints, Bedroom 1, Bedroom 3 and Upstairs present a sneak peak into Griffin’s home. The prints show but a sliver of a room through an open door, at once intimate, yet starkly non-descript and devoid of any warmth. The images become almost archetypal, a glow of blood orange through one door, the hint of a white rumpled bed spread through another, a starkly lit toilet in the third; the images become ambiguously intrusive. Curator Bren Brophy commented wittily that its not so much a matter of who is looking, but why they are looking through half closed doors. Positioned at eye level, the viewer can’t help but want to push the door open and see a little more. Griffin states about the work: 'my intention was to turn the random and accepted interior spaces of my own domestic environment into corridors of suggestion, and use the camera in a way to locate the viewer as a visual intruder'. The verticality of the doorframes, the wall panels and so on take on an almost Dan Flavin-esque luminosity and abstraction.
Lanel Janse Van Vuuren’s work was equally compelling in terms of its concept. Unlike Griffin, Janse Van Vuuren took on an exploration of the minutiae that make a home, a home. Photographing the exteriors of houses around Durban, she then matched various idiosyncratic and deeply personal effects from her own home to create a narrative sequence. The images form an eidetic warehouse of possibilities, a series of short stories or fictions created by juxtaposing the external, with the imagined internal effects of the inhabitants. Rather than photographing what we do see, she has created a series of possible worlds for the viewer to explore.
The notion of the personal sentiment around the idea of ‘home’ was continued in Harry Lock’s series ‘Entrance’. Lock explored various farm gates and small town entrances, playing with the literal and metaphorical borderline between private and public space. Lock terms his photography straight ‘documentary’ and directly references the iconic work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. As with the Becher’s Cooling Towers, Lock presents the photographs in a grid. As such the images become ‘typologies’, banal gates that become idiosyncratic when compared to the surrounding images. One image shows a farm gate, decorated with wagon wheels, another the centenary sign for Zastron, with the later addition ‘Lucas Majozi Str’ tacked on above. While superficially Lock’s work appears banal, the subject becomes charged with meaning in South Africa’s history of land appropriation, and resulting land claims and land restitution.
The remainder of the work on show, including that of Troy Inman, and Michelle Silk was a little more difficult to get to grips with. Inman explored the reverse concept of ‘homing’ as in homelessness. His series ‘Street children of KwaZulu Natal’ presents portraits of Durban’s marginalised ‘street children’ in various situations. While Inman’s intentions to bring to light the ‘harshness of their reality’ is undoubtedly altruistic, the neat exhibition of framed, saleable portraits, to my mind, becomes ethically questionable. While Inman states that he followed internationally acceptable guidelines and procedures for informed child consent, the nameless portraits run the risk of falling into what Sontag calls the colonial practice of ‘exhibiting exotic… human beings’ – where the images objectify the subject to such an extent that they become regarded as something to be seen, rather than someone who sees. Perhaps this is an over-criticism of Inman’s work, however his attempt to refute the ‘ghost-like’ status of his subjects seems to fall short in his beautifully presented series of images.
Michelle Silk’s ‘spaza’ shop installation falls into similarly murky waters. Recreating a ‘spaza’ shop with wood, wire, chicken mesh, and photographs, Silk ‘aims to present a glimpse of the life of the Early Morning Market Traders’. Replete with rubbish on the floor and a ‘carrots for sale’ sign, Silk has created a disturbing diorama within the gallery space. While stating she wanted to show the ‘personal details and belongings of the people who work… at the market’ Silk has in fact lumped the photographs of the ‘traders’ personal effects into one anonymous mash-up, an overview of what the artist terms ‘these peoples… hopes, their fears and their tragedies – their lives – the place they call home’. The photomontage of ‘these people’ seems perhaps an over-simplification and othering of the traders. However, Silk maintains that the relationship between herself and the traders has been built up over months of interaction. The installation cleverly highlights the enormous socio-economic divide between South Africans, where photographs of a ‘spaza’ shop are on sale for R1800, in a gallery space just 2km away from the Early Morning Market itself.
Overall the exhibition was interesting in terms of the range of themes explored under the banner ‘homing’. With the new, energetic curatorship of Bren Brophy, it will be interesting to plot the trajectory of the KZNSA over the next few months.
