For the visitor unschooled in South African history, a visual introduction to the country's discourses of difference is installed in the entrance, courtesy of a huge central wall of Alfred Duggan-Cronin's 'Native Studies', hung salon style. Although traditionally viewed as realistic ethnographic portraits, closer inspection reveals an element of stagecraft: a San woman at a stream collects water in an ostrich egg with a museum accession number printed along one side; a single moth-eaten leopard skin bedecks the shoulders of several chiefs from completely disparate groups. Alarmed by the disappearance of traditional cultures as a result of migrant labour and 'the rapid encroachment of civilisation', Duggan-Cronin travelled the country 'documenting' individuals and groups from varioys indigenous communities, producing images of great beauty and dignity. Yet his own will to disclose a specific fiction led him to deny the reality of urbanisation and cultural flux: the photographs hover between preservation and performance. Remarkably, this is the first time that the images have been exhibited in England since 1924, when they were framed as colonial anthropology: here they are mobilised in an entirely different manner.
A red plinth on either side of the wall of photographic portraits is inscribed with the names of the individuals whose apartheid-era passbooks appear successively on television screens. Courtesy of the Apartheid Museum, the passbook images reflect the way in which fictions of difference are authorised and sustained through legal, socio-economic and spatial control. The visitor passes through South Africa’s past to access its present, the narrative of history produced as the backdrop against which twelve contemporary artists plot diverse stories of self and society.
Screens and dry walls separate the Djangoly gallery’s modest exhibition space into several discrete domains. One inset cove holds a small television playing Steven Cohen’s Crawling…Flying (1999), a separate enclave provides an evocative setting for Dineo Bopape's playful video installation Dreamworld (2008) while another niche sports two – problematically decontextualised – photographic prints from Brett Bailey’s theatrical production iMambo Jambo – The Days of Miracle and Wonder. Bailey has garnered widespread acclaim in the art and theatre industry for his focus on often neglected amaXhosa folktales and traditions. However, he has also ruffled feathers with the on-stage slaughter of a chicken (in response, Bailey blamed the theatre context – like the gallery or museum – in which the truly spiritual is often mistaken for the merely spectacular) and the presumption of yet another white man speaking for the ‘other’.
Prints from Tracey Rose’s Ciao Bella: Ms Cast series (their effect flattened by the absence of the original video installation) speak directly to this historical dynamic. From the ‘primitive’ sexuality of Venus Bartman to the veiled chastity of Regina Coeli; Marie Antoinette’s much-misattributed offer of cake (MAQEII) to the suggestive candy-cane of Nabokov’s Lolita, Rose performs – to amusing excess – the reductive stereotypes of race, gender and politics, as narrated by and through religion, literature, the media, and (art) history. Images from Michael MacGarry's African Archetypes series on an adjacent wall chart the slippage between the reality and representation of contemporary notions of an undifferentiated 'Africa'. The attendant texts lay bare the physical and economic details of their making; demystifying the manner in which art produces new truths.
In another darkened arena, a projection of Berni Searle’s well-known Snow White (2001) is as poignant as ever (particularly for a predominantly new audience). Her photographic triptychs Once Removed (2008) develop a vision in which the ciphers of selfhood are erased; the artist’s face and sex veiled by a white plaster construction. A garland and handful of Searle’s trademark black crepe paper flowers – intricately wrought – are placed on her head and lap respectively; a suggestion of mourning, of loss (extended in the prayer-like pose of her hands). The wet crepe paper begins to bleed its colour into the sheer white coverings, much as in recent video pieces (such as Alibama) in which crepe paper forms dissolve into water, leaving behind protean traces of memory. In Once Removed, this process speaks of both contamination and creation as a new pattern emerges from the interaction of what was previously discrete.
The contested dynamics of separation and contamination are picked up in Athi-Patra Ruga’s response to a political poster (also on display) distributed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) while Ruga held a residency in Berne. The poster depicts a black sheep being forcibly ejected from the country’s borders by a group of homogenous white sheep; the celebrated ‘multiculturalism’ of Europe increasingly evoked as a threat to the security of national and ideological borders. This corner of the exhibition revolves around the black sheep costume (tellingly made of Afro-wigs) donned by Athi-Patra Ruga, along with pink high-heeled cowboy boots, in his performance Even I Exist in Embo: Jaundiced tales of counterpenetration (2007). Ruga actively inserts his hyperbolic guise into cityscape and countryside, revealing the manner in which external appearance is read as essential difference, and highlighting anxieties around social conformity.
Nearby, the parliamentary wig of a 'blacked-up' Brett Murray in Renaissance Man, and Renaissance Man Tending his Land (2008), echoes and inverts the assumptions of Ruga’s woolly costume. As with much of his work, Murray – with poignant humour and irony – explores racial role reversal and its attendant power shifts, painfully pressing the bruised relationship between whiteness and South African identity. The Old Identity Chestnut gives the struggle verbal form. With none of the material pull of Nandipha Mntambo's Iqaba Lami (2007) hanging corpulently in front of Steven Cohen's spectacular Chandelier (2001-2), Murray’s inconspicuous elegy powerfully articulates the overlapping, often conflicting, always co-existing fictions of identity and difference, internalised and negotiated by the individual: ‘I should be an African / I can be an African / I cannot be an African / I might be an African / I will be an African…‘
The installation of the show is slick and professional (though, with its general emphasis on video and photographic works, somewhat lacking in three-dimensional materiality), and space well organised in an attempt to break the exhibition into several digestible chunks. However, the succinct visual shorthand for South African history – the Duggan-Cronin photos and passbook images – gives way to what can be a confounding and seemingly haphazard diversity of ‘fictions’ (the inclusion of Bailey’s images as if to fill a spare wall space, for example). While multiplicity is clearly a factor of curatorial intent – the compelling catalogue refers to the productive potential of a ‘carnival of subjectivities’ – the exhibition could perhaps have engaged more fully with fewer artists, rather than presenting a smorgasbord of South Africa’s BYTs.
