Warm and textured, sensuously appaeling and grand in scale, the prints envelope their viewers, simultaneously attracting spectators with their physicality and repelling them with the implications of the subject matter they depict: palatial chambers in tatters, roofs and walls blown apart, objects (chairs, pianos, beds, chandeliers, tools) once used to sustain and enrich life, now metaphors only for survival in the face of death.
Shelley Rice analyzes recent photowork of Wafaa Bilal.
“The work refers to apartheid, an era that’s behind us. But it also speaks to the present that is very much impacted by apartheid. Everything that is now, the economy, black families living in townships, white people in suburban areas, is a result of the past. So the series also talks about current issues in South Africa, such as land. There have been quite a lot of debates around the redistribution of land. In the work I talk about my family who stayed on a farm for so many years but had no claim to it. And then they came to the city and moved to the townships because that’s just where black people had to live. That doesn’t make sense.”
Manon Braat interviews Lebohang Kganye.
Packer looks for tenderness, for vulnerability, for intimacy. The viewer has to feel the human contact, the realness of the person. “My work is about love and generosity. It does not have anything to do with image making.” Her generosity towards her models may be big, but the space, the context, is very important too. There is no hierarchy. It’s about body and space together. Therefore many times they have the same color.
Rob Perrée analyzes the work of Jennifer Packer.
‘The art itself is ever so important. You have to understand, we are not going to exhibit just any art because it is made by a female artist, or an African artist for that matter. It’s all about the art itself. I especially value art that is, in one way or the other, an expression of a particular critical stance, may it be against sexism or racism, or art that addresses the relationship between art and economy. ‘
Machteld Leij interviews Mirjam Westen about non-western art.
“Yes, one could quite easily argue that Meschac Gaba uses money as a means to discuss colonialism. The banknotes and coins that he transforms are late witnesses of that era, the language in which they are coined still being French. But years after that determined opening statement in his own book (“I use money because I refuse to use the word colonialism.” ed.), he still insisted: “Colonialism is en vogue in Europe, not in Africa”. And: “It is dangerous to write too much about it. In Africa we think about development. Let’s imagine a world without colonialism.” 4
An intriguing quote out of the essay of Daphne Pappers on the work Meschac Gaba, an artist from Benin, living and working in Rotterdam and Benin.