Witnessing South Africa
9 January 2004
On 27 April – Freedom Day - South Africa will be celebrating 10 years of freedom. The exhibition A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa marks this historic moment through the visions of 20 emerging South African artists.
The exhibition will open at the Museum of the National Centre for Afro-American Artists in Boston, Massachusetts on 2 April and will tour to several venues throughout the United States.
The 20 young artists featured critically reflect on how identity used to be defined by the opposition between black and white under apartheid. They also explore the new multidimensional identities that are possible today, and probe their limits and contradictions.
A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa attempts to articulate the ways in which the artists connect their living history with its past.
The framework of the exhibition is to allow for the works to create a conversation that explores the impact
of apartheid and the many complexities and issues that South Africa is confronting today.
The aim of the exhibition is for it to act as a catalyst that will generate discussion around the progress and change that has occurred in South Africa over the last decade. It presents how the artists negotiate between what was, what is, and what is to come.
In A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa the artists examine the ways that identity has been defined, searching for means of expression that are more personal in experience and universal in understanding.
Artists Thando Mama and Rudzani Nemasetoni reflect differently on how the state defined identity. Nemasetoni uses images from his family’s “Pass Books,” the notorious identification book that all “non-whites” had to carry, while Mama uses his own body as a site for the recovery of meaning and power associated with the black subject.
Artists such as Nkosinathi Khanyile, Mthunzi Ndimande, and Nirupa
Sing explore influences of African heritage in modern culture. Through the use of natural materials and implementation of traditional skills such as grass weaving, they recover and celebrate an African heritage that is marginalised and threatened by modern society.
Brenton Maart and Nicolas Hlobo present a critique of community life that is specific to issues concerning sexuality where sexual freedom continues to be overshadowed by the HIV/Aids pandemic. These artists, and others in this exhibition, present a variety of complex issues about the new South Africa relating to urbanism, xenophobia, violence, HIV/Aids and poverty.
The project is funded by Sondela - a project of the South Africa Development Fund - and the Rockefeller Foundation, with additional support from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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