Bubblegum Club

Tag: post-coloniality

  • Sam Vernon’s very suggestive, emblematic images and abstract scenes confront personal and historical memories

    Sam Vernon’s very suggestive, emblematic images and abstract scenes confront personal and historical memories

    A human body lies covered in what appears to be thick, solid pieces of cutout paper. The body is fully covered; barring from the knee down. The image has all the components that engender a sense of familiarity. However, something is off. One of the legs is twisted and both are lifted —suggesting that the body underneath is still breathing. This photograph (Laid, 2011) by artist Sam Vernon seems to say something significant and fateful about the body (particularly the black body) and its presence in the world.…it breathes intrigue into our imagination.

    Vernon is a multi and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the connection between memory, personal narrative and identity. “Through site-specific, staged installations and urgent performances my goals are towards the production of Gothic visual art in which Black narratives are included in the expanse of the genre,” Vernon states in an interview with African Digital Art.

    Vernon goes beyond the confines of a single medium by combining drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptural components— transmuting their form from two dimensional to three dimensional works which become elastic and nonconforming. Her means of expression are constantly evolving as she continuously moves from illustrations, digital, performance and back.

    Vernon’s digital prints, drawings and collages are typically black and white, perhaps an indication of an enhanced awareness of the past. The work is not always easy to process, and yet it remains vivid and clear. Through Vernon’s works, we travel through time towards the vast depth of her experiences. She describes an understanding of the past as a necessary means towards a better understanding of the self in the creation of the future.

    Despite having a visual language that is difficult to pin down  —with elements of abstraction, patterns and human-like figures —Vernon’s voice remains strong. This voice is further amplified by the specificity in the symbolism used to confront her subjects. “The active ‘ghosting‘ of an image, copying and multiplying the original, subtlety exploits the notion of a pure identification of black and white and signifies the essentialism of symbolic meaning and all its associations.”

    Through her practice Vernon deconstructs and redefines narratives that inform memories and collective history through the lens of race and gender. Through her most recent show Rage Wave with G44: Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto, Vernon presented an ambitious exhibition bringing together images, photocopies, drawings and prints to reflect on post-coloniality, racial, sexual and historic memory. She has also presented works at Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Fowler Museum at UCLA, Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn, among many others.

    Vernon’s work, with all its layers of complexity, remain a critical part of moving the conversation on black narratives forward. Her works have a sense of timelessness, where the past and the present seem to merge….perhaps because notions and conceptions of race and gender underpinning the work also have a sense of timelessness. Even as time passes, the trauma of the violent past continues to haunt.

  • Francois Knoetze – Escaping the Frontier

    The immersive technology of virtual reality has world shaking implications. Something as small as a VR headset can destabilize the core categories of dream and flesh which make up consensual reality. With the new show Virtual Frontiers, artist Francois Knoetze is using VR to disrupt the historical categories which continue to infect contemporary South Africa with poverty and violence. Over six short films, his 360 camera maps the psychogeography of Grahamstown, and how the stark racial and social divisions in the town make it a microcosm of the country at large. The film’s wildly merge reenactments, archive footage and special effects to blur the past into the present. The follow up to his acclaimed Cape Mongo series, the new work will be premiered at this year’s National Arts festival.

    Via email, Francois shared some of the themes which underpin his ambitious project

    I’m fascinated by your psychogeography of Grahamstown, and the focus on the past bleeding into the present. Were there any specific historical events, or even things in your own experience, which inspired you to take this approach. And did  Rhodes Must Fall also play a part for you? 

    Growing up during the Rainbow Era, I lapped up my fair share of the almost propaganda-like optimism that flavoured the public discourse of those years. I think my approach to making art is often informed by my distrust for neat, grand narratives. It forms part of a process of unlearning the inclination towards neat categories, binaries and conclusions.

    It’s also an attempt at addressing the ahistorical nature of the Rainbow rhetoric, and how it managed to gloss over the burning question of reparations for 350 years of plundering. ‘94 was branded as an endpoint to colonialism and racism, and I think a lot of people just sort of bought it because it was convenient and colourful. The Marikana massacre showed that the government’s propensity towards militaristic death squad tactics against peacefully protesting black workers was not dissimilar to that of the Apartheid state. And movements such as Rhodes Must Fall opened my eyes to just how far South Africa still has to go in terms of restructuring institutions, syllabi, professions, and economics. We, the white minority, remain seemingly unperturbed or in denial about the dubious origins of our power and privilege, hiding behind security companies, high walls and #zumamustfalls, like the forts of yesteryear. Virtual Frontiers is in part an attempt to make sense of my position within this historical juncture by looking at the effects and systems which organise the way people experience the small, yet extremely fractured city of Grahamstown.

    How do you feel the concept of the frontier impacts on post-colonial, contemporary South Africa?

    I think post-coloniality is a term at odds with the lived experience of most South Africans, the structuring of its cities and its economy. Frontiers are barriers that separate, but like outer space they are also great unknown territories to be explored. I think post-coloniality is in many ways an unexplored frontier in South Africa. I think it is necessary to tear down the barriers that maintain the colonial ordering of people, commodities and spaces. I believe this would open up space for the emergence of a more inclusive society that embraces its Africanness, and doesn’t simply package a superficial version of it for tourist consumption.

    What inspired the use of virtual reality, and do you feel that VR is something that is going to become more socially and politically significant in the near future?

    I started experimenting with virtual reality whilst on residency in Dar es Salaam last year. For me, being able to place the viewer into immersive first-person scenarios raises fundamental questions around positionality and reconciling the giant rifts in the lived experiences of people in a place as divided as South Africa. It puts you, as the viewer, inside of the work, pushing beyond the screen so it has a raw, experiential power that pure film doesn’t. It’s the first medium that makes the leap from representation to experience. The social and political significance of an artistic medium that allows you to experience what you perceive as physical closeness is unprecedented.