Brenda Atkinson On show in Johannesburg
The venue that hosts Holdings: Refiguring the Archive is the vast, arched, high-ceilinged former engineering block at Wits University. The spacious room in which the show is installed has 1970s-brown formica floors, odd built intrusions into space and the comfortable sepia of use.
It’s an appropriate space for an exhibition that undoes the conventional aesthetic and ideological frameworks of archival objects, a space which itself evokes – and questions – the fields of vision that direct our interpretation of history.
Curated by Jane Taylor for the launch of the Wits Graduate School of Social Science and Humanities, Holdings suggests, through its very title, that the archival documentation of the past is neither neutral nor beyond re- imagining.
Taylor’s particular emphasis is on the archive as a repository of conflict, control and desire; on “being” in relation to “having”; on questioning, as she puts it whether we control the archive or it controls us.
The works on the show, most of which were made specifically for its brief, articulate the complex and layered trajectory of objects and commodities through public and private realms.
Familiar works such as Willem Boshoff’s powerful monolith Shredded Evidence and Santu Mofokeng’s haunting From the Black Photo Album/Look at Me are refigured in the context of archival material, which is itself refigured as art. Taylor has sourced archival artefacts – recordings of lullabies in lost languages, machines used for measuring and controlling human physiological response – and used them to blur the distinctions between archive and art.
This blurring, which also poses questions regarding fictional construction and factual residue, is picked up throughout the show. Colin Richards addresses this conundrum directly, creating his own glass case of droll deception and found factual documents. Titus Matiyane’s sprawling, metres-long map of London is made by someone who has himself never been to the city, yet who positions a smiling Princess Diana as the zenith of its archival present.
Penny Siopis installs a constructed amalgam of objects into three recessed, gridded windows of the room, presenting each textured material palette in forms and colours reminiscent of a flag. The form, which questions the point of collapse between system and sentiment, becomes heraldic of personal history, a map of Efetishes and testimonies to memory, violence and loss.
Clive van den Berg’s beautifully controlled video installation also raises personal issues -in this case sexual choice – within a work that looks for “evidence” of gay history in the archives and, finding hardly any, creates that evidence itself. Presented with Wagnerian intensity and longing, Memorials without facts: Men Loving is both love poem and political deconstruction of landscape, body, and memory.
On an entirely different note, Walter Oltmann’s Silverfish – a giant aluminium sculpture of what is better known as a fishmoth – introduces a witty element on the fragility of archives in the face of nature’s unusual feeder. The Silverfish, an insect that consumes text, becomes symbolic of the archive as endlessly destructible.
There are many more works on this exhibition: Jean Brundrit, William Kentridge, Peter Schutz and others have all contributed to a skillfully curated, endlessly layered and fascinating meditation that allows us to interact with the evanescence of material history. Like the academic programme whose launch it marks and celebrates, it invites us to add imagination to intellectual production.
Holdings: Refiguring the Archive is currently on exhibition at the Wits Graduate School of Social Science and Humanities