Review of the week
Alex Sudheim
The alphabet’s own double-cross is in action again for X-Scapes: Photography in a New South Africa, the arresting exhibition of images currently on display at Durban’s NSA Gallery.
Ah, the enduring allure of X! Signifier of mystery, enigma and intangibility, the chimerical consonant has long prefixed the names we give those things we never quite fully comprehend. Names like X-Ray, X- Factor, X-File and Mr X. These terms evoke a kind of fearful reverence, for they represent the point where human understanding becomes dim and clouded, surrendering to the forces of the unknown.
“X” can be anything. Hence the exhibition is a shuddering stereogram of diversity and confluence. There are landscapes, cityscapes, bodyscapes, dreamscapes and figurescapes.
Ultimately, of greatest interest is of course the mindscape. This is because the photographs are not mere mirrors of the external world but works of art, and, as Stefan Bremer so emphatically pointed out in his opening speech: “Art can be political but never democratic. Art is always a vision of one woman or of one man. It can reflect on common things and experiences, but its role is to be personal and intense.”
Now, taking a photograph is a ridiculously simple thing to do. Aim the device, push button, light burns into chemicals on film and hey presto, you have an image. The hard part comes in through sublimating an obscure and abstract mood or desire on this little square of scorched emulsion. How do you take an intractably complex, snarled-up state of mind and make it live, breathe and communicate its invisible urge through a two-dimensional picture? Well, go look at these photographs. Because somehow the artists represented here have done just that.
One of the most surprising facets of photography is the power of emotion it can trigger through mere absence. Looking at Jo Ractliffe’s blurred, cinematic sequences titled Vlakplaas Drive-by Shootings, and all one sees is a few frames of parched veld snapped from a moving car. But there is an immense terror, steeped in suggestion of everything we know about the tortured blood that has seeped into this innocent soil.
A similar sense of strange, disembodied gore is evoked by Dave Southwood’s pristine portraits of spent bullets. Bathed in coloured light, each mangled piece of metal takes on a beautiful, balletic form. The images contain an aesthetic elegance one might expect to find in photographs of irises or tulips, yet one is gripped by a jarring sense of seizure when one discovers that each bullet has been excavated from a corpse, by police forensic pathologists. This radical disjuncture between image and knowledge is a profound example of photography’s potential for psychic manipulation – its sly talent to beguile the eye while fucking with the brain.
Another photographer delving into the mindscape morass is Lance Slabbert, whose works are a subtle deconstruction of the prescribed function of “the photographer”. Instead of capturing images himself, Slabbert dug into the ethnographic archives of Durban’s Campbell Collection to produce (and re-produce) pictures of Zulu men captured on film by local settlers in the mid-19th century. Each man is the proud owner of a fantastically ornate hairstyle, indicating his membership of a particular clan.
To complete his project, Slabbert collaborated with Christian Mutungwa, who asked various acquaintances, relatives and strangers to comment on the photographs. Their remarks – written in Zulu across the yellowed images in gold pen – range from “this reminds us how we should retain pride in our traditions and not be made to feel uncivilised when we do”, to “as a Christian I would regard this person as a primitive”.
Though the exhibition is too wide-ranging and diverse to single out every artist of note, special mention must go to the brilliantly candid work of street photographer Paulos Nkomo; Bobby Bobson’s strangely melancholic studio portraits; Adam Welz’s obsessive documentation of the Great South African Tea Room; Enos Mhlongo’s poetic Spirit of Zululand series; David Goldblatt’s frozen moments of urban desolation; Mluleki Dlamini’s gritty domesticana and Natasha Christopher’s post- violence visual haikus.
And, though visiting Norseman Stefan Bremer’s Durban Horizons might qualify as fodder for the navel-gazing rhetoric of the “politics of appropriation” debate, his images of rotting monkey carcasses in Durban’s downtown muti market have just got to be plain fascinating by anyone’s standard.
X-Scapes is a project of Shuttle 99, a cultural exchange between South Africa and the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The exhibition runs at the NSA Gallery, at the Claremon Library and at the Bat Centre’s Menzi Mcunu Gallery until August 26