Paul Edmunds
REVIEW OFTHEWEEK
In a country where we fawn over tourists and shun refugees, an examination of our attitudes to home, borders, journeys and displacement is never, for want of a better expression, going to be a black and white affair.
Kwere Kwere: Journeys into Strangeness, an exhibition curated by young Johannesburg-based academic Rory Bester, reveals just this. It probes our growing xenophobia and the increased flow of foreigners across our borders. It is more documentary than art exhibition, but none the poorer for this. The show includes film clips, slides, archival footage, radio recordings and projections.
On entering the exhibition, one is confronted with a large screen of projections. Uku Hamba ‘Ze: To Walk Naked, a documentary from 1995 directed by Jacqueline Maingard, tells the story of a group of women whose shacks near Dobsonville faced demolition. As the bulldozers moved in, the women disrobed and stood their ground. The impermanence of their homes and the brutality of the demolition machines stand in contrast to the vulnerability of their bodies and their unshakeable sense of home. (Coincidentally, this is the very room that hosted Jocelyn Taylor’s Alien at Rest, a three-screen projection of her walking naked through New York, during the Johannesburg Biennale of 1997.)
Paul Weinberg’s Back to the Land, 1994- 6, explores more complexities around issues of home and identity. Black-and- white photos document the return to traditional land of two groups of people, as part of the Restitution of Land Act.
The former government had forcibly removed them from this arid, harsh Northern Cape landscape and turned the land into military shooting ranges. The returnees visit the graves of their ancestors and some younger members return to their traditional home, seeing it for the first time.
One photograph depicts a prickly-pear plant growing atop a former school building – an alien plant, whose introduction remains undocumented, colonises the already dispossessed.
Surveillance footage from a sugar plantation on the border of Mozambique and South Africa shows would-be migrants boarding a taxi for South Africa in 1994. The voice-over sounds distinctly old South Africa, but the visual has an abstract appeal of its own. Another group of photographs, unmentioned in the catalogue, depicts the border between Lesotho and South Africa.
A swath of razor and electric wire, like a skeletal Great Wall of China, fills the frames end to end. The sheer ugliness of it, and the knowledge that it was clearly erected in the interests of one party, make it all the more scarlike.
Images and recordings from Somalian, Rwandan and Ethiopian refugees, among others, recount injustice at the hands of South African institutions, officials and residents. In footage from the Lindela Repatriation Centre, we are audience to the racial stereotyping and humiliating treatment of migrants.
In one scene, returning Mozambicans cover their faces from the camera with fingerprinted official documents. It is as if their personal identity is less the problem than their racial origins.
Archival footage from military activity in Southern Angola, Jo Ractliffe’s Vlakplaas, 2 June 1999: Drive-by Shooting and Harold Shaw’s Die Voortrekkers of 1916, go some way to explaining what informs our sense of place, journey, home and borders. Colonial and apartheid practices evidently exert their influence on these issues in many unforeseen and unnoticed ways.
The show is informative and packed with contrasting views and issues and leaves the audience all the richer for this. One minor drawback is the sound and light spill from some works, interfering with others. Spacing them out more generously in the rooms, instead of repeating programmes several times throughout the show, could well solve this. Captions for some of the slides alternate with images. Most of this text is shown for too long, and in an already demanding show this serves only to highlight quite a few grammatical and editorial glitches.
Kwere Kwere: Journeys into Strangeness shows in B Block, The Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town, until April 15