Terry Kurgan
This project, though in every sense a development from Family Affairs (the work for which I was selected), doesn’t use my own photographs or my own children at all. I am using found family snapshots. Mostly from the Sixties – and all in colour. They could belong to anybody. And I am printing on to ivory-coloured silk organza with a digital printing process. I need these images to float in the space like ghosts.
To me, photographs, particularly family ones, represent the impossibility of the desire to hold or contain some concrete reminder of present experience. Photographs are tied so precisely to a particular moment that they are always simultaneously a record of something or someone no longer there. And the family snapshot – well, it seems to be all about desire.
That’s a thread that runs through all my work – the relationship between the visual record and absence. I want the translucent silk on which the photographs appear and disappear to mirror and appear to echo memory itself.
Claudette Schreuders
The work I am making was inspired by four authors, dealing among other things with the theme of “belonging”: Antjie Krog’s book on the truth commission, Karel Schoeman’s biography of Olive Schreiner, Bessie Head’s collected letters and DH Lawrence’s book The Lost Girl.
In the work itself I’ve drawn inspiration mainly from African grave posts and tombs from the middle ages. I was chosen for my work on the Liberated Voices show in New York. They are all carved wooden figures, portraits of specific people presented in such a way that they have a strong storytelling element to them.
The education programme for this year’s Vita is very exciting. I remember my own high school art projects being very superficial and uninspired. I’m enjoying this as an opportunity to make a substantial body of work in a very short space of time.
Berni Searle
I am doing a video installation incorporating three projections which forms part of an ongoing series called Discoloured, using various substances to stain my body. The footage has been generated at different times and in different contexts. It tries to tease out ideas about individual and collective memories and experiences of trauma, and how it is inscribed on the body.
In this work, the body and landscape are interchangeable, both acting as a site in which only traces remain. I was nominated for an exhibition called Colour Me. In this series I had myself covered with various spices and flour and then photographed. I am not a photographer, but I find photography useful in that I am able to “orchestrate” how I am seen.
I see the photograph as a starting point
rather than an end in itself, preferring to work with installation to create an environment that is not static.
It ties up with my ideas about identity. Globally, there is still the perception that all that African artists should be doing is using recycled materials, linocuts and woodcarving. In the educational arena, we need to ensure that the option to pursue art as a professional career is a real possibility for most South Africans.
Hentie van der Merwe
I was nominated for a series of photographs I did for the Babel Tower exhibition, called His Master’s Voice, of two fox terriers interacting with a cell- phone. The installation I’m planning for Vita is inspired by the “archive” – for me a fascinating meeting ground of intensely personal narratives/histories and overtly political and “public” concerns/events. Photography – the medium I most often work in – lends itself to such interests due to its inherent archival nature – photographs can be stored en masse to be utilised at any given moment to narrate different versions of the past and present.
The installation of photographs has been culled from various sources such as my father’s collection of Sixties snapshots, the Namibian Picture Archives, the photo archives of the Museum of Military History, the Gay and Lesbian Archives at Wits and, lastly, my own photographs taken over the last 10 years.
I think it is great the way photography is increasingly being accepted as an important and valid means of art-making in this country. I am also very enthusiastic about the education programme that is being designed around Vita. Art education is desperately lacking in this country.