Brenda Atkinson REVIEW OF THE WEEK The exhibition blank_ Architecture, apartheid and after currently on show in Newtown, forms part of the recent Urban Futures multi-disciplinary event. It offers inspiring insights into the historical articulations of South African urban space. Deserving of acclaim for its acute intelligence and meticulous research, blank_ Architecture, apartheid and after, is installed on the ground floor of MuseuMAfrika. Conceptually driven by Cape Town-based architect Hilton Juden and realised together with over 50 writers, researchers, photographers and artists, blank_ maps the complex spatial history of South Africa’s urban and peri-urban architecture, in the context of that history’s political and ideological co- ordinates.
Launched in 1998 at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, from which it travelled to Berlin, blank_ has finally, timeously, reached Jo’burg’s grimy traffic island shores. It does not, at first, seem like an exhibition that is easy to access, although the first impression is overwhelming: the vast space blazes with white flourescent light that is initially a sensory assault; the two-dimensional works are suspended between black-rubbered floor and high white ceiling along vertically embedded steel cables, creating the experience of being in an exquisitely aesthetic but confusing jigsaw of information nodes. The installation materials – metal, perspex, plastic – and their modes of construction are themselves a phenomenon: this is modernism’s urban grid in service to gob-smacking post-modern sophistication.
But once you spend some time in the space and begin to engage with the material, the surface sophistication becomes more deeply articulated through the brilliant simplicity of the show’s connections and juxtapositions. There is in fact a colour- coded map that functions as the organising structure for the information, although you wouldn’t know this for some time because there is no discernible key – an irritating oversight.
The information is organised into 12 nodes of encounter: “Planned Divisions”, “Corrugated Iron”, “International Tendency”, “1960s”, “Fortification”, “Promised Land”, “Weave”, “House as Icon”, “Violence”, “Forced Removals”, and “Community Building”. All pivot on textual and pictorial content (for example in the “Corrugated Iron” node, text bytes on conditions in urban slums and hostels dialogue with Jodi Bieber’s powerful photographs of housing for the urban poor) and some are supplemented with archival video footage and objects of historical interest: a large bust of HF Verwoerd (the literal and ideological “architect” of apartheid), trekker cappies, mining helmets, and so on. blank_ has been internationally acclaimed, but for South Africans it is particularly powerful: to have the physical banality of urban structures such as Volkskas Bank and the SABC contextualised by the ideologically loaded briefs given to their architects is fascinating and shocking. The deeply sinister political foundations of so much of South Africa’s built environment are exposed, in blank_, through a series of revelations and painful epiphanies that underscore the complicit ignorance, for decades, of an absurdly powerful minority. Through this exposure – achieved with almost archeological depth – we are called on to consider, as in fact we automatically should, the role of both architecture and urban planning in renewing the political future.
blank_ Architecture, apartheid and after is showing at MuseuMAfrika in Newtown, Johannesburg, until January 2001. For information Tel: (011) 833E5624