Dis-location/Re-location
2 weeks ago I took a trip to the Joburg Art Gallery to see a highly recommended exhibition about a British woman's coming to terms with moving to South Africa in the late 19th century. It's fascinating, using the metaphor of roses as that which reminds her of her past, that which she cannot (at first) let go of, and the aloe plant as the symbol of submerging into her new context. It is a mixed media exhibition, involving wax sculptures, photographs, video, a tryptich...all arranged in an interesting way.
I think it's highly relevant to South Africans as well as anyone thinking through identity/enculturation issues. Let me know what you think! I found the following summary online somewhere:
Produced in collaboration with the South African design team Strangelove (Carlo Gibson and Ziemek Pater), Dis-Location / Re-Location is a traveling exhibition scheduled to tour to seven South African Museums as of June 2007 to May 2008.
Debate around identity construction an issue particularly relevant in contemporary South Africa, at a time when this society finds itself in a process of redefining and building a new integrated South Africa from the diverse amalgam of cultures that coexist here. This exploration extends into the questioning of what constitutes South African identities, in relation to South Africa's place within the post-colonial African continent. As a result of the demise of colonialism and apartheid, the terms 'belonging', 'home' and 'displacement' seem to be particularly ambivalent and highly contested.
In the work on the exhibition, Farber explores these ambivalences through a dialogical relationship between South African colonial histories and lived present experience. Farber uses her image as metonym for herself and Bertha Guttmann - a Jewess brought to South Africa from Sheffield in 1885, in order to enter into an arranged marriage with the Lithuanian immigrant to South Africa, entrepreneur Sammy Marks. Residues of British and Jewish ancestry are visually and audibly grafted together with current influences from the Pan-African, post-colonial environment of Johannesburg. Ambivalences around belonging, home and displacement within this post-colonial environment are negotiated in relation to the artist's second-generation immigrant status.
In the work on exhibition, the amalgam of Bertha Marks and Farber is represented as engaged in needlework activities, considered as 'women's work' in the Victorian era and as a signifier of 'femininity' through docility and labour. The craft of needlework is used as a metaphor for the protagonist's attempts to negotiate a sense of being 'African' within a post-colonial environment by attempting to 'graft' a new identity physically and psychologically into herself.
Bertha's bedroom in the Sammy Mark Museum, Pretoria, is the space of such self-induced transformation - a private space wherein the protagonist performs a series of physical and psychologically transformative acts upon her body. The physical room might be considered as a metaphoric 'transitional space', wherein unpredictable outcomes may emerge from the grafting of diverse materials and cultures to give rise to new, hybrid, identity formations.
I think it's highly relevant to South Africans as well as anyone thinking through identity/enculturation issues. Let me know what you think! I found the following summary online somewhere:
Produced in collaboration with the South African design team Strangelove (Carlo Gibson and Ziemek Pater), Dis-Location / Re-Location is a traveling exhibition scheduled to tour to seven South African Museums as of June 2007 to May 2008.
Debate around identity construction an issue particularly relevant in contemporary South Africa, at a time when this society finds itself in a process of redefining and building a new integrated South Africa from the diverse amalgam of cultures that coexist here. This exploration extends into the questioning of what constitutes South African identities, in relation to South Africa's place within the post-colonial African continent. As a result of the demise of colonialism and apartheid, the terms 'belonging', 'home' and 'displacement' seem to be particularly ambivalent and highly contested.
In the work on the exhibition, Farber explores these ambivalences through a dialogical relationship between South African colonial histories and lived present experience. Farber uses her image as metonym for herself and Bertha Guttmann - a Jewess brought to South Africa from Sheffield in 1885, in order to enter into an arranged marriage with the Lithuanian immigrant to South Africa, entrepreneur Sammy Marks. Residues of British and Jewish ancestry are visually and audibly grafted together with current influences from the Pan-African, post-colonial environment of Johannesburg. Ambivalences around belonging, home and displacement within this post-colonial environment are negotiated in relation to the artist's second-generation immigrant status.
In the work on exhibition, the amalgam of Bertha Marks and Farber is represented as engaged in needlework activities, considered as 'women's work' in the Victorian era and as a signifier of 'femininity' through docility and labour. The craft of needlework is used as a metaphor for the protagonist's attempts to negotiate a sense of being 'African' within a post-colonial environment by attempting to 'graft' a new identity physically and psychologically into herself.
Bertha's bedroom in the Sammy Mark Museum, Pretoria, is the space of such self-induced transformation - a private space wherein the protagonist performs a series of physical and psychologically transformative acts upon her body. The physical room might be considered as a metaphoric 'transitional space', wherein unpredictable outcomes may emerge from the grafting of diverse materials and cultures to give rise to new, hybrid, identity formations.
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