What light through yonder windshield breaks? I read the title of Mark Dunlop’s video work on the exhibition Truth Veils: The Inner City, currently on at the Rembrandt Gallery, after two weeks spent thinking about the Truth Veils project.
In Dunlop’s video – a stylish and cleverly crafted sneer at white perceptions of Johannesburg as “a landscape that must be evacuated” – the same white corpse is seen lying in different parts of the city, filmed in a series of digital stills. Each location is emptied of its teeming urban population, and this eery absence of a visible agent of violence renders the corpse somewhat absurd. These pristine, aestheticised spaces also serve as visual projections of the dream-nightmare of an empty urban economic centre.
The work is amusing. Within the context of the brief history of the Truth Veils project, it is particularly apt and unsettling.
Initially conceived by the Wits History Workshop and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation as an international conference to explore the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its impact, the project grafted on to itself two creative limbs that seem in some ways to belong to different bodies. One of these is Truth Veils, at the Gertrude Posel Gallery on Wits campus.
As the right hand of the conference, Truth Veils was constituted, according to Posel director Rayda Becker, because “our experience of the TRC and of the last 30 years is based as much on images as on text and words. The exhibition will give visual form to questions raised in the conference as the making and narration of history, notions of truth, reconciliation and memories of the past.”
Truth Veils densely juxtaposes archival political material, commissioned contemporary artworks and selected works from the gallery’s permanent collection. Works by over 20 artists interrogate, through that juxtaposition, the truth-value of the archive, effectively catalysing a process in which the viewer arranges and rearranges the sense of each shocking, poignant, painful moment.
Elements as clashing as Verwoerd’s laborious, booming voice, statements written in detention and official documentary footage are subverted by a kwaito anthem (Penny Siopis), drive-by shots of Vlakplaas that are deeply sinister in their blandness (Jo Ractliffe), a mirror in which our own image overlays the face of Stompie Sepei (Senzeni Marasela), among many others.
Although the archival contextualisation of the artwork could have been more thorough – the knowledge-base of foreign viewers is assumed – the exhibition is painfully moving, and utterly absorbing.
Truth Veils: The Inner City, extends the archival and interpretive facts of making and narrating history to include a show in which artists engage with the socio- political and spatial conditions of Johannesburg. As Stephen Hobbs, co-curator with Ractliffe of the Inner City show puts it, “Where Truth Veils would look at a wide-ranging and often metaphorical landscape through archives and art, the Rembrandt wanted to focus on a specific piece of landscape. Even as it decentralises, Johannesburg is the economic centre of South Africa, and the curatorial team saw it as a good springboard for discussing related issues. The two would be linked by a bus tour of Johannesburg – Tour Guides of the Inner City -concluding at the Market Galleries for the exhibition opening, that would hopefully communicate the complexity of the political terrain.”
What the curatorial team (consisting of Hobbs, Ractliffe, Becker, Deborah Posel, Fiona Rankin-Smith and Penny Siopis) failed to foresee was that representing the diverse and complex truths of one’s urban landscape to visitors is a difficult enough task. Representing that landscape in the context of such searing emotional and political material as the TRC is far more loaded, and requires meticulous planning, research and great political sensitivity.
As the contextual and conceptual “link” between the Wits components of the project and the Rembrandt launch, the bus tour, like Dunlop’s video, became a charged metaphor for the social, political and historical divides it set out to engage. Unlike Dunlop’s video, its ironic content was misdirected.
Conducted by Hobbs for a double-decker busload of Johannesburg residents and invited international guests from the conference, the tour intended to provide all participants an opportunity to view the city’s historical emblems of racial control, as well as its inner-city lifestyles. Beginning on the south-bound M1 highway, circling the city via the M2 East and entering the bleak and bustling zones of Berea, Hillbrow and Braamfontein, the tour took in the gamut of apartheid legacies and post-apartheid realities.
But instead of providing a forum for informed debate, the tour was controversial for some, disappointing and even offensive for others. As both an artist and a curator Hobbs is dynamically and forcefully engaged with the subject matter of his urban context. But as a guide he expressed little of that passion or interest – his delivery was throw-away, and the historical content under-researched.
When I was in Standard 7, my Zulu teacher organised a tour of Soweto for our Zulu language class. Young as I was, the experience of that tour struck me as profoundly wrong. As we – a group of mostly white students – drove through the lives of Soweto’s residents, I felt less grateful than ashamed, as if this was a trip to the zoo. It was my introduction to white liberal ideology at its most patronising, and the Tour Guides expedition left me feeling much the same.
The curatorial team, competent and aware as its members are, is white and middle class. This does not mean that whiteness is by definition invalid, or that the team was incapable of a sound political perspective. But to put together an ambitious three- pronged project – a project largely defined by racial violence – by an all-white team of academics in a timespan of two months, should have been unthinkable. Although the Inner City exhibition sets itself up as discrete from the raw material of the TRC, it is structurally and discursively related to that material.
The Tour Guides component – which was in fact conceived by Hobbs over a year ago as part of a dynamic and interactive art work with no links whatsoever to the TRC – will fortunately live again in the form originally intended by Hobbs. A worthy idea in principle, its translation from cutting edge art commentary to straight-up bus tour was perhaps inappropriate in the first place.
There are a few works on the Inner City exhibition itself that underline the tendency among certain groups of white cultural producers, among them contemporary artists, to ironise history to the extent that they practically dismiss it. But this does not make the show uninteresting or facile, and the bulk of contributions provide plenty of food for thought.
Mark Dunlop’s is one of them, as are video works by Nhlanhla Mbatha, Hobbs and Martin Mitchell. The audio-visual co-presentation of work by Ractliffe and Laurence Hamburger is superb. Titus Matiyane’s 20m drawing of Johannesburg, and Zem’s Scamtho Dictionary are works that have been seen twice before, but they stand the test of cultural and critical scrutiny.
The Truth Veils exhibitions, perhaps because of, rather than despite, their problematic entirety, pull the veils from our still myopic eyes.
Both exhibitions end on July 9