Little deaths (original) (raw)
Related papers
Photographies, 2022
Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting dead activists to their graves during political funerals in late-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on Afrapix photographer, Gille de Vlieg’s images of Themba Dlamini’s funeral in Driefontein in 1990, the paper restores their local history to view and unpacks the visual cultural and material cultural circuits of militant mourning in which they were embedded. It then uses various orders of metonymy in the visual field to comment on the “necropolitics” of the apartheid regime (Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”). The paper concludes with a reflection on Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the “civil gaze” (Civil Imagination) and considers what unfolds when a reckoning with the differential distribution of death that characterizes necropower reorients this faculty away from the individual photograph towards series, genre or corpus.
The Significance of Art in South Africa
Butcher Boys, 1985Boys, -1986. Natiomal Gallery of Arts, Cape Town. With this work the artist (Jane Alexander) produced a feeling of discomfort and disgust representing human bestiality in violence.
The Farm, the River and the Picnic Spot: Topographies of Terror1
African Studies, 2009
In the mid-1980s, around ten unidentified persons were found dismembered in rural areas in and around Bophuthatswana. This article tracks the journey of these corpses, from their deaths, through amnesty hearings of their killers, to their recovery and reburial. Through this journey, the biographical life of these corpses has shifted from 'terrorists', to victims of state terror, to their current position as heroes of liberation.
Metromusings. Catalogue for curated exhibition, University of Pretoria. Andrew W Mellon Foundation
2013
The curated exhibition Metromusings (2013) in the Rautenbach Hall of theDepartment of Visual Arts of the University of Pretoria engaged thematically with the notion of capital cities. Recoding a diverse and massive - ‘invisible’ - archive of stories and experiences, the exhibition offered visual representations of reflections on urban environments (and Pretoria in particular) that have been shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces. Metromusings endeavoured to present a visual mapping of the social and political power geographies and complexities that dominate cities and how urban culture can be voiced, claimed, negotiated and contested. A defining question in the context of the city was how space can be translated into place.